How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The Best Book to Get You Started On Your Friendship Journey

Don’t you just wish there was a book you could pick up that would help get you started? Well I have the perfect book for you. The book is, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. This book was written all the way back in 1936, so you know it must have something working for it since it is still relevant today. I just saw that there is an update for the book that includes digital age information. I will have to check that out another time, but for now let me tell you about How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The book starts out talking about Mr. Carnegie who is a professor that lectures about how to make friends. He does this until one of this students suggests he take it in another direction. The student suggests having a stenographer take notes so that Dale could turn his class into a book. The book discusses ways that people can make friends, settle arguments, become better leaders, and how to better your home life. The books ideas are based on psychology and plain old facts, or proverbs or whatever you want to call them. Another way to think of the book’s lessons is that people have egos, and if you want to win them over, use that to your advantage. The book has been revised twice. One of the times, I said before, was the addition of digital age information. The second time was when somewhat outdated information was removed in 1981. You can read about these changes on the Wikipedia page. For now let’s review some more of the books material.

The book has a page at the beginning that lays out the points of interest that will improve for your life. These 12 points are listed like so:

1. Get you out of a mental rut, give you new thoughts, new visions, new ambitions.
2. Enable you to make friends quickly and easily.
3. Increase your popularity.
4. Help you to win people to your way of thinking.
5. Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.
6. Enable you to win new clients, new customers.
7. Increase your earning power.
8. Make you a better salesman, a better executive.
9. Help you to handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant.
10. Make you a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
11. Make the principles of psychology easy for you to apply in your daily contacts.
12. Help you to arouse enthusiasm among your associates.

I found that the book has a very interesting style to it. It did not just throw lesson at you in a numbered list, but rather it felt like I was in an actually lecture hall. I believe the style worked so well, because the author told stories to the reader to try to make sense of the points he was trying to make. For example there is a whole story about the civil war and how friendship principles could have helped avoid further losses. One of the story that threw me for a loop was about how people can go their whole lives without truly feeling appreciated, and in their final moments, someone could show them appreciation and that would end up being the most important moment in their near ending life. Reading about these friendship principles made me want to try them out. For me at least, the principles did improve how I felt in social situations. I could tell people felt like I cared more. These stories had a great impact on making this book one of the most successful of its kind.

Now I will talk about some of the greater points to take away form this book. One of the points in the book that you can immediately feel the impact of is using peoples names. In the book he explains that a persons name is the sweetest, most sensitive, and greatest sound that they can hear. I never thought about it like that, but have you ever been in a loud crowded room and heard your name even though you could not really hear anything else? That is what he is trying to point out. We as people can hear our name so easily out of all the sounds in the world. So now that you have this knowledge go out there and name drop all day and night! This is the tip that I took and it immediately had an impact on my life. I simply started using my coworkers name's when I say good morning, and they would respond the same with a warm smile. They even would ask me follow up questions or seek out my help specifically. It is amazing to me how one change could make such an impact.

There were other good points in the book as well. There were simple ones like don't be a negative Nancy. People in general don't like being around negative people if you have nothing, but whining and complaining to share, maybe you should rethink your approach to communication. Then there was a point of being a good listener. Now this is something I am good at. I did not even know it was a skill people liked so much. The only people love more than their own names, is hearing themselves talk. So perk up those ears, and ask about a topic someone likes and you'll be drowning in conversation in no time!

Overall I really liked the book. I would go as far as to say I give it a 5/5. The book has a lot of wisdom to offer and I did not even share half of it. If you like what you've read so far feel free to pick up a copy on Amazon. I can barely even think of something I did not like about the book. Well I guess the one issue I can think of is that there was not more of it. Happy reading friends!