Introducing Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People"
Jul 04, 2023 · 2 mins read
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The title How To Win Friends and Influence People reeks of insincerity. How many people would boast of ‘winning’ a friend and influencing them for their own personal gain?
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For a modern reader, the book conjures up mental trickery for a dog-eat-dog world, a shonky product hawked by a Depression-era salesman. In this case, judging a book by its cover would seem a very reasonable thing to do.
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Yet there is a strange inconsistency between the brazenness of the title and what is actually in the book. When read carefully, it is not at all a manual for manipulation in the manner of Machiavelli’s The Prince.
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Carnegie genuinely despised ‘winning friends’ for a purpose: “If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way.”
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The energy which makes the book a great read comes from a love of people. Maybe it is still bought by shallow egomaniacs, but it is about time Carnegie’s classic was seen in a kinder, truer light.
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When Carnegie wrote the book in the 1930s, America was still clawing itself out of the Great Depression. Opportunities, particularly for people with limited education, were scarce.
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Carnegie offered a way to get ahead, taking advantage of the one thing you truly owned outright - your personality. By modern standards, the claims made in How To Win Friends do not seem too wild – motivational psychology is now well established.
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But try to imagine its impact in 1937, before the great prosperity of the post-World War Two period. To many people it’s lessons would have seemed liked gold. For many today, it still is.
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How To Win Friends is a self-confessed manual of action, “letting the reader in on a secret”. No theory, just a set of rules that work “like magic”.
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Next up, learn about Dale Carnegie's research that led him to write How To Win Friends and Influence People

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