Introducing Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People"

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Next up, learn about Dale Carnegie's research that led him to write How To Win Friends and Influence People

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Carnegie's Research and Findings Education, not manipulation. The success of dale Carnegie’s adult communications