Book Review: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

 

Many self-help books remain as trends for a few years before disappearing into the aether. What happens most of the time is that the ideas and theories of the book sink into mainstream knowledge and fade away. Those who try to pick it up again after 20 years may feel bored, and will realise that the knowledge shared within it is nothing new. That being said, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published in the October of 1936. The fact that it is still regarded as one of the best self-help books of all time is testament to it’s longevity… and our inability to understand each another.

Carnegie’s writing reduces complex ideas into simple axioms; one for each chapter. These axioms may be things that you’ve heard before, but are hardly aware of how to put into practice. For example, the axiom that “if you want people to like you, you have to be interested in what they are interested in” is common knowledge to many people, but how easy is it to feint interest in something you have no interest about? The book teaches you different perspectives at looking at a particular situation, and will explain that the problem is not in the idea, but in its execution, and this is explained through Carnegie’s personal life experiences.

The book demonstrates Carnegie’s clear empathetic nature. While reading, you’d probably start saying to yourself “He’s absolutely right! I would be nicer to someone who treated me this way!” it is in this way that the book becomes enticing ; it affirms and reinforces your belief, and teaches you how encourage this behaviour in your own personal life. However, the disagreement between Carnegie’s perspective and mine is that this book solely looks at other people as a means to make sales or conduct business deals. There will come a time where I have to treat people as objects rather than subjects, but as long as I can, this is something I want to avoid. The book is called “How to win friends…”, but if you are looking to “Make friends”, I would say it is always best to be as genuine as you can, and to get people to like you for who you are.