the personal journal of Brent Stewart
My entire life How to Win Friends and Influence People has been something of a punchline, but not something I had read. I think the cultural touch-point to this book is that it is an empty way to manipulate people, kind of a psychopathic how-to. I decided to read the book and came away with a (mostly) different view.
Dale Carnegie, according to the forward, quick biography, introduction, and various stories in the book, was a poor midwesterner driven to succeed. He pushed himself and tried a variety of paths before understanding that his gift was working with people and coaching others on interpersonal effectiveness. As he presents himself, he wasn’t a manipulator and worked for mutually attractive solutions. He understood that each party in a conversation has their own idea of value and that both could usually be met and they didn’t have to be the same.
That said, How to Win Friends is full of anecdotes that border on manipulative. That could be because they are presented in an encapsulated form and there isn’t space to describe the full story.
This is actually a collection of 37 short essays on different aspects of dealing with others. I found some of the advice obvious but all of it was useful and worth considering . One essay is “Talk about your own mistakes first” and focuses on the idea of recognizing your own failability in a conversation as a way to encourage the other person to reflexively consider their mistakes.
The most interesting thing for me was that I could repackage this as a summary of the twenty-first centuries best business books. It seems like subsequent authors have absorbed the ideas presented here and expanded them into full independent books. In fact, I have often said that the problem with most business books is that they should be pamplets - just a few basic ideas over-analyzed and over-extended into a few hundred pages. How to Win Friends is that collection of pamplets in many ways.
Modern business books are either more analytical or present a “business fairy tale” to describe their point. How to Win Friends takes neither approach. Instead, it’s generally told in the first-person in a fireside-chat style voice. The examples are numerous and drawn from Carnegie’s work teaching these concepts. I found the voice to be a little tiring, found myself wanting some actual data, and found the anecdotes too self-congratulatory. However, I recognize that this was written almost a century ago and many of the forms and expectations we use today weren’t present.
I found this to be a worthwhile book. It’s a short read - my edition is 232 pages - broken up into 37 small essays that can be easily absorbed over the morning coffee. The book gets a little annoying in places, but setting that aside the actual points it makes are good. The advice can be read as manipulative, but it’s manipulative in the sense that good manners are manipulative. Manners can be a way to show respect and to react thoughfully with the other person in mind, or they can be a way to manipulate a persons trust. Embodies in a person of character, manners are a distinction and I took the books advice in that light.
I recommend the book. The content is worthwhile and can be thought provoking. I also found it interesting as the prototype of later business books.
I’ve made a practice of summarizing these books into desktop backgrounds. I set my desktop to flip between them and in that way keep some of these ideas fresh in my mind. I’ve added a summary for How to Win Friends and Influence People to my github repository if you are interested.