How To Win Friends And Influence People

This book tells you how to deal with people, find success in relationships and make long lasting friendships. This book helps a person who has difficulties while speaking with people and is always pondering over what to speak.

In this book, Mr. Carnegie has effectively illustrated his points through examples and illustrations from the lives of great personalities. He has explained his methods by the perspective of a psychologist.
This book is a must read.

This is a book review of Dale Carnegie’s all time international classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is a fairly large review with the occasional “diversion” from the topic because I feel it is appropriate for this classic book.

The original version of this book was written in 1937 with just 5,000 copies in print. It didn’t take long for the word to spread about the value contained within the book for further copies to be produced. The book has spread like wildfire since then with over 16 million copies in print. Business owners, salespersons, and generally people who are interested in better relating to their fellow human being, have constantly referred to How to Win Friends and Influence People over the years as one of the best books you can read on the subject.

In every subject, there are usually one or two books that people categorize as a necessary read if you are to succeed in that subject. In the wealth world there is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich. In the advertising world there is Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising. In the self-help world there is Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics or The New Psycho-Cybernetics. While in the human relationships and communication skills world, the number one book to read is How to Win Friends and Influence People. There are people who will of course disagree with this, but there are a substantial number of authority experts in the respective industry that refer to these books as the best ones you can read.

All of these books date back many decades and were the pioneers in their industry. Books which discuss the psychology of being financially successfully to this day use the exact same principles mentioned in Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich which was firstly published in 1937. The same goes for other self-help classics like As A Man Thinketh by James Allen. I strongly encourage you to read these books as they are the original source of much self-help information taught today. The same is true for How to Win Friends and Influence People. Just about any communication skills book today will mention a principle that originated from this book whether it be to show interest in the other person or to not criticize. It is the authority book in human relations.

If you’re not really familiar with self-help classics, you may be wondering how the heck can books written back in the early to mid 1900s be useful today? Surely humanity has made many more great discoveries that are far superior than this “old school” material?

I use to think the exact same thing prior to reading such books. However, there is something to do with learning about a subject from the core, the nectar, the heart of its original pioneers that makes the information so powerful. I have literally heard hundreds of people praise How to Win Friends and Influence People. Originally, I thought it was because the book was most people’s introduction to communication skills. I thought, “Sure, the book is great because it’s your first experience in learning the amazing effect of good communication.”

What I later found, which is what many people have experienced, is that by reading the book one time every year you experience a powerful new realization. Life-changing realizations are also frequently experienced by many people when reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. The awareness and experience you have at the present time isn’t enough to completely grasp the principles in these classic books.

After reading the 2007 edition of this book, I’ve come to realize that the book’s four parts which deal with techniques to handle people, ways to make people like you, winning people to your way of thinking, and being a successful leader, are the fundamental skills of all human relations. I constantly teach these principles without realizing it because they are so fundamental to relationships. The very important point I’d like to distinguish here is that fundamentals are not necessarily basic skills. Fundamentals in any area form a solid framework for further skill development.

An athlete cannot become good in his or her sport by not having correct fundamentals. Sport coaches will tell you that an athlete who doesn’t have the right fundamentals is tough to coach because every skill builds off the foundation laid by fundamental skills. Professional athletes constantly fine tune their fundamental skills because they know the profound affect such skills have on their professional abilities. Advanced techniques are only useful when the person knows the fundamentals. Also, having good fundamentals produces an exponential effect that puts you ahead of 95% of people, while advanced techniques in any area produces a slight improvement that gives you an edge of the 5% who also have sound fundamentals.

Tiger Woods can work on perfecting his 2 iron stinger where he hits the ball with a very low trajectory, while the average golfer is better off focusing on fundamentals like a better grip, stance, and pre-shot routines. However, Tiger still needs to monitor and work on these fundamentals as well. The skills taught in How to Win Friends and Influence People constantly need to be revisited and worked on regardless of how good you think you are at communicating.

At the start of each chapter, Dale discusses the chapter’s principle. He then provides an example of how someone, mostly students from his speaking course, have applied the principle in their business or family life. The stories themselves can be a revelation at times as you become aware of how and in what situations the principles can be applied.

The majority of the book discusses concepts instead of word-for-word techniques. One principle is making the other person feel important. Dale doesn’t tell you to say exactly this and that. He provides the “what,” which is the concept, with a little bit of the “how.”

The table of contents is below:

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People
1. ‘If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive’
2. The Big Secret of Dealing with People
3. ‘He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way’
Six Ways to Make People Like You
1. Do This and You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere
2. A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression
3. If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble
4. An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist
5. How to Interest People
6. How to Make People Like You Instantly

Win People to Your Way of Thinking
1. You Can’t Win an Argument
2. A Sure Way of Making Enemies - and How to Avoid It
3. If You’re Wrong, Admit It
4. A Drop of Honey
5. The Secret of Socrates
6. The Safety Valve in Handling Complaints
7. How to Get Cooperation
8. A Formula That Will Work Wonders for You
9. What Everybody Wants
10. An Appeal That Everybody Likes
11. The Movies Do It. TV Does It. Why Don’t You Do It?
12. When Nothing Else Works, Try This

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment
1. If You Must Find Fault, This is the Way to Begin
2. How to Criticize – and Not Be Hated for It
3. Talk About Your Own Mistakes First
4. No One Likes to Take Orders
5. Let the Other Person Save Face
6. How to Spur People On to Success
7. Give a Dog a Good Name
8. Make the Fault Seem Easy to Correct
9. Making People Glad to Do What You Want

I went through this book a year ago and now that I've landed up in the professional career, I think this book has profound influence on my personality. I'd suggest anybody to go through this book whether he is professional or a layman, for we are human beings and we need to deal with human beings in day to day life. And how successfully we do it decides the fate of our day. This book has a lot of vivid illustrations from varying range of people e.g. Businessmen(Henary Ford.. oops I remember just one name out of those .. sorry ;), Authors and other eminent personalities.

Brief Summary
“How to Win Friends & Influence People” is a 1936 classic by Dale Carnegie having sold over 15million copies worldwide. The book basically aims to teach methods to get other people like you and get them to do what you want them to do.

Review
Even though the book was published way back in early 1930s, the techniques of Carnegie still haven’t lost their sheen. His examples and stories are still as relevant as they were during his time.
The book is divided into four sections - Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, Six Ways to Make People like You, How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking, Be a Leader: How to Change People without Giving Offense or Rousing Resentment. Each section provides a clear and detailed methodology to increase one’s amiability. The book starts off with a chapter titled “If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick over the Beehive” and it contains quotes from Lincoln, Franklin and Confucius. Each chapter has numerous stories and finishes with a Principle.
Some of the quotes from the book are:
“I will speak ill of no man...and speak all the good I know of everybody." - Benjamin Franklin
"Don't criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances." - Abraham Lincoln

The book is written in a very optimistic tone and claims that by simply remembering other people name, letting them do the most of the talking, speaking in terms of their interests, we can make a friend out of anyone.

Why I chose this book
I came across this book while searching for a professional development book on the internet. Amidst the thousands of books out there, this one caught my eyes as it was one of the best sellers written in 1936 on Flipkart.com. Despite its age, people around the globe were still recommending it for a must read. I read a quote from Warren Buffet saying “It changed my life” and labeling the book as the most successful self-help book of all times. Curious, that I became after reading such statements by world’s most powerful people, I took to reading the book to be left nothing but satisfied.

Aspects of book I liked
While the techniques given in the book may sound nothing more than obvious, we more often than not tend to forget these basic principles while dealing with others. The methodologies are practical and can be incorporated in one’s life without much difficulty.

Aspects of book I did not like
The book portrays an ideal world. There might be situations in real world where the best option might not be being nice to others. Many people will blatantly abuse niceness.

again a very good book by Dale Carnegie.
Very nicely explains the title of the book and also explains how to deal with people.
Examples provided in the book are good and helps us to understand the situation in a better way.
Must read it.