How to Win Friends & Influence People - review by Richi

The book and the author:

    In the 1930s, Dale Carnegie started working on his new book. He made courses about public speaking. These courses were successful as hundreds of people came to listen, but he realized speech wasn't the problem, rather it was getting along with people. Dale used his own knowledge and experience, and research to create this book. The first pages describe how you should read it, such as "Develop a deep driving desire to master the principles of human relations.", and "Make a lively game out of your learning by offering some friend a dime or a dollar every time he or she catches you violating one of these principles"(sounds like a bit much for me). The book is divided into four parts, all with different principles. The first part, as described in the book, explains the fundamental techniques in handling people. I understand most of it as don't blame anyone for anything. It's hard to give an example of this because most of the book is written in stories and examples, such as "George B. Johnston of Enid, Oklahoma, is the safety coordinator for an engineering company. One of his responsibilities is to see that employees wear their hard hats whenever they are on the job in the field. He reported that whenever he came across workers who were not wearing hard hats, he would tell them with a lot of authority of the regulation and that they must comply. As a result, he would get sullen acceptance, and often after he left, the workers would remove their hats." The way the book is written was made to be analyzed, with the gist being unclear if reading mindlessly. The second part of the book is titled "six ways to make people like you", and those six ways are listening to what someone is saying, simply smile, discuss topics that the other person has an interest in, refer other peoples names with respect, Be interested in the other personal beliefs and opinions, and most important is to make people feel important, but do so in an honest way. The third part of the book is "how to win people to your way of thinking", and the main ideas of this section are no one can win an argument, How to avoid enemies by avoiding quarrels and calling out their mistakes, being honest if you know you're wrong, and give the other person what they want; your acceptance. The fourth part of the book explains how to "be a leader: how to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment", and some principles it gives are how to criticize and not be hated for it (which isn't much of a principle, but goes more in-depth in the book), talk about your own mistakes first, don't give orders to people since no one likes to be ordered, make mistakes seem easy to fix and make people glad to do what you want. Now that I explained the book, it's time for my opinion.

My opinion on the book:

    I really enjoyed reading this book. I learned a lot from the stories, even though they're from before the 30s. Something that surprised me was how the principles applied to today's world. I remembered many moments where I thought I could have done better, with Dale's advice, and overall I can relate to the life lessons. At the beginning of the book, it told me to read precisely, and I see why. The book is heavily based on stories and personal experiences. I didn't understand some of them, since I have little context from the 30s, and I had to look up some of the people and events that happened. The examples were like instructions since the author cant assume people had some similar event happen. There were multiple times when I wondered how I can apply this to my life, and the examples showed how. I couldn't describe everything the book explained, since I was trying to be concise, but I 100 percent recommend this book to anyone who would like to know more.