dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people

Carnegie pinpointed things we desperately need to know and get good at but which had been largely neglected by previous writers. We spend vast parts of our lives trying to build relationships, hoping to get others to appreciate who we are, to understand us and grasp what we have to offer them and yet our efforts are, so often, far from successful. The issues he addresses are utterly basic. In 1936, when he was in his late forties, he summed up his views on being nice in a book that was ridiculed by intellectuals: How to Win Friends and Influence people. With over-prominent ears and a prosaic hair-cut, Dale Carnegie was almost the anti-type of what we imagine a great and centrally important writer might be like. He then got involved in adult education and spent tens of thousands of evenings giving talks to small audiences in out-of-the-way towns. Rather than attend university, he spent years selling bacon and soap to people living on isolated ranches. But these were not the assumptions of a man far cleverer and more important than intellectual history has been prepared to allow.īorn in 1888 into a poor farming family in rural Missouri, Dale Carnegie left school in his teens. Certainly they shouldn’t try to ‘influence’ them: they just need to say witty, intelligent things. Why on earth, these people mutter, would an intelligent person need help with something as basic as that? And in any case, good people don’t need to win friends: they should already have them. It is also one of the books most routinely ridiculed by people who think they are clever. How to Win Friends and Influence People is the title of possibly the most famous book of the twentieth century.

Dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people