How to Win Friends & Influence People — Dale Carnegie
Paperback | Gallery Books | October 1, 1998
The Gist
In a shocking turn of events, being pleasant and agreeable helps you communicate with more people and maybe make a friend or two or three or more.
Read if you like
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
The Verdict: Borrow It, Write Down the Principles, Done
Carnegie’s upbeat tone makes How to Win Friends & Influence People an easy read. The chapters are short and each is summed up with a principle. The principles are evergreen and can be applied across various situations (person or professional), industries, and eras. For this reason, it’s easy to understand why the book has withstood the test of time. However, while Carnegie lists endless examples of how the principles are successful, there aren’t any examples of how to recover if a principle backfires. Each example assumes that the person you’re using this principle on is oblivious to your tactics (and hasn’t read this book themselves). Additionally, while Carnegie leans heavily on examples to showcase the principles, he doesn’t take the time to analyze them. As a result, How to Win Friends & Influence People is a good book to help kickstart your self-help journey, but it isn’t the last self-help book you will ever need to read, like the marketing all over the back of the book leads you to believe.
