How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
The Value-Add of this Book
It is pretty amazing that, How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book first published in 1936 should still serve as your guide for navigating personal and business relationships. So much has changed since Dale Carnegie wrote this book in 1936. However, there are principles of human nature that have remained constant. The most preeminent, in my opinion, and the key takeaway from this book, is that you can get almost anything that you want in life if you make the other person from whom you are making your request feel important. How to Win Friends and Influence People will be your one-stop for enhancing your interpersonal skills, and thus the one book you need for getting everything that you have ever wanted for your life.
Why You Will Enjoy It
You can literally create from the concepts in this book a quick mental checklist that you can fall back on for maximizing every interpersonal relationship you have. Let’s assume that you have a business meeting with a potential client. How should you approach the conversation? Sell them on what you do and can do for them? Try to impress them with prior success stories? Not sure what their personality is and to which conversational approach they will best respond? The quick and simple advice is to make the meeting about them, not you.
Speaking generally, we all like someone who makes us feel important. Here is the mental checklist that you can store away and use in any conversation. As you read the book, you may certainly add more to this list, but, with just these few items, I think you will be better tomorrow than you were today:
Be lavish in your genuine praise and appreciation for others
We learn from this great How to Win Friends and Influence People quote to genuinely find things and point them out that you can admire about the other person you are speaking with. It can be anything that truly impresses you. Keep your eyes open and find these things.
Focus on the interests of the other person in your conversation
People love to talk about themselves. Make it a habit to fill any gap in conversation with a question for the other person, rather than turning to talk about yourself.
Smile and High Energy
Carry these with you always. These show the other person that their presence excites you. This is a way to compliment without using a single word.
To be interesting, be interested
If you want to be great at conversation, be a great listener. What a great tip, for example, for how to make friends as an introvert. To be well-liked, it is the quiet listener who has the best relationships, not the boisterous extrovert.
A note: Sincerity is crucial. We all know when someone is being insincere. Your praise, energy, focus on interests and questions should really relate to the things about the other person that you can sincerely admire and that enthuse you.
How You Will Benefit
Do you know the expression that “the world will give you anything you want from it, you just have to ask?” Getting what you desire in life and business often depends on human relationships. A boss, a client, a supplier, an investor, all these people that come into our lives play a huge role in our outcome. Make them feel important through genuine interest and admiration and all you want in life will be at your fingertips. Remind yourself of the principles in this book everyday.
The lessons in this book and tips on how to make friends also provide a great pressure relief for you. In my own experience, it is much easier to ask someone questions about themself than it is to have to decide which stories about yourself will most impress!
This summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People is just the start. This will be the book that you look at over and over again whenever your own happiness and success depend on how well you can manage relationships with others! You´ve gotta get it.
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