How To Make Friends And Influence People & How To Stop Worrying And Start Living E-Book
Carnegie Dale
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "How To Make Friends And Influence People" and "How To Stop Worrying And Start Living," Dale Carnegie provides a transformative exploration of human relationships and personal wellbeing. These seminal works, written in a clear, engaging style with practical advice, offer timeless principles grounded in the psychological understanding of social dynamics and emotional health. Carnegie employs anecdotes and relatable scenarios to illustrate his points, rendering complex interpersonal skills accessible and actionable. The context of the 1930s, marked by social upheaval and economic anxiety, amplifies the relevance of Carnegie's insights as he addresses the universal need for connection and reassurance in an uncertain world. Dale Carnegie, a pioneer in self-improvement and interpersonal communication techniques, channeled his own experiences in overcoming social anxiety and professional setbacks into these influential guides. His background in public speaking and experience with life coaching enabled him to distill practical advice from his observations of individuals who successfully navigated social landscapes. This expertise, coupled with a keen understanding of human nature, positions Carnegie as a forefather of modern self-help, underscoring the enduring relevance of his work. I highly recommend these companions for anyone seeking to enhance their interpersonal skills and find peace in an often-worrying world. Carnegie's teachings not only foster meaningful connections but also equip readers with strategies to transcend anxiety. These books are invaluable resources for those aspiring to lead fulfilled, engaged lives. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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How To Make Friends And Influence People & How To Stop Worrying And Start Living
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection brings together two of Dale Carnegie’s most influential works, presenting a coherent introduction to his practical philosophy of human relations and personal resilience. By pairing his classic guide to interpersonal effectiveness with his companion volume on overcoming worry, the collection offers a panoramic view of Carnegie’s approach to everyday challenges at work and in life. The purpose is not to assemble miscellany but to foreground a method: concrete principles illustrated by lived examples and designed for immediate application. Read together, these books form a comprehensive program aimed at strengthening character, communication, confidence, and well-being through steady, observable habits.
The texts collected here are works of nonfiction in the self-help and personal development tradition. They combine instructional writing with illustrative anecdotes, brief case histories, and prescriptive exercises. Carnegie writes as a practitioner rather than an academic theorist, drawing on classroom experience and pragmatic observation. The books function as manuals for skill-building: chapters introduce a concept, demonstrate it through stories from everyday life and public figures, and translate it into steps a reader can try. While they engage with psychology and communication, their emphasis is practical rather than technical, designed to be accessible to general readers in a clear, conversational tone.
How to Win Friends and Influence People first appeared in 1936, evolving from courses Carnegie had developed for adults seeking to improve public speaking, sales, and leadership. Its material was refined through repeated teaching, feedback from participants, and real-world trials. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, published in 1948, emerged from a similar instructional context, focusing this time on worry, decision-making, and emotional habits that affect daily functioning. Together they reflect the mid-twentieth-century adult education movement, when structured programs promised tangible improvement in work and personal life. Their publication histories underscore an emphasis on usable knowledge grounded in experience.
Unifying these works is a commitment to agency: the belief that small, consistent adjustments in behavior and mindset can yield outsized benefits. Carnegie emphasizes empathy, attentive listening, and courteous conduct as foundations for constructive relationships. He likewise treats worry as a problem susceptible to practical management, emphasizing action, perspective, and reasonable acceptance. Both books rest on a purposefully optimistic view of human nature without denying conflict or difficulty. They argue that respect, clarity, and good faith make cooperation more likely, and that disciplined attention to the present can reduce anxiety. The result is a humane, pragmatic ethic of everyday effectiveness.
Stylistically, Carnegie favors plainspoken instruction and memorable illustrations over abstraction. Chapters are compact, move briskly from premise to example, and culminate in applicable takeaways. The prose is encouraging, sometimes urgent, and notably free of jargon. Case studies—a mix of ordinary encounters and well-known anecdotes—serve as laboratories for testing principles. The structure rewards incremental reading: lessons can be tried the same day and revisited later. While the writing is accessible, it is not simplistic; its persuasiveness comes from cumulative demonstration and consistent alignment with observable human behavior. This combination of clarity, narrative, and practicality is central to the books’ enduring appeal.
As a whole, the collection demonstrates why Carnegie’s work has remained a touchstone for communication training, leadership development, sales, customer relations, and personal growth. Its influence extends across workplaces, schools, and community organizations because it translates social insight into teachable practices. The books have been widely read for decades, reprinted in numerous editions, and recommended in contexts ranging from management seminars to individual self-study. Their longevity owes less to novelty than to durable usefulness: readers recognize situations they face and find steps they can implement. The works retain relevance precisely by foregrounding conduct that builds trust and eases strain.
The first volume centers on improving interpersonal effectiveness. Its premise is straightforward: considerate, purposeful communication can strengthen rapport, reduce friction, and make collaboration more likely. Carnegie addresses common situations—introductions, disagreements, requests, feedback—and offers ways to proceed that preserve dignity while advancing understanding. The outlook is ethical as well as strategic; influence is linked to genuine interest, fairness, and appreciation, not manipulation. Readers encounter recurring themes such as listening before arguing, acknowledging perspectives, and framing proposals in mutually beneficial terms. The cumulative message is that respect and clarity are not ornaments but tools that make daily interactions more productive.
The second volume turns inward to the problem of worry—how it accumulates, narrows perception, and drains energy. Carnegie proposes ways to reclaim attention and momentum: defining a situation clearly, acting on what can be controlled, and setting aside what cannot. He illustrates the costs of indecision and the relief that comes from committing to a course. The tone is practical, not clinical; stories show how ordinary routines, purposeful rest, and constructive work restore balance. Rather than promising a life without difficulties, the book teaches readers to face problems with steadier nerves and to cultivate habits that limit needless mental strain.
Read together, the books reinforce each other. The interpersonal guidance of the first gains depth when paired with the inner steadiness fostered by the second, while the worry-management techniques become easier to sustain when relationships are cooperative and clear. The combination offers a loop of mutual support: calm enables better conversation; better conversation reduces uncertainty; reduced uncertainty diminishes worry. This integrated approach allows readers to improve both the climate around them and the climate within, without requiring specialized background or extensive time. The result is a coherent framework for navigating professional responsibilities and personal commitments with composure and purpose.
A defining feature of Carnegie’s method is its classroom origin. The books distill practices tested in adult-education settings, where learners brought immediate workplace and home challenges to discuss. This pedigree explains their emphasis on participation, repetition, and follow-through. Lessons are framed to be tried, observed, and refined, with attention to visible results rather than theoretical completeness. Readers will notice structured chapters, clear transitions from principle to example, and recurring prompts to act. The pedagogy is pragmatic: practice precedes mastery, and mastery is measured by improved relationships and reduced anxiety. The writing models this rhythm of learn, apply, and reflect.
Although rooted in the 1930s and 1940s, the books’ concerns are broadly contemporary. Economic uncertainty, rapid change, and information overload intensify the need for reliable interpersonal skills and resilient thinking. The historical backdrop—Depression-era and postwar America—shaped Carnegie’s focus on constructive initiative and steady optimism, yet the core insights travel well across time and culture: people respond to respect; clarity reduces conflict; purposeful action curbs rumination. Readers may notice period details in examples or idiom, but the underlying practices adapt readily to modern workplaces, diverse communities, and digital communication, where attention, tone, and trust remain decisive.
Approached as a collection, these volumes invite deliberate, incremental reading. Many find it helpful to sample a principle, apply it for a week, and note outcomes before moving on. A journal, checklist, or study group can support this process, but the essential ingredient is consistent practice. The books reward revisiting: insights that seem obvious on first reading often gain force in new contexts. Treat them as companions rather than curiosities—texts to be used, not merely admired. In doing so, readers can expect gains that are modest at first, then compounding: clearer conversations, steadier nerves, and a more purposeful daily life.
Author Biography
Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) was an American writer, lecturer, and pioneer of modern self-improvement whose books and courses reframed public speaking, leadership, and interpersonal communication for a mass audience. Working in the first half of the twentieth century, he bridged classical rhetoric and practical business training, emphasizing learnable skills over innate talent. His name became closely associated with confidence-building and relationship skills in professional life. Best known for the enduring bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie advanced a pragmatic philosophy centered on clarity, civility, and empathy, promoting methods that aimed to reduce friction, build cooperation, and help people achieve results without coercion.
Carnegie grew up in rural Missouri and attended the State Teachers College in Warrensburg, now the University of Central Missouri. As a student he was active in debating and public speaking, discovering both aptitude and enthusiasm for persuasive communication. After college he worked in sales and related fields, traveling and learning firsthand how to connect with diverse customers under demanding conditions. Those experiences, together with his interest in rhetoric, shaped his view that communication is a practical craft that improves with guided practice. Seeking a broader stage for these ideas, he eventually moved to New York to develop training for adults outside traditional classrooms.
In the early 1910s Carnegie began teaching at a New York City YMCA, where he created a public-speaking course that quickly drew overflow crowds. He emphasized frequent practice, concrete storytelling, and constructive feedback, inviting participants to speak about real challenges rather than abstract topics. This approach matured into the Dale Carnegie Course, a structured program that blended speaking drills with principles of human relations. He also published instructional materials to support the training. An early milestone was The Art of Public Speaking (1915), prepared with J. Berg Esenwein, which codified many of his classroom techniques and became a widely used guide for practical oratory.
Carnegie’s breakthrough as an author came with How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), which became an immediate and lasting bestseller. The book distilled his classroom lessons into principles for understanding others, showing appreciation, listening carefully, and framing requests in terms of mutual benefit. Written in an accessible, anecdotal style, it appealed to businesspeople, educators, and general readers alike. While critics sometimes faulted its maxims as formulaic, Carnegie repeatedly stressed sincerity and warned against manipulation. Its popularity reflected a cultural desire for humane, everyday tools of persuasion, and it established Carnegie as one of the defining voices of American self-improvement.
Carnegie extended his reach with works that broadened his themes. Lincoln the Unknown (1932), a biography of Abraham Lincoln, reflected his interest in character and resilience, drawing leadership lessons from historical narrative. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) addressed stress and anxiety in modern life, presenting case studies and practical routines to keep problems in perspective and encourage constructive action. Across these books, Carnegie incorporated insights from psychology and pragmatic philosophy while maintaining his focus on conversational tone and usable techniques. He continued to refine his course materials, aligning them with the needs of salespeople, managers, and others who relied on clear, persuasive communication.
As demand grew, Carnegie formalized his training enterprise, developing a network that operated under what became Dale Carnegie & Associates. Instructors were trained to deliver standardized courses in effective speaking, human relations, leadership, and sales, using active participation, role-playing, and peer feedback. By the mid-twentieth century, his programs served individuals and organizations across the United States and abroad, influencing corporate training practices and adult education. The courses emphasized habit formation and real-world application, encouraging participants to practice small changes consistently. This institutional framework helped preserve Carnegie’s methods and ensured that his pedagogy reached audiences far beyond his own lectures.
Carnegie continued writing, teaching, and refining his curriculum until his death in the mid-1950s. His organization persisted, updating materials while retaining core principles of respect, clarity, and practical action. How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living remain widely read, often cited in leadership programs and professional development. Admirers credit his work with democratizing rhetorical skills and promoting empathetic persuasion; skeptics question whether simplified rules risk instrumentalizing relationships. Yet his influence on business communication, sales training, and the broader self-help tradition is enduring, and his books continue to be approached as pragmatic manuals for improving everyday human interaction.
Historical Context
Dale Harbison Carnegie emerged from the rural Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, a period defined by the Progressive Era’s faith in education and self-improvement. Born in 1888 in Missouri and educated at the State Teachers College in Warrensburg (now the University of Central Missouri), he came of age amid debates clubs, elocution contests, and civic boosterism that championed clear speech as a civic virtue. The agricultural rhythms and small-town networks of western Missouri acquainted him with the practical, everyday psychology of persuasion—skills that would later shape both his 1936 volume on interpersonal influence and his 1948 guide to managing anxiety in modern life.
Carnegie’s early work as a traveling salesman for a national firm in the Great Plains, and his stint pursuing acting studies in New York City, intersected with the era’s expanding commercial culture and mass entertainment. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Broadway orbit exposed him to voice, gesture, and audience rapport, while sales on the road taught endurance and practical empathy. These experiences converged into a distinctly American pedagogy of performance and persuasion, blending theatrical technique with business savvy—an approach that would inform his enduring program in public speaking and personal relations, the intellectual scaffolding for both of his most famous books.
By 1912, Carnegie launched his first public speaking course at a YMCA in New York, tapping into the adult-education boom that stretched from lyceum halls to Chautauqua tents. The YMCA network, a quintessential Progressive Era institution, offered accessible night classes to strivers in the new white-collar economy. In 1915, he coauthored The Art of Public Speaking with J. Berg Esenwein, a volume that codified practical techniques for stage presence and audience analysis. This early synthesis of classical rhetoric and pragmatic exercises set the methodological template that later infused his 1936 and 1948 books with case-based instruction and a conversational, workshop-tested style.
New York’s publishing world amplified Carnegie’s influence as the interwar marketplace for advice literature expanded. Simon & Schuster, founded in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, would publish his 1936 blockbuster and support a sustained campaign of lectures, courses, and serialized excerpts. By the 1920s, Carnegie had adopted the now-familiar spelling of his surname, resonating—however controversially—with the prestige attached to Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), whose philanthropy and “Gospel of Wealth” (1889) had redefined American notions of leadership and social responsibility. The association situated Dale Carnegie’s project within a broader narrative linking enterprise, education, and civic uplift.
Carnegie’s career aligned with the nation’s shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality, memorably described by historian Warren Susman. The 1920s saw the rise of advertising, market research, and mass magazines that valorized charm, poise, and adaptability. Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine, Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), and older traditions stemming from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) nurtured a thriving advice genre. Carnegie’s pedagogy distilled this ethos into teachable steps, positioning likeability and empathy as professional competencies rather than mere personal traits—an orientation that served both his guidance on winning cooperation and his later counsel on mastering worry.
The Great Depression, triggered by the 1929 stock market crash and followed by the New Deal (1933–1939), intensified demand for practical skills in persuasion, confidence, and stress management. Displaced workers, ambitious clerks, and anxious managers sought tools to keep jobs, rebuild careers, and maintain morale. Carnegie’s classes, rooted in case studies from New York’s offices and the nation’s salesrooms, provided behavioral scripts for interviews, negotiation, and team leadership. The 1936 publication of his book on interpersonal influence tapped precisely this audience, offering a repertoire of tested practices at a time when economic survival and social cooperation felt inseparable in both public and corporate life.
Management thinking was simultaneously evolving toward the “human relations” paradigm. Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne studies at Western Electric near Chicago (1924–1932) emphasized attention, recognition, and group dynamics, while Chester Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive (1938) reframed leadership as cooperative systems-building. Carnegie’s insistence on appreciation over criticism echoed these currents and entered boardrooms and classrooms as a complementary, practitioner-led toolkit. Parallel organizations—Toastmasters International (founded 1924 in Santa Ana) and service clubs like Rotary (founded 1905 in Chicago)—normalized performative leadership in civic and business spheres. Carnegie’s courses translated these ideas into daily habits, shaping both his influence-focused prescriptions and his later stress-reduction strategies.
Radio, syndication, and digest culture magnified the reach of advice literature in the interwar and wartime years. Reader’s Digest, launched in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace in Pleasantville, New York, condensed practical wisdom into portable formats, while newspaper features spread catchy rules-of-thumb to commuters and salespeople. Simon & Schuster harnessed mail-order clubs and promotional pamphlets to keep Carnegie’s counsel ubiquitous. In an age when NBC and CBS made intimate voices household companions, Carnegie’s anecdotal, conversational tone sounded native to the medium. This media ecology sustained the continuous circulation of his lessons across locales, occupations, and the two marquee volumes of his oeuvre.
The techniques Carnegie advocated dovetailed with the social architecture of large organizations that emerged in the 1910s–1940s: telephone networks, insurance firms, department stores, and national manufacturers. As bureaucracies formalized hierarchies, informal influence—persuading colleagues, calming customers, coordinating teams—became indispensable. The rise of personnel departments and training divisions encouraged standardized curricula that could be franchised and scaled. Carnegie’s institute model, based in New York and replicated nationwide, met this need. His program’s stress on names, praise, listening, and shared purpose aligned with the demands of service work and salesmanship, providing a lingua franca for white-collar advancement reflected across his major books.
World War II (1941–1945) brought new pressures to the home front: rationing administration, war-bond drives, and labor mobilization in factories and offices. Government agencies such as the Office of Price Administration required calm public encounters, while defense industries relied on foremen able to motivate diverse crews. Carnegie’s emphasis on morale, recognition, and emotional composure accorded with wartime leadership handbooks and morale campaigns. Veterans returning under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill, 1944) entered classrooms and offices with altered expectations for leadership, stress, and opportunity. In this environment, postwar readers would be especially receptive to a comprehensive, nonclinical approach to worry and daily mental hygiene.
After 1945, the mental hygiene movement and the National Mental Health Act (1946) fed public interest in psychological well-being. The creation of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1949 signaled a new scientific infrastructure. Yet clinical services were unevenly available, and stigma remained. Carnegie’s 1948 volume on worry offered a pragmatic alternative: structured routines, compartmentalization (“day-tight compartments”), and purposeful action. Drawing inspiration from earlier popular psychology—William James’s antifatalist pragmatism, habit theory, and attention—and resonating with later cognitive-behavioral emphases, his method translated psychological insights into daily rituals. This approach complemented his earlier interpersonal guidelines, completing a two-part framework for navigating modern social and emotional demands.
The mid-century company town had given way to multinational firms, and American ideas on salesmanship and leadership were increasingly exported. Carnegie’s methods, honed in New York classrooms and Midwestern seminars, traveled via licensed instructors to Canada, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe and Latin America by the 1950s. Translations and international courses adapted examples to local norms while preserving the core emphasis on respect, listening, and constructive feedback. This global dissemination reflected broader U.S. cultural outreach in the early Cold War, as management know-how and soft skills were packaged with technical assistance and developmental programs, extending the books’ relevance beyond national borders.
Carnegie’s audiences were shaped by mass immigration (Ellis Island operated 1892–1954) and internal migration to cities. In offices where surnames, accents, and customs mingled, social friction could threaten productivity and advancement. Manuals of etiquette—Emily Post’s Etiquette (1922)—and Americanization classes sought to harmonize behavior. Carnegie’s pedagogy offered a secular civics of rapport that was both cosmopolitan and utilitarian: learn names, listen first, frame disagreements as shared problem-solving. In both his interpersonal guide and his later counsel on anxiety, the underlying civic ideal remained the same: self-mastery in the service of cooperation, enabling individuals to navigate heterogeneous, rapidly changing urban institutions.
Women’s expanding presence in the labor force—accelerated during both world wars and sustained in clerical, sales, and managerial tracks—reshaped the audience for communication and stress-management advice. Secretarial schools, teacher colleges, and civic clubs sought practical curricula on poise, persuasion, and calm under pressure. Carnegie’s course rosters and readership included women seeking advancement or equilibrium in male-dominated offices. While his anecdotes reflected the gender norms of his time, his techniques—recognition, listening, collaborative framing—applied across roles. The dual focus of his major books, one on human relations and the other on worry, mirrored the dual burdens many workers, including women, shouldered in public and private spheres.
The institutionalization of Carnegie’s methods paralleled mid-century standardization in American business education. By the 1930s–1950s, his organization—often known as Dale Carnegie & Associates—licensed instructors, crafted instructor manuals, and established quality controls typical of national franchises headquartered in New York. The resulting ecosystem ensured that the case histories and maxims readers encountered in the 1936 and 1948 books echoed the exercises practiced in classrooms from Cleveland to Los Angeles. This alignment between print and pedagogy cultivated a brand of practical wisdom that corporations, civic groups, and schools could adopt at scale, reinforcing the books’ durability as cross-institutional reference points.
Carnegie died in New York in 1955, widely reported as from complications related to Hodgkin’s disease; he was interred in Belton, Missouri, reconnecting his national fame to his Midwestern origins. By then, millions of copies of his books had circulated through Simon & Schuster’s channels, abridgments, and foreign editions. His widow, Dorothy Carnegie (married 1944), helped steward the legacy, contributing compilations that kept his aphorisms in print. Postwar management thinkers—Peter Drucker among them—would frame organizations as human communities, a view congenial to Carnegie’s stress on dignity and purpose. The continuity between his two signature books and the ongoing training apparatus sustained their influence.
Across the half-century arc from Progressive reform to early Cold War consolidation, Carnegie’s oeuvre sat at the junction of rhetoric, psychology, and management. He converted the vernacular wisdom of sales floors and lecture halls—tested in New York classrooms after 1912—into portable rules for cooperation and composure. The 1936 guide capitalized on the Depression-era demand for humane efficiency; the 1948 volume answered postwar anxieties with methodical calm. Both drew energy from adult education, human relations research, and mass media. Taken together, they mapped a civic pedagogy for modern institutions, tying personal character to organizational life in a language that proved durable across decades and borders.
Synopsis (Selection)
How To Make Friends And Influence People
A practical guide to building rapport, winning cooperation, and leading effectively through empathy, tact, and sincere appreciation. It distills principles like showing genuine interest, listening more than speaking, avoiding criticism, giving honest praise, and appealing to others’ interests to persuade without creating resistance.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
A handbook for reducing anxiety through actionable habits such as living in day-tight compartments, analyzing and accepting the worst, structured problem-solving, and rest routines. It uses practical steps and case examples to break worry cycles, handle criticism, and cultivate gratitude and purposeful activity.
How To Make Friends And Influence People & How To Stop Worrying And Start Living
How To Make Friends And Influence People
Twelve Things This Book Will Do For You
Get you out of a mental rut, give you new thoughts, new visions, new ambitions.
Enable you to make friends quickly and easily.
Increase your popularity.
Help you to win people to your way of thinking.
Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.
Enable you to win new clients, new customers.
Increase your earning power.
Make you a better salesman, a better executive.
Help you to handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant.
Make you a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
Make the principles of psychology easy for you to apply in your daily contacts.
Help you to arouse enthusiasm among your associates.
Preface: How This Book Was Written And Why
by Dale Carnegie
During the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century, the publishing houses of America printed more than a fifth of a million different books. Most of them were deadly dull, and many were financial failures. "Many," did I say? The president of one of the largest publishing houses in the world confessed to me that his company, after seventy-five years of publishing experience, still lost money on seven out of every eight books it published.
Why, then, did I have the temerity to write another book? And, after I had written it, why should you bother to read it?
Fair questions, both; and I'll try to answer them.
I have, since 1912, been conducting educational courses for business and professional men and women in New York. At first, I conducted courses in public speaking only - courses designed to train adults, by actual experience, to think on their feet and express their ideas with more clarity, more effectiveness and more poise, both in business interviews and before groups.
But gradually, as the seasons passed, I realized that as sorely as these adults needed training in effective speaking, they needed still more training in the fine art of getting along with people in everyday business and social contacts.
I also gradually realized that I was sorely in need of such training myself. As I look back across the years, I am appalled at my own frequent lack of finesse and understanding. How I wish a book such as this had been placed in my hands twenty years ago! What a priceless boon it would have been.
Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer. Research done a few years ago under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching uncovered a most important and significant fact - a fact later confirmed by additional studies made at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. These investigations revealed that even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering-to personality and the ability to lead people.
For many years, I conducted courses each season at the Engineers' Club of Philadelphia, and also courses for the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. A total of probably more than fifteen hundred engineers have passed through my classes. They came to me because they had finally realized, after years of observation and experience, that the highest-paid personnel in engineering are frequently not those who know the most about engineering. One can for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering, accountancy, architecture or any other profession at nominal salaries. But the person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people-that person is headed for higher earning power.
In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said that "the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee." "And I will pay more for that ability," said John D., "than for any other under the sun."
Wouldn't you suppose that every college in the land would conduct courses to develop the highest-priced ability under the sun? But if there is just one practical, common-sense course of that kind given for adults in even one college in the land, it has escaped my attention up to the present writing.
The University of Chicago and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools conducted a survey to determine what adults want to study.
That survey cost $25,000 and took two years. The last part of the survey was made in Meriden, Connecticut. It had been chosen as a typical American town. Every adult in Meriden was interviewed and requested to answer 156 questions-questions such as "What is your business or profession? Your education? How do you spend your spare time? What is your income? Your hobbies? Your ambitions? Your problems? What subjects are you most interested in studying?" And so on. That survey revealed that health is the prime interest of adults and that their second interest is people; how to understand and get along with people; how to make people like you; and how to win others to your way of thinking.
So the committee conducting this survey resolved to conduct such a course for adults in Meriden. They searched diligently for a practical textbook on the subject and found-not one. Finally they approached one of the world's outstanding authorities on adult education and asked him if he knew of any book that met the needs of this group. "No," he replied, "I know what those adults want. But the book they need has never been written."
I knew from experience that this statement was true, for I myself had been searching for years to discover a practical, working handbook on human relations.
Since no such book existed, I have tried to write one for use in my own courses. And here it is. I hope you like it.
In preparation for this book, I read everything that I could find on the subject- everything from newspaper columns, magazine articles, records of the family courts, the writings of the old philosophers and the new psychologists. In addition, I hired a trained researcher to spend one and a half years in various libraries reading everything I had missed, plowing through erudite tomes on psychology, poring over hundreds of magazine articles, searching through countless biographies, trying to ascertain how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with people. We read their biographies, We read the life stories of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to Thomas Edison. I recall that we read over one hundred biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone. We were determined to spare no time, no expense, to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages for winning friends and influencing people.
I personally interviewed scores of successful people, some of them world-famous-inventors like Marconi and Edison; political leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and James Farley; business leaders like Owen D. Young; movie stars like Clark Gable and Mary Pickford; and explorers like Martin Johnson-and tried to discover the techniques they used in human relations.
From all this material, I prepared a short talk. I called it "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I say "short." It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes. For years, I gave this talk each season to the adults in the Carnegie Institute courses in New York.
I gave the talk and urged the listeners to go out and test it in their business and social contacts, and then come back to class and speak about their experiences and the results they had achieved. What an interesting assignment! These men and women, hungry for self-improvement, were fascinated by the idea of working in a new kind of laboratory - the first and only laboratory of human relationships for adults that had ever existed.
This book wasn't written in the usual sense of the word. It grew as a child grows. It grew and developed out of that laboratory, out of the experiences of thousands of adults.
Years ago, we started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experiment and research came this book.
The rules we have set down here are not mere theories or guesswork. They work like magic. Incredible as it sounds, I have seen the application of these principles literally revolutionize the lives of many people.
To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticized and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organization is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of team-work. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: "When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name."
This employer gained more profit, more leisure and -what is infinitely more important-he found far more happiness in his business and in his home.
Countless numbers of salespeople have sharply increased their sales by the use of these principles. Many have opened up new accounts - accounts that they had formerly solicited in vain. Executives have been given increased authority, increased pay. One executive reported a large increase in salary because he applied these truths. Another, an executive in the Philadelphia Gas Works Company, was slated for demotion when he was sixty-five because of his belligerence, because of his inability to lead people skillfully. This training not only saved him from the demotion but brought him a promotion with increased pay.
On innumerable occasions, spouses attending the banquet given at the end of the course have told me that their homes have been much happier since their husbands or wives started this training.
People are frequently astonished at the new results they achieve. It all seems like magic. In some cases, in their enthusiasm, they have telephoned me at my home on Sundays because they couldn't wait forty-eight hours to report their achievements at the regular session of the course.
One man was so stirred by a talk on these principles that he sat far into the night discussing them with other members of the class. At three o'clock in the morning, the others went home. But he was so shaken by a realization of his own mistakes, so inspired by the vista of a new and richer world opening before him, that he was unable to sleep. He didn't sleep that night or the next day or the next night.
Who was he? A naive, untrained individual ready to gush over any new theory that came along? No, Far from it. He was a sophisticated, blasй dealer in art, very much the man about town, who spoke three languages fluently and was a graduate of two European universities.
While writing this chapter, I received a letter from a German of the old school, an aristocrat whose forebears had served for generations as professional army officers under the Hohenzollerns. His letter, written from a transatlantic steamer, telling about the application of these principles, rose almost to a religious fervor.
Another man, an old New Yorker, a Harvard graduate, a wealthy man, the owner of a large carpet factory, declared he had learned more in fourteen weeks through this system of training about the fine art of influencing people than he had learned about the same subject during his four years in college. Absurd? Laughable? Fantastic? Of course, you are privileged to dismiss this statement with whatever adjective you wish. I am merely reporting, without comment, a declaration made by a conservative and eminently successful Harvard graduate in a public address to approximately six hundred people at the Yale Club in New York on the evening of Thursday, February 23, 1933.
"Compared to what we ought to be," said the famous Professor William James of Harvard, "compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use,"
Those powers which you "habitually fail to use"! The sole purpose of this book is to help you discover, develop and profit by those dormant and unused assets,
"Education," said Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton University, "is the ability to meet life's situations,"
If by the time you have finished reading the first three chapters of this book- if you aren't then a little better equipped to meet life's situations, then I shall consider this book to be a total failure so far as you are concerned. For "the great aim of education," said Herbert Spencer, "is not knowledge but action."
And this is an action book.
DALE CARNEGIE
1936
Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book
1. If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is one indispensable requirement, one essential infinitely more important than any rule or technique. Unless you have this one fundamental requisite, a thousand rules on how to study will avail little, And if you do have this cardinal endowment, then you can achieve wonders without reading any suggestions for getting the most out of a book.
What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with people.
How can you develop such an urge? By constantly reminding yourself how important these principles are to you. Picture to yourself how their mastery will aid you in leading a richer, fuller, happier and more fulfilling life. Say to yourself over and over: "My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people."
2. Read each chapter rapidly at first to get a bird's-eye view of it. You will probably be tempted then to rush on to the next one. But don't - unless you are reading merely for entertainment. But if you are reading because you want to increase your skill in human relations, then go back and reread each chapter thoroughly. In the long run, this will mean saving time and getting results.
3. Stop frequently in your reading to think over what you are reading. Ask yourself just how and when you can apply each suggestion.
4. Read with a crayon, pencil, pen, magic marker or highlighter in your hand. When you come across a suggestion that you feel you can use, draw a line beside it. If it is a four-star suggestion, then underscore every sentence or highlight it, or mark it with "****." Marking and underscoring a book makes it more interesting, and far easier to review rapidly.
5. I knew a woman who had been office manager for a large insurance concern for fifteen years. Every month, she read all the insurance contracts her company had issued that month. Yes, she read many of the same contracts over month after month, year after year. Why? Because experience had taught her that that was the only way she could keep their provisions clearly in mind. I once spent almost two years writing a book on public speaking and yet I found I had to keep going back over it from time to time in order to remember what I had written in my own book. The rapidity with which we forget is astonishing.
So, if you want to get a real, lasting benefit out of this book, don't imagine that skimming through it once will suffice. After reading it thoroughly, you ought to spend a few hours reviewing it every month, Keep it on your desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often. Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application. There is no other way.
6. Bernard Shaw once remarked: "If you teach a man anything, he will never learn." Shaw was right. Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire to master the principles you are studying in this book, do something about them. Apply these rules at every opportunity. If you don't you will forget them quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
You will probably find it difficult to apply these suggestions all the time. I know because I wrote the book, and yet frequently I found it difficult to apply everything I advocated. For example, when you are displeased, it is much easier to criticize and condemn than it is to try to understand the other person's viewpoint. It is frequently easier to find fault than to find praise. It is more natural to talk about what you want than to talk about what the other person wants. And so on, So, as you read this book, remember that you are not merely trying to acquire information. You are attempting to form new habits. Ah yes, you are attempting a new way of life. That will require time and persistence and daily application.
So refer to these pages often. Regard this as a working handbook on human relations; and whenever you are confronted with some specific problem - such as handling a child, winning your spouse to your way of thinking, or satisfying an irritated customer - hesitate about doing the natural thing, the impulsive thing. This is usually wrong. Instead, turn to these pages and review the paragraphs you have underscored. Then try these new ways and watch them achieve magic for you.
7. Offer your spouse, your child or some business associate a dime or a dollar every time he or she catches you violating a certain principle. Make a lively game out of mastering these rules.
8. The president of an important Wall Street bank once described, in a talk before one of my classes, a highly efficient system he used for self-improvement. This man had little formal schooling; yet he had become one of the most important financiers in America, and he confessed that he owed most of his success to the constant application of his homemade system. This is what he does, I'll put it in his own words as accurately as I can remember.
"For years I have kept an engagement book showing all the appointments I had during the day. My family never made any plans for me on Saturday night, for the family knew that I devoted a part of each Saturday evening to the illuminating process of self-examination and review and appraisal. After dinner I went off by myself, opened my engagement book, and thought over all the interviews, discussions and meetings that had taken place during the week. I asked myself:
'What mistakes did I make that time?' 'What did I do that was right-and in what way could I have improved my performance?' 'What lessons can I learn from that experience?'
"I often found that this weekly review made me very unhappy. I was frequently astonished at my own blunders. Of course, as the years passed, these blunders became less frequent. Sometimes I was inclined to pat myself on the back a little after one of these sessions.
This system of self-analysis, self-education, continued year after year, did more for me than any other one thing I have ever attempted.
"It helped me improve my ability to make decisions - and it aided me enormously in all my contacts with people. I cannot recommend it too highly."
Why not use a similar system to check up on your application of the principles discussed in this book? If you do, two things will result.
First, you will find yourself engaged in an educational process that is both intriguing and priceless.
Second, you will find that your ability to meet and deal with people will grow enormously.
9. You will find at the end of this book several blank pages on which you should record your triumphs in the application of these principles. Be specific. Give names, dates, results. Keeping such a record will inspire you to greater efforts; and how fascinating these entries will be when you chance upon them some evening years from now!
In order to get the most out of this book:
Develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles of human relations,
Read each chapter twice before going on to the next one.
As you read, stop frequently to ask yourself how you can apply each suggestion.
Underscore each important idea.
Review this book each month.
Apply these principles at every opportunity. Use this volume as a working handbook to help you solve your daily problems.
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.
Check up each week on the progress you are making. Ask yourself what mistakes you have made, what improvement, what lessons you have learned for the future.
Keep notes in the back of this book showing how and when you have applied these principles.
A Shortcut to Distinction
by Lowell Thomas
This biographical information about Dale Carnegie was written as an introduction to the original edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is reprinted in this edition to give the readers additional background on Dale Carnegie.
It was a cold January night in 1935, but the weather couldn't keep them away. Two thousand five hundred men and women thronged into the grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Every available seat was filled by half-past seven. At eight o'clock, the eager crowd was still pouring in. The spacious balcony was soon jammed. Presently even standing space was at a premium, and hundreds of people, tired after navigating a day in business, stood up for an hour and a half that night to witness - what?
A fashion show?
A six-day bicycle race or a personal appearance by Clark Gable?
No. These people had been lured there by a newspaper ad. Two evenings previously, they had seen this full-page announcement in the New York Sun staring them in the face:
Learn to Speak Effectively Prepare for Leadership
Old stuff? Yes, but believe it or not, in the most sophisticated town on earth, during a depression with 20 percent of the population on relief, twenty-five hundred people had left their homes and hustled to the hotel in response to that ad.
The people who responded were of the upper economic strata - executives, employers and professionals.
These men and women had come to hear the opening gun of an ultramodern, ultrapractical course in "Effective Speaking and Influencing Men in Business"- a course given by the Dale Carnegie Institute of Effective Speaking and Human Relations.
Why were they there, these twenty-five hundred business men and women?
Because of a sudden hunger for more education because of the depression?
Apparently not, for this same course had been playing to packed houses in New York City every season for the preceding twenty-four years. During that time, more than fifteen thousand business and professional people had been trained by Dale Carnegie. Even large, skeptical, conservative organizations such as the Westinghouse Electric Company, the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the New York Telephone Company have had this training conducted in their own offices for the benefit of their members and executives.
The fact that these people, ten or twenty years after leaving grade school, high school or college, come and take this training is a glaring commentary o adults really on the shocking deficiencies of our educational system.
What do adults really want to study? That is an important question; and in order to answer it, the University of Chicago, the American Association for Adult Education, and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools made a survey over a two-year period.
That survey revealed that the prime interest of adults is health. It also revealed that their second interest is in developing skill in human relationships - they want to learn the technique of getting along with and influencing other people. They don't want to become public speakers, and they don't want to listen to a lot of high sounding talk about psychology; they want suggestions they can use immediately in business, in social contacts and in the home.
So that was what adults wanted to study, was it?
"All right," said the people making the survey. "Fine. If that is what they want, we'll give it to them."
Looking around for a textbook, they discovered that no working manual had ever been written to help people solve their daily problems in human relationships.
Here was a fine kettle of fish! For hundreds of years, learned volumes had been written on Greek and Latin and higher mathematics - topics about which the average adult doesn't give two hoots. But on the one subject on which he has a thirst for knowledge, a veritable passion for guidance and help - nothing!
This explained the presence of twenty-five hundred eager adults crowding into the grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in response to a newspaper advertisement. Here, apparently, at last was the thing for which they had long been seeking.
Back in high school and college, they had pored over books, believing that knowledge alone was the open sesame to financial - and professional rewards.
But a few years in the rough-and-tumble of business and professional life had brought sharp dissillusionment. They had seen some of the most important business successes won by men who possessed, in addition to their knowledge, the ability to talk well, to win people to their way of thinking, and to "sell" themselves and their ideas.
They soon discovered that if one aspired to wear the captain's cap and navigate the ship of business, personality and the ability to talk are more important than a knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard.
The advertisement in the New York Sun promised that the meeting would be highly entertaining. It was. Eighteen people who had taken the course were marshaled in front of the loudspeaker - and fifteen of them were given precisely seventy-five seconds each to tell his or her story. Only seventy-five seconds of talk, then "bang" went the gavel, and the chairman shouted, "Time! Next speaker!"
The affair moved with the speed of a herd of buffalo thundering across the plains. Spectators stood for an hour and a half to watch the performance.
The speakers were a cross section of life: several sales representatives, a chain store executive, a baker, the president of a trade association, two bankers, an insurance agent, an accountant, a dentist, an architect, a druggist who had come from Indianapolis to New York to take the course, a lawyer who had come from Havana in order to prepare himself to give one important three-minute speech.
The first speaker bore the Gaelic name Patrick J. O'Haire. Born in Ireland, he attended school for only four years, drifted to America, worked as a mechanic, then as a chauffeur.
Now, however, he was forty, he had a growing family and needed more money, so he tried selling trucks. Suffering from an inferiority complex that, as he put it, was eating his heart out, he had to walk up and down in front of an office half a dozen times before he could summon up enough courage to open the door. He was so discouraged as a salesman that he was thinking of going back to working with his hands in a machine shop, when one day he received a letter inviting him to an organization meeting of the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking.
He didn't want to attend. He feared he would have to associate with a lot of college graduates, that he would be out of place.
His despairing wife insisted that he go, saying, "It may do you some good, Pat. God knows you need it." He went down to the place where the meeting was to be held and stood on the sidewalk for five minutes before he could generate enough self-confidence to enter the room.
The first few times he tried to speak in front of the others, he was dizzy with fear. But as the weeks drifted by, he lost all fear of audiences and soon found that he loved to talk - the bigger the crowd, the better. And he also lost his fear of individuals and of his superiors. He presented his ideas to them, and soon he had been advanced into the sales department. He had become a valued and much liked member of his company. This night, in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Patrick O'Haire stood in front of twenty-five hundred people and told a gay, rollicking story of his achievements. Wave after wave of laughter swept over the audience. Few professional speakers could have equaled his performance.
The next speaker, Godfrey Meyer, was a gray-headed banker, the father of eleven children. The first time he had attempted to speak in class, he was literally struck dumb. His mind refused to function. His story is a vivid illustration of how leadership gravitates to the person who can talk.
He worked on Wall Street, and for twenty-five years he had been living in Clifton, New Jersey. During that time, he had taken no active part in community affairs and knew perhaps five hundred people.
Shortly after he had enrolled in the Carnegie course, he received his tax bill and was infuriated by what he considered unjust charges. Ordinarily, he would have sat at home and fumed, or he would have taken it out in grousing to his neighbors. But instead, he put on his hat that night, walked into the town meeting, and blew off steam in public.
As a result of that talk of indignation, the citizens of Clifton, New Jersey, urged him to run for the town council. So for weeks he went from one meeting to another, denouncing waste and municipal extravagance.
There were ninety-six candidates in the field. When the ballots were counted, lo, Godfrey Meyer's name led all the rest. Almost overnight, he had become a public figure among the forty thousand people in his community. As a result of his talks, he made eighty times more friends in six weeks than he had been able to previously in twenty-five years.
And his salary as councilman meant that he got a return of 1,000 percent a year on his investment in the Carnegie course.
The third speaker, the head of a large national association of food manufacturers, told how he had been unable to stand up and express his ideas at meetings of a board of directors.
As a result of learning to think on his feet, two astonishing things happened. He was soon made president of his association, and in that capacity, he was obliged to address meetings all over the United States. Excerpts from his talks were put on the Associated Press wires and printed in newspapers and trade magazines throughout the country.
In two years, after learning to speak more effectively, he received more free publicity for his company and its products than he had been able to get previously with a quarter of a million dollars spent in direct advertising. This speaker admitted that he had formerly hesitated to telephone some of the more important business executives in Manhattan and invite them to lunch with him. But as a result of the prestige he had acquired by his talks, these same people telephoned him and invited him to lunch and apologized to him for encroaching on his time.
The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction.[1q] It puts a person in the limelight, raises one head and shoulders above the crowd. And the person who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he or she really possesses.
A movement for adult education has been sweeping over the nation; and the most spectacular force in that movement was Dale Carnegie, a man who listened to and critiqued more talks by adults than has any other man in captivity. According to a cartoon by "Believe-It-or-Not" Ripley, he had criticized 150,000 speeches. If that grand total doesn't impress you, remember that it meant one talk for almost every day that has passed since Columbus discovered America. Or, to put it in other words, if all the people who had spoken before him had used only three minutes and had appeared before him in succession, it would have taken ten months, listening day and night, to hear them all.
Dale Carnegie's own career, filled with sharp contrasts, was a striking example of what a person can accomplish when obsessed with an original idea and afire with enthusiasm.
