How To Stop Worrying And Start Living & How To Make Friends And Influence People (Unabridged) E-Book
Carnegie Dale
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "How To Stop Worrying And Start Living & How To Make Friends And Influence People (Unabridged)," Dale Carnegie presents a timeless self-help guide that intertwines practical advice with compelling anecdotes. The book offers a dual exploration of emotional resilience and interpersonal skills, emphasizing the importance of conquering anxiety to lead a fulfilling life. Carnegie's conversational style, replete with real-life examples, makes the material accessible and relatable. Set against the backdrop of the early 20th century, a time marked by societal change and personal uncertainty, Carnegie's work stands as a beacon of optimism and pragmatic wisdom. Dale Carnegie, a pioneer in the self-improvement genre, famously developed his principles from experiential learning and public speaking courses he conducted. His desire to help individuals overcome their fears and improve their social interactions stemmed from his own struggles in a rapidly changing world. With a background that includes humble beginnings and a profound understanding of human psychology, Carnegie's insights are as relevant today as they were during his lifetime. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking to enhance their quality of life and strengthen relationships. By integrating both worry management and effective communication, Carnegie equips readers with the tools to navigate life's challenges with confidence and grace. 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 Stop Worrying And Start Living & How To Make Friends And Influence People (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents two complete, unabridged cornerstones of Dale Carnegie’s contribution to personal development: How To Make Friends And Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Brought together, they offer a coherent survey of Carnegie’s practical philosophy for everyday life, combining outward effectiveness with inward steadiness. The scope is deliberately comprehensive within this focus, gathering the full texts to preserve their structure, examples, and cumulative logic. Readers encounter not excerpts or summaries, but the original guidance as it was shaped, allowing the principles, case illustrations, and sequences of advice to work as intended across professional, social, and private spheres.
The purpose of pairing these works is to highlight their complementary strengths. How To Make Friends And Influence People concentrates on building rapport, communicating with tact, and exercising influence that rests on mutual respect. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living addresses the mental habits that undermine peace of mind, encouraging perspective, constructive action, and resilience. Together they propose a balanced toolkit: interpersonal skill prevents avoidable friction, while emotional balance prevents avoidable strain. The result is a single reading journey that moves between the social and the personal, demonstrating how progress in one dimension reinforces progress in the other.
The genres represented here are non-fiction and self-help, situated within the broader tradition of applied psychology and practical ethics. These are not novels, stories, or plays, but instructional texts built from real-world examples, advisory commentary, and stepwise recommendations for practice. They blend narrative case sketches with prescriptive counsel, designed to be read both continuously and in targeted selections. While the tone is conversational, the orientation is pragmatic: each concept aims at behavior readers can attempt, observe, and refine. The collection therefore serves as a compendium of methods—clear, actionable, and cumulative—rather than a theoretical treatise or abstract meditation.
Both books emerged in the mid-twentieth century, a period when accessible guidance on communication, leadership, and well-being reached wide audiences through public lectures and popular publishing. Preserved here in unabridged form, they retain the organization and illustrative episodes that made their counsel memorable to general readers. The publication context emphasizes clarity and usability over academic apparatus, prioritizing real-life situations and common dilemmas. By maintaining the original pacing and progression, this edition enables readers to follow the intended arc—from principle to practice, from obstacle to opportunity—without interruption, and to appreciate how the examples illuminate the advice rather than merely decorating it.
Several stylistic hallmarks unify the volumes. Carnegie’s prose favors plain language, direct address, and concrete anecdotes that anchor general advice in familiar circumstances. Lessons are framed through stories and brief case reports that show what effective behavior looks like in ordinary settings. Guidance arrives in compact statements that encourage trial, reflection, and repetition. This method treats improvement as a sequence of manageable steps. The voice is encouraging but unsentimental, inviting the reader to experiment rather than to admire. The cumulative effect is a style designed for recall under pressure, when one needs a steady rule of thumb more than a long argument.
A central theme across the collection is respect for human dignity. The counsel on making friends and influencing people asks readers to understand others’ perspectives, to notice their needs, and to respond in ways that preserve self-respect on both sides. It treats influence not as force but as the art of cooperation. Another unifying thread is attention to language: words are instruments, and tone, timing, and tact determine their effect. Throughout, sincerity is presented as the foundation of durable rapport. Without it, technique collapses; with it, even modest efforts can build trust. The emphasis is on reliable habits rather than theatrical performance.
The companion concern is the inner economy of attention and emotion. The guidance on stopping worry concentrates on what can be acted upon, and how to confine anxieties that would otherwise drain energy. It advocates practical boundaries for thought, disciplined focus on the present task, and routines that translate concern into constructive steps. The message is not to deny hardship but to approach it with measured responses. By framing problems into solvable units, the book invites readers to reclaim agency. The result is a repertoire of practices that reduce rumination, restore proportion, and free the mind for productive work and genuine rest.
Taken together, these works remain significant because they codify skills that are perennially scarce and perennially needed: the ability to connect without coercion, and the capacity to remain steady under strain. Their durability rests on plainspoken methods that adapt to changing contexts without losing force. Workplace conventions evolve, technologies shift, and social norms adjust, yet the basic challenges—misunderstanding, impatience, fear—return in new forms. Carnegie’s approach addresses the stable core beneath those variations. He offers tools that do not depend on specialized jargon or elaborate theory, making them portable across roles, cultures, and eras, and useful to readers at different stages of life.
Another unifying strength is the books’ dual commitment to clarity and kindness. The communication guidance asks for precision without harshness; the worry guidance asks for realism without defeatism. In both, small consistent actions outrun grand declarations. Readers are encouraged to test ideas in routine encounters—listening in a conversation, preparing for a difficult meeting, handling a complaint, framing a request, or planning a day sensibly. Because the recommendations are incremental, they suit novices and experienced practitioners alike. The collection thereby functions as both an introduction and a refresher: accessible to first-time readers, and continually useful for those returning with new challenges.
Ethical considerations run through the advice. Influence, as presented here, is inseparable from good faith. The techniques are framed to foster mutual benefit, not manipulation. Praise is intended to be specific and deserved; criticism, when necessary, to be careful and fair. Likewise, worry management is not avoidance by distraction, but the cultivation of proportion, gratitude, and prudent action. These ethical contours are not decoration; they are the source of the books’ credibility. Readers sense that the advice works in part because it aligns effectiveness with integrity. The result is practical wisdom that can be used confidently without compromising one’s values.
Readers may approach the collection sequentially or in alternation. Some will prefer to begin with social interaction and then move to inner composure; others will reverse the order, using calm as the basis for improved relationships. Either path is coherent, and each book enriches the other. Those who keep notes, practice one change at a time, and revisit chapters periodically will find the material deepens with use. The unabridged format aids this method: examples and transitions remain intact, so insights accumulate rather than fragment. Over time, the books serve less as a checklist and more as a companion to daily practice.
The pages that follow invite steady, hopeful effort. They gather the full texts of two works that have helped readers communicate more humanely and face uncertainty more bravely. Their promise is modest but profound: that ordinary people, by learning reliable habits, can improve their relationships and their peace of mind. No single chapter claims to be a cure-all; collectively, however, they furnish a durable framework for growth. Enter with curiosity, experiment without haste, and return as needed. In these unabridged volumes, Dale Carnegie offers tools shaped for everyday use and sturdy enough to accompany a lifetime of learning.
Author Biography
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer, lecturer, and pioneer of modern self-improvement, best known for How to Win Friends and Influence People. Emerging in the early twentieth century, he bridged classical rhetoric and practical psychology to teach communication, leadership, and salesmanship to mass audiences. His courses and books emphasized empathy, clarity, and confidence as learnable skills, reshaping workplace training and popular attitudes toward interpersonal effectiveness. Through a blend of vivid anecdotes and structured practice, Carnegie helped turn public speaking from a specialist's craft into a common professional competency, laying groundwork for a global training movement that carries his name.
He grew up in rural Missouri and attended a teachers college in Warrensburg, today the University of Central Missouri, where he participated in debate and dramatics and developed a lasting interest in oratory. After graduation he worked as a traveling salesman, gaining firsthand familiarity with the challenges of persuasion, customer relationships, and self-confidence under pressure. These early experiences supplied the concrete situations that later animated his teaching. Rather than an academic theorist, Carnegie approached communication as a practical art, drawing on everyday encounters and the American tradition of platform speaking to craft techniques that audiences could practice and apply immediately.
In the early 1910s Carnegie moved to New York and began offering an evening public-speaking class at a YMCA, encouraging students to stand up and talk about their work and lives. His method stressed supportive critique, incremental challenges, and personal storytelling, a structure that helped ordinary adults overcome fear and build poise. The classes proved popular and evolved into the Dale Carnegie Course, which he refined through constant experimentation and audience feedback. During World War I he served briefly in the U.S. Army, then returned to teaching, writing lesson materials, and delivering lectures that connected performance on the platform with effectiveness at work.
Carnegie's first major publication was The Art of Public Speaking, produced with J. Berg Esenwein and widely used as a practical text. He later turned to biography with Lincoln the Unknown, reflecting his admiration for perseverance and moral leadership. In the mid-1930s he published How to Win Friends and Influence People, which distilled classroom principles into accessible rules and case stories. The book became an international bestseller and has remained continuously in print, praised for turning social intelligence into everyday practice. Its core messages—avoid criticism, show sincere appreciation, listen well, and focus on others' interests—became touchstones of modern interpersonal training.
Success in print accelerated the expansion of his training enterprise. Carnegie systematized his curriculum and licensed instructors, building an organization that brought courses to companies, civic groups, and individuals across the United States and, later, abroad. Sessions emphasized participation, impromptu speaking, memory-building, and constructive feedback, with graduates reporting gains in confidence and workplace effectiveness. By the postwar years the program, often known as Dale Carnegie Training, offered modules in leadership, sales, and human relations alongside public speaking. Its format—short, intensive meetings, peer coaching, and practical homework—anticipated later corporate development practices and helped normalize lifelong learning as a professional expectation.
Carnegie continued publishing, notably How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which addressed anxiety through habits of action, perspective, and gratitude. After his death, materials drawn from his courses were issued as The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking, extending his public-speaking method to new readers. Reception of his work has been mixed in tone but enduring in effect: admirers celebrate the plainspoken wisdom and actionable exercises; skeptics note its formulaic packaging. Yet even critics concede the books' role in democratizing communication skills, translating insights from psychology and rhetoric into routines that helped millions secure employment, manage teams, and navigate social complexity.
In his later years Carnegie lectured widely, supervised instructors, and saw his name become synonymous with interpersonal effectiveness. He died in 1955, but the organization he founded continued to adapt his curriculum to new industries and cultures, maintaining a presence in many countries. Today his books are read as foundational texts in self-improvement and business communication, valued for their emphasis on respect, clear expression, and initiative. In an era of digital correspondence and cross-cultural teams, Carnegie's insistence on listening, empathy, and practical rehearsal remains relevant, shaping how managers, educators, and professionals think about influence, resilience, and the everyday craft of getting along.
Historical Context
Dale Carnegie’s career unfolded across the United States’ transition from an agrarian society to an urban, corporate nation. Born on November 24, 1888, near Maryville, Missouri, and raised in rural Warrensburg, he experienced the Populist and Progressive eras’ emphasis on self-improvement, civics, and moral uplift. The spread of public high schools, normal schools, and extension programs exposed young adults to rhetoric and elocution, fields he later professionalized. This Midwestern upbringing grounded his interest in practical persuasion and civility that would animate both the 1936 best seller commonly known as How to Win Friends and Influence People and the 1948 volume How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
The adult-education boom that shaped Carnegie’s method drew on lyceum circuits, Chautauqua assemblies, and YMCA classrooms that flourished between the 1890s and the 1920s. After attending the State Teachers College at Warrensburg (now the University of Central Missouri), he worked briefly in sales for Armour & Company before moving to New York. In 1912 he began teaching public speaking at a YMCA in New York City, a pivotal moment that launched his commercial courses. The classroom innovations, audience drills, and peer coaching honed there became the framework of his later books, which distilled thousands of student encounters into portable, step-by-step guidance.
Carnegie’s approach intersected with evolving ideas about business organization and persuasion. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) emphasized efficiency, but by the 1920s the limits of mechanistic control were evident. Public relations pioneers such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays (author of Propaganda, 1928) reframed persuasion as relationship-building, while sales organizations borrowed psychology to shape customer behavior. Carnegie’s emphasis on empathy, recognition, and narrative fit this shift. His work translated human-relations theory into practice, anticipating what would be formalized in management literature and helping salespeople, supervisors, and clerks adapt to the softer skills demanded by modern firms.
Carnegie’s first major text, Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1931), crystallized material tested in evening classes and seminar circuits. Its timing amid early Depression years proved decisive. Businesses cut costs but needed morale and customer loyalty. Workers faced layoffs, demotions, and relocations as industrial production collapsed after 1929. Carnegie’s low-cost, high-impact training promised measurable improvements in poise, clarity, and rapport. That appeal set the stage for the broader 1936 manual on interpersonal influence, whose case-based storytelling reflected a decade of coaching shop foremen, traveling salesmen, and civil servants confronting the new realities of mass unemployment and precarious advancement.
The Great Depression created the immediate backdrop for the 1936 publication by Simon & Schuster in New York. New Deal programs restructured labor and finance, yet the daily challenges of negotiation—keeping accounts, retaining clients, and resolving disputes—remained. Carnegie’s program reframed influence not as manipulation but as cooperative alignment of interests, an ethos resonant with civic revival rhetoric of the 1930s. The book’s overnight success, with continuous printings and early translations, grew from readers’ hunger for practical scripts and a humane tone. Its cross-industry utility—from small shops to corporate headquarters—anchored a public identity that would carry into his postwar writings on worry and resilience.
Mass media amplified the reach of Carnegie’s principles. Radio networks in the 1930s carried personality-driven advice, and newspapers disseminated compact rules of thumb. Beginning in 1937, the syndicated column ‘Dale Carnegie Says’ (distributed by King Features Syndicate) summarized classroom lessons for a national audience. This media presence reinforced the books’ conversational style and cemented recognizable narratives about tact, listening, and praise. The column’s blend of anecdotes and actionable points mirrored the classroom cadence—tell a story, extract a principle, invite practice—creating a consistent pedagogy across print, lecture, and broadcast that would support both the interpersonal guidance of 1936 and the anxiety management of 1948.
Urbanization and immigration between 1900 and 1930 transformed workplace communication, with multiethnic teams navigating accents, status, and new norms of politeness. Telephones compressed decision time; rail and postal networks expanded markets; chain stores standardized service. Organizations such as Rotary International (founded 1905 in Chicago) and Toastmasters (founded 1924 in Santa Ana by Ralph C. Smedley) institutionalized public speaking and fellowship as civic virtues. Carnegie’s courses thrived in this civic-business ecosystem, offering a grammar of courtesy and clarity suited to the bustling office and the shop floor alike. The same cross-cultural competencies underpin the broad applicability of both his flagship interpersonal and worry-focused manuals.
Carnegie’s work drew from accessible psychology rather than technical clinical discourse. He cited William James’s pragmatic insights about habit and emotion, bridged with commonsense observations from sales and service work. Concurrently, behaviorism’s focus on reinforcement (after John B. Watson’s 1913 manifesto) and Alfred Adler’s social interest influenced popular discourse on motivation. Mental hygiene advocates, inspired by Clifford Beers’s 1908 memoir and later institutionalized through the National Mental Health Act of 1946, normalized discussions of stress. Carnegie operationalized these currents into practice: model the desired behavior, rehearse it aloud, and design environments that reward cooperation—principles that govern influence and the management of worry alike.
Biography furnished Carnegie’s moral exemplars. His 1932 book Lincoln the Unknown reflected a broader midcentury habit of extracting leadership lessons from national figures, a method he also applied in classroom case studies featuring inventors, executives, and civic leaders. Abraham Lincoln’s patience, capacity to listen, and command of tone served Carnegie’s dual agenda: influence without coercion and composure under pressure. By anchoring lessons in named historical actors and dated events—from frontier courts to cabinet conflicts—Carnegie made abstract principles tangible. This narrative pedagogy, cultivated in New York classrooms and touring lectures across U.S. cities, shaped both the 1936 and 1948 volumes’ enduring anecdotes.
The human-relations movement in management provided a scientific backdrop that validated Carnegie’s pragmatism. The Hawthorne studies at Western Electric in Cicero, Illinois (1924–1932), led by Elton Mayo and colleagues, suggested that attention, group norms, and leadership style affected productivity. Consulting firms and business schools thereafter emphasized morale, supervision, and communication. Carnegie’s courses—rebranded over time as the Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking and Human Relations—fed this appetite with drills on listening, feedback, and recognition. Corporate training in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles integrated such curricula, connecting academic insights with the day-to-day scripts that populate both of his hallmark books.
World War II intensified demand for clear communication and psychological steadiness. Mobilization required supervisors to coordinate diverse crews and accelerate on-the-job training. After 1945, the return to civilian life, inflationary pressures, and early Cold War anxieties redefined everyday worry. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) met this postwar climate by codifying routines—compartmentalizing time, focusing on controllable tasks, and practicing gratitude—compatible with veterans reentering offices and factories. The language of duty and resilience, already present in his prewar work on positive engagement, was repurposed to address insomnia, rumination, and conflict, integrating lessons from the human-relations toolkit into personal mental hygiene.
The GI Bill of Rights (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944) expanded adult and continuing education, catalyzing a nationwide market for practical courses. Evening classes proliferated on college campuses and in downtown training centers, a landscape in which Carnegie’s program flourished. Veterans and newly promoted supervisors sought structured opportunities to practice presentations, negotiation, and stress control. This institutional infrastructure supported the dissemination of both books, as instructors aligned chapters with weekly assignments and role-plays. The postwar suburban boom—new sales territories, civic clubs, and parent–teacher associations—offered further venues to apply interpersonal and worry-management techniques beyond the office, reinforcing the books’ broad civic framing.
Shifts in gender and labor broadened Carnegie’s audience. During the 1940s and 1950s, women increasingly occupied clerical, retail, and managerial roles, and many enrolled in public-speaking and human-relations courses. The postwar economy’s service orientation—banking, hospitality, insurance—rewarded competencies that Carnegie foregrounded: patient listening, conflict de-escalation, and confidence in meetings. His classrooms in New York and other cities incorporated mixed cohorts of salespeople, engineers, and secretaries, making the case examples inclusive and repeatable. The practical universality he claimed—whether dealing with a supervisor, a client, or a family member—connects the interpersonal playbook of 1936 and the anxiety-reduction repertoire of 1948 within a shared social horizon.
Publishing economics also shaped the oeuvre’s impact. Simon & Schuster’s 1936 launch relied on immediate word-of-mouth from course alumni and aggressive backlist marketing; the book quickly moved into multiple printings and foreign editions. By the early 1940s, it had sold well into the millions worldwide, making Carnegie a brand whose name signified applied human relations. The 1948 follow-up benefited from similar distribution networks and postwar reading habits that favored practical nonfiction. Newspapers featuring ‘Dale Carnegie Says’ drove readers to bookstores and lecture halls. This reciprocity—print to classroom to print—embedded the two volumes within the infrastructure of American commercial publishing and adult education.
Carnegie’s civility ethic drew from older American traditions. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, the ‘self-made’ archetype, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations about voluntary associations underwrote a cultural faith in sociability as democratic glue. Rotary luncheons, Chambers of Commerce, and church committees served as arenas for practicing the habits he prescribed: remembering names, praising publicly, and disagreeing gently. These communal forms thrived in places like New York, Kansas City, and Cleveland, where Carnegie taught and recruited students. The books’ advice, therefore, belongs not only to business literature but to a civic repertoire that links the workplace, neighborhood, and club—sites where influence and worry both manifest.
Carnegie died on November 1, 1955, in Forest Hills, New York, and was buried in Belton, Missouri. His widow, Dorothy Price Vanderpool Carnegie, whom he married in 1944, helped steward the franchise and shaped later compilations, including The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962), drawn from course materials. Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc. continued to license instructors and update examples, keeping the 1936 and 1948 frameworks in step with changing workplaces. The continuation of classes across North America, Europe, and Asia confirmed that the core thesis—human relations as a teachable craft—remained viable amid shifting corporate hierarchies and communication technologies.
It is important to distinguish Dale Carnegie from the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, though both participated in an American conversation about merit, philanthropy, and social order. Dale’s synthesis spans the lineage from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine (founded 1897) to the midcentury ‘organization man’ examined by William H. Whyte (1956). Where earlier efficiency schemes optimized systems, Carnegie optimized encounters, uniting interpersonal influence with anxiety control. That unity—first cultivated in 1912 YMCA classrooms, expressed in 1936 and 1948, and institutionalized after 1955—anchors the collection in a century-long negotiation between individual aspiration and the demands of modern, interdependent life.
Synopsis (Selection)
How To Make Friends And Influence People
A practical guide to interpersonal effectiveness that outlines principles for gaining goodwill, winning others to your viewpoint, and leading without arousing resentment. It emphasizes empathy, sincere appreciation, attentive listening, and aligning communication with others’ interests.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
A step-by-step approach to reducing anxiety through focusing on the present, gathering facts, deciding and acting, and accepting the worst to regain control. It pairs mental frameworks with habits—such as rest, gratitude, and purposeful activity—to replace rumination with constructive action.
How To Stop Worrying And Start Living & How To Make Friends And Influence People (Unabridged)
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.
