I actually already read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” once, but a while ago, and it’s a book that bears re-reading. In the water supply—sure, to some extent, but as always, you need to actually do the stuff not just read a book about it, and re-reading the book is a way to give yourself a kick in the seat of the pants as a reminder to keep it top of mind.
In fact, come to think of it, HTWFAIP is probably a uniquely bad book to read in a book brigade, because it’s mostly not procedural knowledge even though it comes in that form. What the book really does is drive home the “no, really, actually do this”. It does this by telling anecdote after anecdote, in a way which makes you see how that works, why that’s obviously the way to do it.
If you’re going to sum up chapters into things like “be a good listener”, etc, then just read the table of contents (well, no, it’s got terribly uninformative chapter names, but I’m sure there is some online summary somewhere that does the equivalent.) Nevertheless, I feel the book was worth reading, and indeed is worth re-reading, because a dry list of rules like “be a good listener” is one thing, but at that level alone it is hard to internalize. By reading Dale Carnegie’s rendition in a conversational style of endless anecdotes to drive it home, it at least feels like you can actually grok it. Rather than a list of abstract rules, you get some human context that grounds them.
To show what I mean, here’s an excerpt of the start of the chapter about being a good listener:
Some time ago, I attended a bridge party. I don’t play bridge—and there was a woman there who didn’t play bridge either. She had discovered that I had once been Lowell Thomas’ manager before he went on the radio and that I had traveled in Europe a great deal while helping him prepare the illustrated travel talks he was then delivering. So she said: “Oh, Mr. Carnegie, I do want you to tell me about all the wonderful places you have visited and the sights you have seen.”
As we sat down on the sofa, she remarked that she and her husband had recently returned from a trip to Africa. “Africa!” I exclaimed. “How interesting! I’ve always wanted to see Africa, but I never got there except for a twenty-four-hour stay once in Algiers. Tell me, did you visit the big-game country? Yes? How fortunate. I envy you. Do tell me about Africa.”
That kept her talking for forty-five minutes. She never again asked me where I had been or what I had seen. She didn’t want to hear me talk about my travels. All she wanted was an interested listener, so she could expand her ego and tell about where she had been.
Was she unusual? No. Many people are like that.
For example, I met a distinguished botanist at a dinner party given by a New York book publisher. I had never talked with a botanist before, and I found him fascinating. I literally sat on the edge of my chair and listened while he spoke of exotic plants and experiments in developing new forms of plant life and indoor gardens (and even told me astonishing facts about the humble potato). I had a small indoor garden of my own—and he was good enough to tell me how to solve some of my problems.
As I said, we were at a dinner party. There must have been a dozen other guests, but I violated all the canons of courtesy, ignored everyone else, and talked for hours to the botanist.
Midnight came. I said good night to everyone and departed. The botanist then turned to our host and paid me several flattering compliments. I was “most stimulating.” I was this and I was that, and he ended by saying I was a “most interesting conversationalist.”
An interesting conversationalist? Why, I had said hardly anything at all. I couldn’t have said anything if I had wanted to without changing the subject, for I didn’t know any more about botany than I knew about the anatomy of a penguin. But I had done this: I had listened intently. I had listened because I was genuinely interested. And he felt it. Naturally that pleased him. That kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone. “Few human beings,” wrote Jack Woodford in Strangers in Love, “few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention.” I went even further than giving him rapt attention. I was “hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.”
I told him that I had been immensely entertained and instructed—and I had. I told him I wished I had his knowledge—and I did. I told him that I should love to wander the fields with him—and I have. I told him I must see him again—and I did.
And so I had him thinking of me as a good conversationalist when, in reality, I had been merely a good listener and had encouraged him to talk.
That’s almost 600 words out of an over 3000 word chapter, so imagine a total of five times this amount of anecdote all to the same point. It is a bit verbose, indeed, on a fairly simple topic that can be summed up in a sentence—but that’s a large part of the point of the book. It’s not, I think, mostly a matter of being in the water supply. Some of it is, but much of it is an intentional effort to “show, don’t tell” these principles. As a list of preachy rules, it’s not going to be any good—so instead he tells anecdotes which drive the point home.
He’ll then sum up at the end of the chapter, as gathered from the anecdotes. In this case:
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
That’s well and good as a summary, but the book would lose a lot if it were just a list of such summaries.
For better or for worse—I can certainly see the point of view which gets fed up of endless anecdotes about the same “obvious” subject. Still, though you could compress the book into a listicle by cutting out only these chapter summaries, you’d lose the main thing the book has to give, reducing it to yet another social skills listicle that doesn’t stick in your brain beyond the moment you close the browser tab.
