Keertana's Reviews > How to Win Friends and Influence People

Every week for the past seven years my father has diligently asked me--without fail--whether or not I had finally read this book. How to Win Friends & Influence People changed my father's life when he first read it, back during the 1970s, and as such he's wanted me to read it as well. I have three copies of this book in my house--the first an aqua paperback my father originally bought for me, the second the very same paperback my father re-bought for me when in a fit of rebellion I told him I'd lost the first copy, and the third my father's own disheveled edition he brought back from India.

If your parents have ever shoved anything down your throat, you can probably understand why it took me seven years to finally pick up this volume. Even now, I've only read it under the threat that my father wouldn't pay my college tuition bills for the fall semester unless I would read and discuss it with him before the payment deadline. Lo and behold, Dale Carnegie's non-fiction piece finally made it into my hands.

Admittedly, this isn't a bad book. It shares useful pieces of advice with plenty of support to back up its claims. Only, in my eyes, I don't believe that each and every individual can truly put Carnegie's advice into effect. Certain tid-bits, such as listening to others or offering genuine praise, can definitely be employed by all but others, such as manipulating a situation so that the other person believes your idea is really his or her own, are much harder. We've all met charismatic and charming people who can take advantage of any situation seamlessly. It isn't a learned skill, but rather an innate one. Thus, having read How to Win Friends & Influence People I truly cannot influence people unless I find myself in the same exact situations outlined by Carnegie. Thrown into another one, I fear I'd sink and find myself influenced instead.

Winning friends isn't overly difficult, in my opinion. Much of what Carnegie writes are valuable stepping stones I've picked up over the course of my two years blogging online. I offer genuine praise when I enjoy a blog post, I take the time to read--or "listen"--to what others have to say, I use their name when commenting because it builds that personal connection. Consequently, I don't find this book to be particularly helpful. When it comes to winning friends, I think we all undergo certain trajectories in life where we make genuine friends and others where we don't, but we learn from those experiences to know the advice Carnegie puts into chapters. (I also dislike the phrase "winning" friends...)

So, the first part of this book was useless, the second part--"influence people"--isn't as helpful as it should be and the last part, leadership attributes, are yet again qualities I don't think can be completely taught. Carnegie speaks of traits a good leader possesses, but oftentimes the difficulty doesn't lie in being a good leader but rather in becoming a leader in the first place. Perhaps I am overly critical of this book considering my past experiences with it, but I will not deny that, in the right hands, this book is certainly moving. In today's day and age, with the internet altering our perception of face-to-face interactions, this volume may be even more significant to individuals who cannot cease texting and are hooked onto technology. For others, though, this book is merely repetitive (seriously, so many of the same pieces of advice are repeated in different phrases throughout the novel) and rather dull.