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

At the end of the Great Depression, Dale Carnegie wrote one of the benchmark self-help books of American literary history. He encapsulated the formula to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” in the midst of a market downturn, to put it mildly. His title, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was probably used to win and influence book sales rather than cleverly and accurately describe the content of his book. Simply, it is a misnomer. With chapters on considerate social intercourse and sincerely understanding the opponent’s point of view, he is a herald of the golden rule. But Carnegie gives you a 10 step program to follow (the Ten Commandments must have been too vague).

I guess the whole idea is that when you are agreeable, intellectual, considerate, proper, quick, thoughtful and strong, people will go out of their way to be nice to you and do you favors. That social axiom is my particular beef with self-help books in general. But of all self-help authors, Carnegie outlines it fairly and motivationally. He must have been a courageously dynamic speaker—he sold his seminars for a thousand a pop, back then! But with uninterrupted sales since the late 30s and over 15 million copies sold worldwide, Carnegie’s book is well worth the read…or the skim.