The Open Curriculum

The Self · Level 1

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie · 1936

Thesis

People act on feeling more than logic, and above all on the desire to feel important, so the way to win cooperation is to stop criticizing, arguing and demanding, and instead give sincere appreciation, take a real interest in others and let them arrive at conclusions as if they were their own.

The main ideas

Don't kick over the beehive

Dale Carnegie's book, first published in 1936 and built from the courses in public speaking and human relations he taught to adults, opens with a chapter titled "If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive." Its first principle: don't criticize, condemn or complain.

The mechanism is self-justification. Carnegie's first example is "Two Gun" Crowley, cornered by police in New York in 1931, who wrote during the standoff that under his coat was a weary heart, but a kind one. If a killer sees himself as a victim, Carnegie argues, ordinary people almost never blame themselves for anything. Criticism puts a person on the defensive, wounds their pride and arouses resentment, while the behavior continues.

His historical case is Abraham Lincoln after Gettysburg. When General George Meade failed to attack Lee's trapped army and let it escape across the Potomac, Lincoln wrote him a bitterly critical letter, then never sent it; it was found among his papers after his death. Carnegie also quotes Benjamin Franklin's resolution: "I will speak ill of no man ... and speak all the good I know of everybody."

Implication: before criticizing, assume the other person has reasons that seem good to them. Write the angry letter if you must, then don't send it.

The desire to be important

Carnegie argues that the strongest motive in human nature is the desire to feel important. He cites John Dewey on "the desire to be important" and William James: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

His example is Charles Schwab, whom Andrew Carnegie paid more than a million dollars a year. Schwab attributed his value to his ability to arouse enthusiasm in people, which he did through appreciation and encouragement, never criticism.

The principle is to give honest and sincere appreciation. Carnegie distinguishes it sharply from flattery, which is insincere and selfish, and which people detect. Appreciation comes from noticing the real merits of another person and saying so.

The same insight drives his principle to arouse in the other person an eager want: to talk about what they want rather than what you want, because that is the only thing that moves them.

Implication: when you want someone's cooperation, start with what you genuinely value in their work, and frame the request in terms of what they want.

Interest in others

Part Two gives six ways to make people like you. The first is to become genuinely interested in other people. Carnegie argues that people are interested above all in themselves, so interest in them wins more goodwill than efforts to impress them.

His clearest case is a dinner at which he met a botanist and listened for hours as the man talked about plants, indoor gardens and the potato, saying almost nothing himself. At the end of the evening, the botanist told their host that Carnegie was "a most interesting conversationalist." The lesson is to be a good listener and to encourage others to talk about themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt, Carnegie reports, prepared for any visitor by staying up the night before reading about the subject the guest cared about most, so he could talk in terms of the other person's interests.

Names receive a principle of their own: a person's name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Andrew Carnegie, as a boy, got friends to feed a litter of rabbits by promising to name the rabbits after them, and later named a steel works after the president of a railroad he wanted as a customer. Jim Farley, who helped elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, claimed to know 50,000 people by their first names.

Implication: in any meeting, aim to learn about the other person rather than to impress them, and remember and use their name.

You can't win an argument

Part Three, on winning people to your way of thinking, begins with a story against Carnegie himself. At a banquet in London, a man attributed the line "There's a divinity that shapes our ends" to the Bible. Carnegie knew it was from Shakespeare and said so. His friend Frank Gammond, a Shakespeare scholar seated nearby, sided with the man. Afterward, Gammond confirmed the line was from Hamlet and asked Carnegie why he needed to prove a man wrong at a festive occasion.

Carnegie's conclusion is that the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. If you lose, you lose; if you win, the other person feels humiliated, resents your triumph and keeps the same opinion.

The related principles follow: show respect for the other person's opinions and never tell them they are wrong; if you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Franklin, Carnegie notes, trained himself out of contradicting people by dropping words like "certainly" and "undoubtedly" for phrases such as "I conceive" or "I apprehend," which left others room to agree.

Implication: when you disagree, ask yourself whether winning the point is worth the relationship. Where it matters, state your view tentatively and leave the other person a way to change their mind without losing face.

The way to agreement

Persuasion, in Carnegie's account, is a sequence. Begin in a friendly way. Get the other person saying yes immediately, a method he traces to Socrates, who asked questions his opponents had to agree with until they accepted a conclusion they would have rejected at the start. Let the other person do most of the talking. Let them feel the idea is theirs.

The mechanism, as Carnegie describes it, is commitment. Once a person has said no, pride requires them to defend it; each early yes makes the next easier. People also defend ideas they believe they reached themselves far more willingly than ideas pressed on them.

His final principle in this part is to throw down a challenge. Schwab, managing a mill whose workers were missing their output targets, asked the day shift how many heats they had made, chalked a large "6" on the floor and left. The night shift saw it, rubbed it out and wrote "7"; the next morning the day shift wrote "10." The mill soon led the plant.

Implication: build a case through questions the other person can agree with, and let competition or challenge do the work that orders cannot.

Changing people without resentment

Part Four applies the same logic to correction. Begin with praise and honest appreciation. Call attention to mistakes indirectly. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing someone else's. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. Let the other person save face.

Carnegie's principle for encouraging improvement is to praise the slightest improvement and every improvement, and to give the person a fine reputation to live up to. People tend to match the expectations held of them, so describing someone as already having the quality you want them to develop gives them a reason to live up to it. Make the fault seem easy to correct, he adds, and make the other person happy to do what you suggest.

The mechanism, consistent through the book, is that people resist direct pressure that threatens their sense of importance and cooperate with requests that respect it.

Implication: when correcting someone, start with what is going well, frame the problem as easy to fix and attribute to them the standard you hope they will meet.

Limits

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