First I have a confession to make - although I would have liked to have read the original 1936 text for the challenge, I left it too late to try and source one, so have actually read an ebook of what I'm fairly sure is a 70s text. In a novel this probably wouldn't matter so much as the text wouldn't have changed. Whereas in my copy the basic 'rules' of winning friends and influencing people are illustrated by a number of examples, none later than the 70s, and yet some which I'm convinced are from the original text because they're actually quite quaint (the quotes leap gleefully all over the place. Confucius and Napoleon and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and President Taft, who I'd never heard of before).
I'd still like to read the original. Still more would I have loved to have attended one of Carnegie's lectures. He is chatty and amusing and I can see how it would be impossible not to be enthusiastic. His rules (he calls them techniques) are in many ways very sensible as well. For example: Don't argue, even if you're right - it pushes the other person to defend their position and you'll never persuade them then - you only have to look at recent twitter spats on serious matters like Brexit or face masks to see the wisdom of this. One side insults the other's intelligence or (vice versa) calls them 'sheeples' and it changes not one single person's opinion but causes huge amounts of bad feeling.
I won't go through all the rules. Some seem common sense, a few seem like hard work (hours of work for little pay off) and some - complimenting people but meaning it sincerely - the kind of thing some people do naturally and others would really struggle with. You can't make yourself feel an emotion you don't have. Fundamentally though all these techniques are based in a belief that everyone is better than you at something, and everyone is entitled to respect, and even if this book didn't always deliver the practical gains to it's hopeful readers that it seemed to be promising, it would make for a nicer business model (and world!) if we all remembered some of this stuff.
Meanwhile, the examples are such fun. Occasionally he'll quote someone and you'll think something like 'you know they executed Socrates, don't you Dale - in purely practical terms he wasn't quite the success you're portraying here?' but that's partly because it is so very entertaining. I enjoyed reading it despite going in not being a fan of self help books, and low-key assuming it would be very cynical and manipulative (Only once did I feel it tipped over into recommending insincerity). I think people must have come out of his lectures feeling he was a pal, and trying to help them.
I also had fun wondering what would happen if two people tried to apply the principle of letting the other do most of the talking at the same time, and it occurred to me that encouraging someone to talk about themselves is probably only effective with the more extroverted person anyway, but I'm guessing big businessmen who place orders (Carnegie was from a sales background, and it seems those were his bread and butter students) probably were pretty extrovert.
It's also very easy to be critical because the things Carnegie was known for - teaching people to speak publicly, teaching people the 'soft' skills of listening and negotiating - are not new things anymore. In it's day it may well have been revolutionary to say to people in business 'avoid arguing, you lose if you lose and you lose if you win, too' or 'people can hear a smile on the phone'.
Of course there is a more sober side to the thing - people wanted these practical skills in the thirties for the simple reason that work was scarce. The foreword to the original 1936 text (printed at the back of my copy) points out that when Carnegie gave his Philadelphia lecture in 1935 20% of people were on welfare. Did people come to the lectures because Carnegie was a great speaker who fired them up or because they were half a decade into the Great Depression and clutching at straws? How helpful was it, when there were so few jobs to be had, to throw the responsibility back on the individual to change?
Anyway this is my last book for the challenge so thanks again to Simon and Karen for hosting these six-monthly clubs with a focus on a particular year. More book reviews from 1936 (and round ups from previous years) can be found on their blogs, and I look forward to another one in six months (see, I'm applying Carnegie's advice already! 😃)
Wow, I had always assumed it was from the 80s! Thanks so much for adding this tot he club.
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