How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that hasn't just been in print for my entire life, and, while we're at it, all of my parents' lives, has made its author a familiar name, even through the decades following his death. His book is, of course, a classic in self-help – but more that that, it's worth discussing for its importance in American culture and the history of happiness. So this isn't a review of the book. This book helped set the terms we use to talk about happiness with. No stars assigned, just because the ways I'd evaluate it would have been shaped in part by the book itself.
Instead, I'll give an overview of the book, what it does and how it works. Then, I'll explain how it fits into the history of ideas about the good life during the 20th century, as people slowly learned to see one another as useful to one another in a different way.
A Little History
How to Win Friends appeared in 1936, as a result of a problem Carnegie discovered in teaching a class on salesmanship. He discovered that many of his students hit a wall.
It's a rare book from the middle of the last century holds up today, but this one is worth a read both for the advice it contains, the voice it projects, and what it tells us about the history of ideas of a self that can be helped in the US.
No matter how persuasive a salesman could be in promoting his products (we're talking about the 30's here – his students were mostly men), unless he had good social skills, he wouldn't be able to close many deals.
The result was a book aimed at teaching people exactly what the title suggests: getting people to like you enough to buy your wares, or hire you, or work harder for you, or agree with your arguments.
There are two theories of happiness in this book. One, explicitly laid out, describes what other people want. The other only gets hinted at around the edges, but it's just as important. It's about what the buyer of the book wants.
What do other people want? Basically, Carnegie tells us, they want respect. They want to be listened to. They want to be recognized as important. They want their contributions to be meaningful to other people.
And that's not unreasonable. And yet, Carnegie points out again and again, people often don't recognize those desires in others. Or, perhaps, they don't know how to honor them.
The bulk of How to Win Friends consists of examples that support a number of simple, humane points that Carnegie summaries and re-summaries periodically throughout the book: "Begin with praise and honest appreciation." "Use encouragement." "Encourage others to talk about themselves."
The Softer Side of Happiness
How to Win Friends is recognizing something that may seem obvious today, but that strikes a different note from many of the self-help books that were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He's pointing out that, on the inside, people are vulnerable, often weak, and needing reassurance. There's even something of a glorification of foibles and frailties in the recognition that everyone has them. (Maslow will codify these as needs later on in the century.) How to Win Friends suggests a bit of a celebration of this aspect of humanness.
First, it encourages people to make use of one another's frailties by playing to their egos and listening to their problems. (Carnegie is not encouraging the reader to recognize her own, of course – but he's also trying to appeal to the reader's sense of self. More on that in a moment.)
More than that, his language often valorizes and glamorizes insecurities. He never mocks them. The characters in his book - mostly real people - invariably come across as sympathetic. They are kind, they are well-intentioned, they learn their lessons and become better people.
He recognizes the soft, gooey insides that people have, and the message he sends is that it's OK. "'This is a dreamhouse,' [the neglected old woman] said in a voice vibrating with tender memories. 'This house was built with love…." (p. 99)
To be clear, Carnegie is not recommending faking sympathy. People will see through you if you're insincere, he explains. At the same time, he offers no therapy to teach you how to be more empathic. I may have missed it, but I don't recall seeing the word "empathy" in the book, and the word "sympathy" only once. Carnegie lays out instructions on how to behave, not about what to feel.
The Business Side of Happiness
And this brings us to the second theory of happiness: the one aimed at the reader herself. Instead of recommending people get in touch with their own soft insides, he lays out techniques for success as businesspeople. This makes sense; before he wrote this book on social skills, he taught classes on professional skills. How to Win Friends is focused on winning over co-workers, clients, employees, and, occasionally, bosses, more than people who are already friends. Making the reader happy, then, has nothing to do with their insecurities and sensitivities, and everything to do with succeeding in business. Other people are economic units to be brought in line with the reader's own professional goals.
So we end up with a split vision of human existence: one soft inner part, one part economic. To harness their economic power, Carnegie teaches us, you must access the inner selves of others.
That's quite a bit different from the earlier style of self-help books.
A Little Self-Help History
The first self-help book was Samuel Smiles's intuitively-titled Self-Help, published in 1859, a slow, dull slog through a swamp pf inspirational stories. He was trying to teach people that they could find success by utilizing their innate virtues: patience, kindness, intelligence, the ability to work hard – all illustrated with excessively long portraits of the lives of famous men. There's no direct advice in the book. You'll find no techniques like the ones that Carnegie builds each chapter around. Instead, Smiles tells people to find the good traits that live within them already.
Smiles seems to be tapping in to the idea that virtue will bring you rewards from the universe. This notion is a new version of an Enlightenment idea. God wants us all to act rightly, and nature will reward those who behave themselves. So reading inspirational success stories should be enough to get you moving toward success, and not be an incredibly boring experience.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, self-help books evolved from emphasizing character to a focus on personality. The universe won't reward you, these books suggest, but if you charm and disarm them, other people might. By the 1920's, character was, apparently, no longer the grandest thing in the world, and books like Masterful Personality by Orson Swett Marden focused on how to impress people. He begins with this:
When we go near some people who are very magnetic. We positively feel their impelling presence before we get near enough to touch them.
(This book is a direct precursor of The Secret, by the way, which was really never much of a secret. But that's another story.)
Instead of God rewarding virtue, your peers will reward your personality. This book is very much about impressing people as a means to material success.
What How to Win Friends adds to the conversation is a little pinch of modesty. It's not about you, dear reader, Carnegie says, it's about your future friends.
Carnegie and the Next Step
So Carnegie marks the next stage of this evolution in self-help, still using the old anecdotal model to produce something thoroughly readable, still assuming a definition of "success" that focuses around careers.
In later decades, self-help authors will focus more on what Carnegie seems to consider the gooey human center, advising people toward self-actualization. Instead, How to Win Friends focuses mostly on the economic goals of his readers.
It connects to its audience by talking to them in a folksy, conversational style. This is what you might expect from someone who started out as a professional public speaker. It's easy to get a sense of his voice, and the time he came from. (The old lady mentioned earlier mentions the fact that young people these days spend their time "off gadding about in their automobiles.")
In the End
The book was updated by Carnegie's family in 1981 to eliminate outdated and obscure references, although they kept the original's 30's style. I found it a little jarring to be hearing Carnegie's clear, friendly, old-fashioned voice, and suddenly realize that he's talking about someone like Stevie Wonder – and feel as though a ventriloquist has suddenly taken over the conversation. Really, this is my only reservation, and one I can't lay at Dale Carnegie's feet.
How to Win Friends and Influence People plays a big role in the history of self-help, and its position is well earned. It's a rare book from the middle of the last century holds up today, but this one is worth a read both for the advice it contains, the voice it projects, and what it tells us about the history of ideas of a self that can be helped in the US. Definitely worth a read.