How to Win Friends and Influence People
Available for the first time ever in trade paperback, Dale Carnegie's enduring classic, the inspirational personal development guide that shows how to achieve lifelong success. One of the top-selling books of all time, "How to Win Friends & Influence People" has sold more than 15 million copies in all its editions.
Stats for nerds
579recommend
1,071mentions
853people
2007–2026years
69% recommend26% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's used in "How to win friends and influence people" if I recall correctly. A great book that everyone should read, just a shame about the title.
I've been meaning to reread it for a while.
- One thing which has helped me is to genuinely wish good for others for the sake of it and helping them out in that.
Note: I worry if I am virtue-signalling or larping here because there are immense flaws and inconsistencies within me. I sometimes feel like there are just these thoughts that come in me but acting on them (consistently) is hard. Not too much time has passed for me to comment if it has become part of my identity or not but commenting it can help solidify it further and help others get to know me (which feels my need to be understood) or more importantly, perhaps can help a single person out there.
When otherwise I would think of competition and stop, I now DO try to speak the thing out loud which can help the other person. We all have our biases and if I as a person can help see the other bias and try to help them provided I try to not cross boundary or be pushy but just for the sake of helping. Then yeah, it is good.
Paraphrasing my brother here: "You can genuinely change people's (friends) lives within college. It's genuinely so powerful"
Also, I see many spirits of kindness from people of all walks of life and the world has been aside from a few occassions still a kind place to me in terms of giving me chances. It's cruel and kind at the same time but it's my world and I can try to make it a little better for my friends.
In that sense, "The world is a generous place", as Minhyong Kim said[0]
I sincerely believe that "How to measure your life" is a great book which has a piece of logical advice which did change my interpretation of it (so much so that I wrote the entire page and pasted it on my front desk). I highly recommend reading that book [Along with How to win friends and influence people and Deep work, I wish to read em all and moreso act on them now]
Here's what the page said:
I genuinely believe that relationships with family and friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple but like any important investment, these relationships need constant attention and care (...)
You'll be tempted to invest your resources elsewhere but if you don't nurture these relationships, they won't be there to support you in hardships or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.
My interpretation: Balance is necessary and understand the important of family and friends as the society around us is underweighing the genuine importance of it and as the culture around it is focused on not paying importance to it (and rewarding that behaviour).
Appreciate your family and friends and don't take for granted.
Take an Action (Knowledge means fundamentally nothing if you don't act on it): Try to do something which can show the appreciation that you have for friends and family and show it within words and tell it to them.
If it can help you take some action, I have messaged two of my brothers while writing this comment appreciating them.
- Firstly, take everything that I say with a grain of salt. I can only reply on to the things that you've told here and give advice from it but I don't know the full situation. Read the advice and apply it as you wish.
> I have been staying up late, sleeping in, skipping chores, neglecting my relationships, eating too much food, neglecting hygiene, and generally just being a bum.
Happens with me. Something which helps me is figuring out why I sleep late. For me, it was a constant cycle of trying to do something today's night to cope up with waking up late or not doing something today.
Realize that productivity = hours put in * focus. I found myself constantly procastinating (hours go down) and when doing tasks (with less focus)
And if you continue this cycle, then the cycle continues. Over a long term, it is better for you to sleep today no matter how the day went early and then wake up early. It has been scientifically shown to improve your mental health and even from the logical standpoint of productivity, it will be better to sleep early today than not.
Your time is constant, when you sleep late you are borrowing time from tomorrow's productivity and this borrowing cycle will continue and you will feel as if you are short on time but you have ample amount of time provided you break the cycle.
Don't Neglect your relationships: Here's a comment[0] that I recently wrote about it. TLDR: try to appreciate them back and don't take them for granted. Appreciate them a lot.
There is some logic that I have found in that struggle is finite and constant and you can either take it in small doses today rather than an instant hit later. This also applies to doing chores
Regarding cleanliness: My room is a mess but the logic which can help is that I have found myself losing so so many time because I lost my keys or just lost something and then it has an insane amount of stress/time loss and struggle. I had forgotten (twice) that I had already taken my clothes back from laundry because of how messy my room is and I had to manually count all clothes I have (twice).
The amount of struggle in keeping your room clean is better than keeping it not clean.
Also, even speaking out of logical arguments, right now if I understand you, you want to be the guy who does keep his room clean, who does sleep early and who does appreciate relationships. You don't want the immediate benefits of it as much as you want it to help be part of your identity and boost its self-confidence. You want to be the guy as you want to do something, anything.
> My main reason has been that I am afraid of interviewing and that my skills are not up to par.
Happens with me as well but again the struggle is constant if not larger. You can either do interviews right now and fail them (which is okay, literally everyone fails) and failure teaches more than success. You learn from it, you improve and your fear can be taken less. Fear is because of the fact that you aren't approaching it, not that you aren't approaching it because of fear. In some sense, its a chicken and egg problem and the only way to break out of it is to not give the fear enough importance to make you change decisions but rather act on it and pass through its struggle and win through it. Do the interviews right now,don't postpone/procastinate it. Try to give as much as possible and not expect anything in return. because if so, then what is it to fear? Worst case: you don't get the job, best case: you do.
Well if you don't interview, its already the worst case plus you are giving fear its weight.
If you notice, I am saying the same thing over and over again applying more weight to it each time but I think that this overarching philosophy does help me sometimes to be more comfortable with struggling to then be a better person because I want to be a better person and I am gonna struggle. Might as well struggle (less) and then be a person I am proud of being.
Once again, I doubt that the thing stopping you is knowledge. I have tried to give knowledge but in today's world, it's not because you lack some knowledge that is causing you this but rather the lack of actions. One action can speak more and form your identity better than reading books and speaking all you want.
Your brain asks you: Talk is cheap, show me the actions. Actions start small and slowly and with some initial intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. Words can help you motivate for sometime but it won't be lasting unless you decide it upon your identity itself.
Books which can help you: Atomic Habits, How to win friends and influence people, How to measure your life, Deep work.
Hope this helps and I understand the situation that you are going through and I genuinely want you to know that you can change this very instant, and so with that in mind, have a nice day :-D
- How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Sounds corny, but the advice is timeless and eye opening if you don't have natural knack for dealing with people. It will save you a lot of frustration. I didn't read it until 30 and I wish I had read it at 16.
- This is one of the core principles of How To Win Friends And Influence People (Dale Carnegie). Since Ive read I tried to apply this rule. It works.
- It is wild to me that people consider Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins in the same boat. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie completely changed how I communicate with people, for the better.
For nerds (like me) who think data and statistics are the way to persuade people, you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring the truth. Lots of people think sales are icky, but much of life is influenced by your ability to persuade and sell, even yourself, to others.
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