WINNING FRIENDS AND INFLUENCING PEOPLE

LESSONS FROM THE GREAT DALE CARNEGIE

Im excited to be bringing this episode to all of you as this person, the book we’ll be talking about, but more importantly, the principles we’re going over in this one have had a special place, not just in my life, but in the lives of millions of people around the world since 1934. This book has sold over 35 million copies since it came out; It’s been translated into almost every language on the planet; and it’s had an unbelievable impact on business and personal growth for millions and millions of people on the planet. The book and author we’re talking about today is How To Win Friends and Influence People by the great Dale Carnegie. 

Dale Carnegie is one of the most well-known and well-respected business teachers and authors, and his book, How To Win Friends and Influence People is one of the big reasons for that notoriety. I can remember being a young kid in the house I grew up in and being introduced to this book. The way I was introduced to it was the way most kids are introduced to most things, and that’s out of sheer curiosity and messing around with stuff. My father is an avid reader and student of many things, so we had a floor to ceiling bookcase in our basement that my dad built by hand. It had hundreds of very interesting books covering a wide variety of topics ranging from Eastern philosophy to the stock market to martial arts to the occult. What was also mixed into that eclectic collection was a shelf filled with motivational and inspirational books by a variety of authors and one of those books was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I can still remember actually pulling it off the shelf for the first time. It was a hard cover book with a royal blue jacket cover with gold letters and a picture of Dale Carnegie on the cover. 

I also remember fairly clearly thinking, ‘this is kind of a strange title for a book!’ How to win friends and influence people? In fact, even today I think it’s a strange title for a book, but it’s become something of a household name and, since it contains so much value, there was no need to change it, I guess. I pulled it off of the shelf and opened it up to what would become a lifelong journey of personal development that continues to this day. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the credit for my passion for reading, for knowledge and information, and for continuous growth goes to my father for having that handmade bookshelf with so many interesting books. That’s a little hint, by the way, for all the parents who might be listening. I know most things are digital now, but children are naturally curious and have a penchant for getting into things. Help them get into interesting topics and rabbit holes based on the interesting stuff on your own bookshelves. Maybe it’s just the way I’m wired, or maybe I’m wired this way because of my father’s bookshelf, but even today, Barnes and Noble is one of my favorite places because of all the shelves of knowledge, wisdom, and information. 

So, let’s get into the key points of How to Win Friends and Influence People and the big takeaways for me. The way the book is laid out is in 4 parts: fundamental techniques for handling people, ways to make people like you, how to win people over to your way of thinking, and being a leader. In essence, the whole book is about human interactions, how to communicate with other human beings in the most effective manner, and how to not turn people off so that you never have the opportunity to have a positive influence with them, or to be influenced by them. I’ve condensed the whole book into 10 points in this episode, even though the actual book has more points than that. Some of the themes and points are a bit repetitive, in my opinion, but the stories for each section are different so that you get a new perspective from each story and anecdote. 

The first suggestion for winning friends and influencing people is to never criticize, condemn, or complain. Essentially, Carnegie explains that there is nothing to be gained by criticizing another person, especially in front of others. Criticism doesn’t yield anything positive and, in fact, is almost always met with resentment by the person being criticized. What it does is it makes people dig in their heels and feel like they have to defend themselves from the criticism, from the embarrassment if its public criticism, and does nothing to win you any friends or any influence with those listening to the criticism. What Dale Carnegie recommends instead of criticism is to think about your own flaws and mistakes, admit those first, conjure up some compassion for the other person, and ask yourself what you might have been like at their age, their level of experience, or if you were in their shoes. 

Would you want to be criticized? Have you been criticized before? Of course you have and it doesn’t feel good. For all the tough guys and gals out there who say that criticism has helped make them tougher and develop a thicker skin to deal with the ups and downs of life, to that I will simply say that it may, in fact, be the case that learning to take your lumps in life may have made you a stronger person, just as living through Hell Week as a Navy Seal makes you a stronger and more likely to be able to handle tough situations. However, the point of the book and Carnegie’s teachings on this subject are about winning friends and developing influence with other human beings. The difference between normal human beings like you and I and Navy Seals is that the Navy Seals all volunteer to be yelled at and criticized. Most people do not line up to be criticized by another person. Its degrading and typically unwelcomed and, to the point of the book, rarely wins you friends and influence. What it does do is win you enemies, detractors, and people who will go out of their way to avoid interactions with you. 

The next suggestion from Carnegie is to give honest and sincere appreciation. The great philosopher and psychologist, William James, said that “the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated”. If you want to win friends and influence people, you have to learn to give other people what they want. In fact, it’s really the only way to motivate people to do anything in life. To get somebody to do something, we typically have to give them something they want whether that’s money, appreciation, recognition, love, praise, candy, or advice. Whether you are cognizant of this fact or not, most people spend most of their waking hours thinking about themselves. Not necessarily in a narcissistic way, but from the standpoint of thinking about what they have to do today, what meetings are ahead, what results they’re going to get from their actions, what bills they have to pay, what activities they’re going to do later, maybe this weekend, who they’re going to do it with, etcetera. 

You don’t even have to think deeply about it to realize that all of those things, although they may contain a component outside of themselves, they also all contain a ‘me’, an ‘I’, and a selfish aspect because all of the things we generally think about involve ourselves. We’re thinking about how things will affect us. What impact will ‘I’ have? What jerks will ‘I’ have to deal with? What am ‘I’ going to do this weekend? This, by the way, is human nature. It’s impossible to not think, and its next to impossible to contemplate existence without the ‘I’ or ‘me’ aspect because we are the ones generating the thought. You are the only thinker in your personal world. All of your thoughts are coming from inside of you. 

So, now that we know most people spend most of their waking hours subconsciously thinking about themselves, the next most important thing to know is that almost everyone has a longing to be and feel important. Knowing that almost everyone has this longing within gives everyone outside of ourselves great power over us in both a potentially positive or negative way. Criticism makes us feel small and unimportant where honest and sincere appreciation makes us feel wanted, needed, and important. You have the power to completely change a person’s beliefs and perspective about themselves with just a few sincere and uplifting words. In the same vein, we also have the power to tear somebody down and make them feel small and unloved. When it comes to winning friends and influencing other people, choose honest, and sincere appreciation, praise, and kind words over unkind ones. 

This leads to the next suggestion, which is to give people what they want, not what you want. How do we know what other people want? Usually by listening with sincerity and making it all about them, not you. In my opinion, this is one of the most important lessons I believe I’ve learned from Dale Carnegie and others. Human beings spend an inordinate amount of their life energy trying to get things they want. One of the easiest ways to get what we want is to first give others what they want. A famous quote from Carnegie on this topic is, “The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So, the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.” 

One of the most important skills one can develop, in my opinion, is the skill of truly listening. We’ve talked many times before on this show about how most people listen for their opportunity to respond, rebut, refute, argue, or talk about themselves as if the conversation was a competition. When it comes to winning friends and influencing other human beings in a positive way, the quickest path is through honest listening and sincere questions. In essence, when you’re talking with someone, do your best to make them feel like the most important and most interesting person in the room. Ask questions and then shut up; just listen for the answers they give which will contain the information you need to ask a follow up question. Get people talking, especially about themselves, and they feel important. 

I did an episode of this show on the great book by Stephen Covey called, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which has some very similar suggestions and ideas for developing your influence with others. One of those suggestions is to ‘seek first to understand before trying to be understood’. Seek first to make the other person feel important and heard before trying to be important and heard by the other person. Give people what they want first before ever asking for what you want, and most people just want to feel important and to be heard. This suggestion does not mean give people everything they ask for or desire in life. It says to give others what they want, not what you want. Its referring to this important part about giving others their deep-seated desire to be important and heard. Theodore Roosevelt said, “the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most”. We should always make an effort to talk in terms of the other person’s interests instead of our own.

This one is also closely tied to the point about criticism and a problem we see all around us today, disagreements and arguments and how best to deal with them. The rule of thumb for ratio of speaking to listening is 25/75. That means 75% of our time spent with other people should be listening, with only 25% of the time spent talking ourselves. Some of the 25% should be spent asking them more questions to get them talking about their interests, needs, and wants even more. What we see in spades today, thanks primarily to social media and an increasingly polarized population, is never-ending arguments and disagreements over silly stuff that go nowhere. We see it in the appraisal industry daily on social forums where people break every rule in Dale Carnegie’s teachings in order to have a momentary feeling of superiority over another human being. We see people criticizing each other, not listening, not respecting another’s opinions, talking over others, and seeking only their own desire to feel important while completely disregarding the other person’s same desire to feel important. 

Carnegie has some advice for this as well, which is that the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. If you do find yourself in a disagreement, the advice is pretty simple: first, welcome the disagreement. When you’re open to other people having an opinion, you relieve yourself of the need to instinctively have to defend your position right out of the gate. Carnegie tells us to ‘distrust our first instinctive impression’. What he means by that is to recognize that our first instinct is typically to defend, to fight, to make the other person feel as attacked as we feel in that moment, and to be right over being heard. Sometimes in life its more favorable to distrust our self-defense instincts in this regard. Welcome the disagreement, control your temper, and listen to the other person sincerely. What are you listening for? You’re listening for areas of agreement. While most people focus on the parts they disagree with, it’s very rare to disagree with every single thing a person is saying. 

Instead of arguing over the areas of disagreement, find the areas of agreement and give them honest appreciation for those. If you find yourself in a discussion that requires some decisions or some thought, postpone taking action in the moment. Most of us have moments we regret where we acted on our first instinct and did or said something out of our disagreement and the emotions that arise from that. Its best in those moments to postpone taking any action and to tell the other person that you appreciate that two people can hold differing positions on topics and still learn something. Tell the other person that you will think over their ideas and positions on the topic and get back with them. My recommendation from there is to actually give their ideas some thought. I’ve had my mind changed many times over the years and that only happened by being open, by truly listening, and by asking questions. When you seek first to understand before being understood, you remain open to learning and growing. You also inadvertently acknowledge the other person as a human being worthy of your respect. When you honor another person’s right to have an opinion you may not share, you’re showing them a form of sincere appreciation. 

The last part of Carnegie’s teaching on disagreements is to always let the other person save face. Like criticism, when you make a person feel small and stupid for having an opinion, they lose face, which means you’ve just taken one of the most important and primal emotions for human beings, which is the desire to be wanted and needed. When somebody loses face, which is when they are publicly humiliated and have lost the respect of others, not only do they feel shame and embarrassment, but they likely also feel intense anger and resentment. There will be no opportunity for influence or friendship there. 

The final takeaways from Dale Carnegie on this topic, although separate chapters in the book, all tie together in my mind. There are 3 final ideas and they are; let people feel like the ideas are their own, appeal to their nobler motives, and give people a lofty reputation to live up to. When talking and connecting with people, always do your best to use questions and sincere interest in the other person to help them arrive at wherever you’d like to arrive in the conversation with them feeling like any new ideas are their own, even if you had already come up with the same ideas. To give some context as to how this might work I’ll use an analogy involving drawing or sketching. 

Imagine you’re sitting at a restaurant with a business partner and you’re trying to sell them on an idea. To make your point more clear you draw out a sketch of the thing or idea you’re trying to convey. When you’re finished with the sketch, you push it across the table and ask if they agree with it. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Maybe they agree with parts of it and disagree with other parts. However, what if, instead, you started the sketch but then left it half completed or three quarters unfinished. Then, instead of laying everything out, you ask the person what they think should be added to the sketch. Ask them how they see things working and fitting together. You might find, in the end, they draw the same sketch you would’ve drawn, with maybe some slight variances, but coming to the same conclusion except, with the second method, they drew most of the sketch so it’s their idea. Now they own the process because it was their idea. You’ve accomplished what you wanted by getting ownership and buy in from the other person. 

The second to last one, appealing to their nobler motives, essentially comes from the belief that we all have two reasons in our heads about why we do something. We have the reason that sounds good, and then we have the real reason. When talking with people, especially when we’re trying to convince somebody of something or maybe have them arrive at the conclusions we’ve already arrived at, it’s helpful to think of some of the traits you believe the person likes embody and project to the world. For example, most people like to think of themselves as responsible, fair, generous, caring, and intelligent. Whatever those noble traits are, work some of them into the conversation, especially when trying to get people to take some action you believe they should be taking. 

I’ll share a couple examples of how I use this one in daily life, keeping in mind that it doesn’t always work the way we’d like it to. The first example is from my past life running a large martial arts and leadership school. Every now and then, after somebody would decide to cancel their membership for whatever reason, they would stop in and phone us asking for a refund for the months they hadn’t attended any classes. We had a pretty straightforward policy that we needed 30 days to cancel someone’s membership and billing because we used an outside payment service to manage all the memberships. We always had the ability to give refunds when warranted, but I had a real issue with people asking for money back simply because they didn’t show up to class. 

We made it very clear from the beginning of every relationship that our job was to make sure the school was open, that there were good teachers running the classes, and that the bathrooms worked as they should. It was their job to get themselves to the school and get some value for their investment. We never failed on our side of things so, when somebody would ask for a multi month refund because they didn’t show up for class, I would simply try to appeal to their nobler motives. I would say, “Mr. Jones, I can appreciate that you feel you paid for something you didn’t get any value from and that that entitles you to a refund for the unused days of your membership. From our time together, I know you to be a hardworking, responsible, and honorable gentleman. If you truly feel that we didn’t live up to what we promised you when you first joined, I’ll happily refund you what you’re asking for.” I would finish the sentence with the phrase, “I’ll leave it completely up to you to choose whatever you feel is right.”

I can tell you that we did, in fact, give a few refunds over a 20-year period, with the overwhelming majority ultimately realizing that it was their responsibility to show up if they wanted to get value. The second way I use this concept is in coaching people every day. When I’m using this concept as a coach, I’m doing it to activate what is called the ‘Pygmalion Effect’, which is the psychological phenomenon that high expectations lead to bigger results and better performance. However, the Pygmalion Effect isn’t referring to the high expectations from within oneself, it’s referring to the high expectations of those around us and those we respect. If our teammates, our authority figures, our colleagues, and those we look up to have high expectations of us, we tend to reach for higher levels based on their belief in our ability to achieve. This, by the way, even if we don’t believe in ourselves. 

So, with coaching, I know for a fact that almost everyone I’m working with can achieve more than they have in the past, I always speak in a way that seeks to activate those nobler motives and beliefs within the persons. I say things like, “look, you’re a very intelligent person, people like you, you’re a good communicator, we need to show the world a little more of what you’re capable of.”  I know when I say things like that, and it’s always the truth, that it might just be the first time that person has ever heard those words from another person. Having somebody else believe in us and appeal to what we’d like to think ourselves to be is very powerful. Appeal to their nobler motives. 

The final part of this trio, which is very closely tied to the last one, is give other people a lofty reputation to live up to. This is as simple as saying to somebody, “I’ve heard some really great things about you! You’ve helped a lot of people and I’m excited to work with you!” When you compliment people in a way that lets them know they have a good reputation to live up to, they’ll almost always bend over backwards trying to live up to that. 

In closing this episode, I will say that one thing I’ve learned over the years of practicing Dale Carnegies’ teachings is that you don’t want everyone as a friend, and you don’t necessarily want to influence everyone. You want a very close, tight, and loyal group of friends you trust implicitly to hold you accountable and lift you up, and you want to influence the right people. The better you get at discerning the difference between those you want to be in the company of and those you don’t, the more valuable the time spent and invested. And, as you all know, time is our most valuable resource and currency, invest it wisely my friends.

Until next week, I’m out…