Tough Love and Dale Carnegie

This is neither a regular review nor an essay, just a random collection of thoughts I had since reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

I'm writing this mainly for myself, I wonder if writing about what I read will help consolidate memories, and, in a more general sense, help the content have a more lasting impact on me?

Also, being French, it's a bit harder for me to articulate my thoughts in English when not talking about technical subjects, so I should be honest here: Claude sometimes helped me reformulate sentences and gave feedback on flow.

To understand how I perceived this book at first: I consider myself a somehow broken person. Not going into details here, but I had to live through difficult situations, and so did most of the people I clicked with.

It's really hard to assess whether I naturally find myself befriending other broken persons, or if statistically most people at some point have to go through complicated events. Maybe I only have this bias since only my friends would talk to me about these?

I still think that what most of the friends I'm thinking of as examples went through is really not considered "normal".

There is something quite weird: even though I can rationalize that what we went through is not normal, that we were the weird ones, that our way of talking about stuff was uncommon... the "normal" way of communicating still felt off.

Like, tough love was the default mode of communication.

I've been tuning down lately, but from 15 to 25, being "nice" would always feel fake, and the guys I surrounded myself with were of the same vibe. Life is somehow supposed to be violent and sad, and trying to express some form of joyful optimism would just feel naive and stupid.

All that to say, I think that the person I was 5 years ago would have dismissed this book as "stupid" after skimming through a bunch of random pages.

The more I go through life, the more I consider that it's not about the information but about how you're receiving it. It's about whether you are ready to ponder what you read. Would you do it because it seems logical, according to your current intellectual framework? Because there's some form of authority - whether by the sheer number of people considering these writings good, or a smaller, specific category of people who can acknowledge that this content is worth reading?

What IS this book? For those who didn't read it: Each chapter is a collection of little stories by Dale Carnegie himself, or his direct contacts, or related historical events... all pointing towards the moral of the chapter.

Here is the list of chapters, which should give you a good idea of what the book contains:

  Part 1: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People
  1. Don't criticize, condemn, or complain
  2. Give honest and sincere appreciation
  3. Arouse in the other person an eager want

  Part 2: Six Ways to Make People Like You
  4. Become genuinely interested in other people
  5. Smile
  6. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound
  7. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
  8. Talk in terms of the other person's interests
  9. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely

  Part 3: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking
  10. Avoid arguments
  11. Show respect for the other person's opinions
  12. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically
  13. Begin in a friendly way
  14. Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately
  15. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking
  16. Let the other person feel the idea is theirs
  17. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view
  18. Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires
  19. Appeal to nobler motives
  20. Dramatize your ideas
  21. Throw down a challenge

  Part 4: Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense
  22. Begin with praise and honest appreciation
  23. Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly
  24. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person
  25. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
  26. Let the other person save face
  27. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement
  28. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to
  29. Use encouragement
  30. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest

This is a good list. But we have no way to know if Dale Carnegie, the salesman, didn't describe any of his encounters to his advantage, or even if he didn't make up some of these stories. In all honesty, you could say the same about Freud, but does it dismiss the whole field he created?

The best description that now comes to my mind is "positivity bombing". Like love bombing, the sheer volume is meant to overflow your defense mechanisms. But unlike love bombing, when it wears off you're not left confused and bitter—you might actually find yourself reconsidering his point. The vast amount of anecdotes is there to force you to consider the final point. To force you, through every little story, to consider if there couldn't be some similarity with some encounter you had in your own life.

I think that worked with me, because I decided that it had to work. I decided to give this book a chance as I finally acknowledged that the mental state I'm in is not supposed to be normal (not that I want to change that much), and that I should actually work against that aversion to positivity that I took pride in defining myself with. I also acknowledged that I probably missed many opportunities from 20 to 25 by not being a "nice" person, even if I did show concern for other people through my actual actions.

Once again, it's not about the content of the book, it's about how and when you're receiving it.

If you just want a specific example of how I would reflect about all that: Chapter 5, smile. Well, it just struck me, but most of the guys I feel the closest to don't smile much, and I usually don't smile around them. I somehow always understood implicitly that I had to smile with other people, but it's not the same as reading Dale Carnegie rambling for a whole chapter about the value of a real, warm smile.

There's also something I started pondering years ago when reading any book that managed to go through the excellent filter that time is: how relatable it would feel. While the world is changing, human nature is still nearly what it was hundreds (or even thousands) of years ago. I'm sure you could post some of these 100-year-old stories on LinkedIn, just rephrasing the first and last sentence to match the current LLM era impact-writing style, and it would work. The only thing going for Carnegie is that he wrote a whole book with somehow good intentions?

Another thing that seems interesting is how different people get such a different takeaway from this book: for some, this is about faking it, and for some, this is about building a genuine interest in people. I consider some of the phrasing that Carnegie picked to be a good indication that he intends it as some form of method acting. The way someone interprets all this advice is a good indication of how they view their interactions with other people.

I decided to write and commit this as I reflected on this book months after I finished it. The effect did wear off, and I wonder if I should put a system in place to re-read the books I consider worth tainting my mind with?

Personally I'm walking out of this with the idea that success through being "nice" is actually something timeless, and that I shouldn't have dismissed this kind of advice earlier in my life. Rationalizing the behavior of a very marginal group (that actually did show some form of care for each other) as being more real and honest than what the average person usually internalizes before becoming a functioning adult was probably a mistake.

If you're a decent person but can still seem inconsiderate sometimes, I think this is a decent read—do as you see fit!