198: How to Win Friends and Influence People
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"How to Win Friends and Influence People." First published in 1936. You know, and you read this thing, you can see why it is number one. Dale Carnegie writes in this "Peped Up" style. You don't think of the word "moxie" much anymore, but when you read this, this is typical. He writes, "In preparation for writing this book, he read everything he could find on the subject, that he was all the stuff that he and his trained researcher read to figure out how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with people." He says, "I recall that we read over 100 biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone. We were determined to spare no time, no expense, to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages for winning friends and influencing people." Anyway, on page 61 of the edition that I have, Dale Carnegie tells one of the many, many stories he uses to illustrate the very main idea that underlies the whole book. He says, "I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn't think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I then go to worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and said, "Wouldn't you like to have that?" Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?" To win friends and influence people, Dale Carnegie says over and over in the book, "Think about what they want." People, he says, are only interested in themselves. And if you can get yourself to the point where you are genuinely interested in them and what they like and what they want, then they will like you and they will do your bidding. Okay, so imagine you were 11 years old and your dad notices that you don't bring many friends around the house and it takes you aside and it gives you a copy of this actual book. This happened. This happened to Paul Feig growing up in suburban Michigan. At first, I didn't know what to think. First of all, if you've ever seen the book, it's got this picture of Dale Carnegie on the front who is somewhere in his 60s or 70s wearing those Mr. Menace glasses, the Menace's dad used to wear. It's kind of white, slick back hair. He looked like every guy that was in my dad's Kiwanis with him and didn't seem to me like a guy who particularly would have that many friends or much influence over people. But he had written the book. So my father went on to make this speech basically about how now that I was getting older, I was 11 years old, that it was time for me to kind of get social skills that he assumed I didn't have. In fact, in school, Paul had plenty of friends. He was kind of a class cut up. And his way of winning friends was the same as other kids. He talked about what they saw on TV and he tried to be funny.
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