In times of disruptive cultural upheaval, periods of forgetting, and many levels of chaos, the best approach is to return to basics.
I’m going to recommend a book that will not appear on any college reading lists. No professional sociologist, psychologist, business consultant, or philosopher will suggest it to you. That makes it no less true or helpful. Indeed, it is a revelation, and one that bears rereading every few years because its lessons are easy to forget.
It seeks to offer what the author says is “a new way of life.”
But the smart set and polite society avoid the book completely, regarding it as pedestrian, too popular, not based in science, and surely untrue. It is extremely obvious to me that such people have not read the book and will not. This is, in part, why they are miserably unhappy people. And will stay that way.
It’s amazing to me because the fix to vast amounts of human misery, or at least the beginning of a fix, is available to anyone for easy download in a single text.
The book has been a bestseller for the past hundred years for a reason. It connects. It reveals. It changes. It works. It’s quite simply a fantastic guide to getting along with yourself and others. It trains the human mind to empathize and it offers guideposts for living a happier life, and who doesn’t want that? Results are guaranteed.
You can buy used copies online and you should (I’m doubtful about the “improvements” and “updates” of the new edition put together by his daughter).
It so happens that this weekend I was walking along a road in one of those neighborhoods where people leave books out for others to take. Digging through the offerings, I found an early edition of this book and took it. Having already read it several times, I flipped through it again, and was just amazed at the sparkling prose and the powerful insight. So I reread the whole thing.
I can only say that it is vastly better than I remembered.
The reputation of this book is that it is a guide to being duplicitous and manipulative in order to get your way with others. The title suggests that, perhaps. But that is wrong.
In fact, that’s completely upside down. The book helps people understand the effect of their own behavior on others. It is a guide to understanding yourself better by obtaining a better understanding of others. The suggestions all come with anecdotes, fascinating history, and, above all, a test: Try a new way and see what happens.
That’s the whole of it. In a sense, that’s everything you need to know. The observations and advice are all counterintuitive, until you make them a habit. Then everything becomes intuitive.
That said, the title is brilliant because it entices people to read the book out of purely selfish motives. What people learn is that the best path to achieving your goals is not to be selfish, but rather to have a high regard for the opinions, dignity, mentality, and outlook of others. The author’s insight is that even if people do this out of self-interest at first, that behavior will start to be rewarded, and then it will start to inform who you are.
Which is to say, this book will make you a better person. Of all short classics to recommend to children, grandchildren, co-workers, or employees, this one is the best. Later they will thank you. Then they will recommend it to others whom they value. This habit of passing along this great work has gone on for nearly a century.
I hesitate to summarize the content for fear that you will treat my words as a substitute for Carnegie’s, so I’ll just offer some observations so you can get a sense.
The theme hits you in the first chapter, which concerns arguments. Carnegie’s core point is that no one wants to be told he is wrong. Doing so immediately creates hostility, entrenches differences, emboldens conflict, and worsens separation. It achieves nothing.
We surely know this from social media, where argument is sport. But what does this achieve in personal life? Carnegie says it does nothing. Listening to others and responding with interest and curiosity is the only path to influencing their thinking.
The failure to do this has led to war and worse, as Carnegie demonstrates in his revealing discussion of the explosive argument between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt during the 1912 presidential election, resulting in the loss of the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson would go on to enter World War I and rebuild Europe in a way that led to World War II. Yes, this simple book reveals that and much more.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you,” he writes. “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
More: “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.” And: “There is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument—and that is to avoid it.”
Is recognizing any of this manipulative? Not at all. The point is that we must all work toward understanding another person’s point of view if we hope ever to influence his thought.
This does not mean flattery, which is brazen and annoying. “The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple,” Carnegie writes. “One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other is universally condemned.”
He offers a hilarious definition of flattery: “Telling the other man precisely what he thinks about himself.”
The beautiful thing about this approach to personal engagement is that it creates good habits in ourselves. Above all else, it suppresses the tendency to complain. No one likes complainers in any aspect of life, ever. That’s true in business, romance, and in every other walk of life. And yet they are everywhere.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do,” Carnegie writes. His section on complaining alone, if taken seriously, would shut down most of the absurd labor-related litigation in this country and result in the closure of most HR departments.
The book was written in 1936 as a manual for helping people through the Great Depression, and for assisting business people in finding a better path for themselves. For this reason, the author was a highly valued speaker and his book sold many millions of copies and remains a bestseller today.
His main message: “It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.” And this book is the path toward fixing the way you think about things.
It sounds so simple, and yet this book changes lives fundamentally, and has for nearly a century.
It seems like a good time to revisit it or read it for the first time. It’s a manual for civilized behavior, above all else. It’s not political, and not ideological, but it is deeply philosophical in fundamental ways.
There is much more to say, but I’ll leave it there. If you read it and don’t like it, tell me and I will apologize for my recommendation. I doubt that will happen. I fully expect the opposite: You will thank me for urging you to read the book that you should have read many years ago.
