Book Review — How to Win Friends and Influence People
A book about learning to deal with people. It offers concrete advice on how to be honest yet diplomatic in one’s interactions.
Name
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Author
Amazon Link
Rating
5/5
Favorite Quote
“I had the satisfaction of controlling my temper, the satisfaction or retorting kindness for an insult.”
Why I Read It
I always considered myself poor at people’s skills. I guess it has to do with the fact that I couldn’t always get people to do what I wanted. So I read it to improve in that area.
The book helped me realize two things:
- I wasn’t as bad at dealing with people as I thought.
- It’s hard for everyone to get people to do what they want because people don’t like being controlled. So you have to work with what you can control, which most of the times isn’t much and requires a lot of diplomacy.
Description
Forget everything you think you know about dealing with people. This book will show you why acting the way you acted in the past wasn’t the best approach. If I had to summarize the main lesson on this book, it would be that most times, when dealing with people, what feels like the right approach, isn’t the right approach.
For example, if an employee makes a mistake, getting upset and berating him might feel right, but it will only make him defensive of his past decisions and thus won’t be an effective way of changing that behavior in the future.
The book is very logical and practical, but at the same it offers a very harmonious approach to dealing with people. For example, to make people like you, it teaches to “Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves”. And to effectively criticize others, it advises to “… talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person”.
It’s full of great advice that seem obvious in hindsight, but we still seldom use when interacting with other people. And each of those advises is backed-up with many real life examples.
Who Is It For
This book helps you to effectively deal with people, so everyone can benefit from it — since everyone has to deal with people one way or another.
If you’re a manager or someone whose job depends on other people doing what you need them to do, you’ll find the lessons in this book particularly helpful.
Favorite Lesson Learned
I liked the part where the author takes a letter (that the head of the radio department of an advertising agency sent to the managers of local radio stations) and he analyses every one of its sentences, stating what’s wrong with each of them.
It’s funny to read because the sender never considers the point of view of the receiver, and speaks mostly of himself and his own concerns. The reaction the author describes after every sentence is exactly the one I would have if I would have received the letter, but, paradoxically, I would probably have written a very similar letter if instead I would have been the sender.
It made me realize that one should never think of oneself and one’s concerns when writing a letter — or during any form of communication for that matter. What we should do instead is to put ourselves in the place of the person that receives the letter, and try to express how what we are proposing is beneficial for that person.
Length
285 pages
