How to Win Friends & Influence People

𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟐 "𝐔𝐏𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒" 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟗𝟖𝟏 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝟓 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝟓."How To Win Friends and Influence People" was the first personal development book I ever read. Being a depressed, lonely, 12 year old child I came across this book by accident at my local library. I was searching the computer's library catalog: "how to get friends", and this was the book that came up. Little did I know this book was going to become an essential for me in developing my social skills.At first glance, you may read the principles taught in this book and go: "this is just common sense". But you may also have heard the quote "common sense isn't common". How many of us actively make an effort to genuinely smile and be empathetic towards others? How may of us jump to criticizing others without considering the other person's point of view? How many of us condemn others without remembering it won't make the other person change their mind?I've read this book so many times I've lost count! It really changed my life, and I was so excited to see it be re-released for a new generation!That said, the book edition of my youth was from the 1990's. How does this 2022 "Updated for the Next Generation of Leaders" edition hold up? I compared the 2 side-by-side.PROS:📌 Grammar revisions make the book easier to read. Examples include removal of filler words, word substitutions, and rewriting story examples. The changes are minor, so most of the time they are not very noticeable.📌 A few new story examples have been added, featuring female figures like Evangeline Booth and Alice Foote MacDougall.📌 A new concluding section: "Apply the Dale Carnegie Principles After the Book"CONS:📌 Lots of book edits come off less as necessary and more as attempts to be politically correct, to remove anything that could be seen as problematic. Examples include substituting words ("they" for "him", "not be able to walk" for "cripple", "house staff" for "servants") and stories that were needlessly removed (which leads to my next point).📌 SO MANY story examples have been removed; no joke, I counted over 35! So many vivid examples that made the book so memorable for me as a kid, PC or not, are gone! I don't care if the story examples used Confederate general Robert E. Lee; they still illustrated the principles.📌 Some edits just don't make sense at all. For example, they renamed Part 3, Chapter 5 from "The Secret of Socrates" to the principle "Get the Other Person Saying 'Yes, Yes' Immediately". No other chapter was renamed like this, and the Socrates example is still in the chapter.As for the audiobook, the narrator gives a great presentation with a good range. But will his voice ever match the baritone of the original Andrew MacMillan? Unfortunately no.In sum, for those who are new to reading this book or were born past the 2000's, I'd say this 2022 edition is a nice introduction, albeit a very sanitized one. There's a longer and better version out there. But if you're already a fan of the 90's publication and could care less about political correctness, there's not much new here to justify a second purchase. In fact, there's much less!Sadly, this isn't the only book lately that's getting the Orwellian treatment. Other authors whose books have been altered lately for offensive content include Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and R.L. Stine (not to mention he's still alive and did not approve the changes). Simply put, it's really getting out of hand!Consider me an old fashioned 30 year old Millennial, but I'll be sticking with my original copy.

In my high school days when I was a budding pseudo-intellectual already reading J.D. Salinger and John Updike, I might have been voted "Boy Least Likely to Read How To Win Friends and Influence People."Our class of 1965 valedictorian, by virtue of her 4.0 GPA, read the popular self-help book in Mrs. Thorpe's senior English seminar, and told us it was all about putting up a façade and becoming a phony.God forbid any of us Catcher in the Rye-carrying members of the Sixties Generation would want to be labeled a phony.As a result, I avoided the Carnegie book for 50 years while taking pride in reading New Yorker certified intellectuals and literary writers.A lot of their books were deadly dull and many were not anything like readable.But when I used to buy them at bookstores in Santa Monica, they impressed the hell out of the clerks.Of course, sometimes I slipped off the literary wagon and read Stephen King, John D. MacDonald or Elmore Leonard.But I never stooped to a book that might get me labeled a phony.Until a few weeks ago.Burned out from reading about the unhappy alcoholic life of literary luminary John Cheever, I spotted a Facebook link to an unlikely essay that struck me as possible antidote for my pseudo intellectual dilemma.How a Dead Man's Copy of Dale Carnegie Saved My Rock Band and Changed My Life by Joshua Parkinson didn't change my life but it did change my perspective.Perhaps temporarily.Perhaps not.Some time ago in Germany, Parkinson read "Don’t criticize, condemn or complain" in the opening pages of How to Win Friends and the proverbial scales fell from his eyes.Although he is not a perfect practitioner of Carnegie's method (it turns out Dale wasn't either and didn't expect any of his readers to be), Parkinson managed to move on from his rock and roll fantasies into a real world working life.I was impressed enough to buy the $2.99 Kindle version of the original 1930s self-help book.Reading the first chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, it dawns on me that there are two ways to live this life.You can go The New Yorker intellectual route and read weighty tomes written by a bitter, angry, paranoid, authors like John Cheever.Or you can follow the Dale Carnegie mold and without being a perfectionist repeat his mantra: “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”It’s a choice.But looking at Cheever's mostly hideous daily life, it is hard to see his choice as something even a pseudo-intellectual like me would want to emulate.It would be pretty to think that Cheever was an unhappy exception but I've read enough biographies of 20th Century literary authors --Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath et al -- to know that Cheever was closer to the rule.The question that begs to be asked is this: if these literary lions were so smart, why weren't they happy?From what I've read so far, the Carnegie philosophy doesn't seem very sophisticated by New Yorker standards.He loves Abraham Lincoln as eulogized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: “There lies the most perfect ruler of men that the world has ever seen.”In making a point about not being judgmental, Carnegie reminds us:"... when Mrs. Lincoln and others spoke harshly of the southern people, Lincoln replied: 'Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.'”Carnegie's philosophy of life owed a lot to America's secular saint and as a Lincoln buff myself, his Abe-isms resonate with me.Dale Carnegie seems to have started off running adult education public speaking programs for engineers and sales people.But my guess is that those engineers and sales reps who applied Carnegie’s lessons, however imperfectly, lived happier lives than the sophisticated writers and intellectuals of their times.Odd as it may seem, the vacuum cleaner salesman at Sears may have a better understanding of life than the author of this year's literary sensation.