This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the How to Win Friends and Influence People principles? How can you use them in your life?
The How to Win Friends and Influence People principles are about creating connections with people and utilizing your communication skills. These principles can help you understand how people think.
Read more about the How to Win Friends and Influence People principles below.
How to Win Friends and Influence People Principles
These How to Win Friends and Influence People principles can help guide you through the book, and you can use the checklists to make sure you’re following these principles. These are the How to Win Friends and Influence People principles as they appear in the book:
- People crave importance. Make someone feel important and they will think well of you. Diminish someone’s importance and they will resent you.
- Appeal to the other person’s interests. Virtually all people care more about what they want than what you want. Don’t fish with cheesecake, fish with worms. Keep asking yourself – “what is it that this person wants?”
- Everyone has something they can teach you, and you benefit by figuring out what that is. This belief leads to a genuine interest and appreciation for other people.
- Angry people are often angry because they feel unheard. Once you sympathize with them, they will soften their anger substantially.
- To influence people to do things, praise and appreciation are more effective than orders.
Checklist for Arguments
Now that you know the How to Win Friends and Influence People principles, take a look at this checklist for arguments:
- Control your temper. You can measure the size of a person by what makes her angry.
- Instead, approach with an open-minded view: “I may be wrong. I frequently am. And if I’m wrong, I want to be put right. Let’s examine the facts.”
- Praise the other person for a trait that will help resolve the argument – eg their patience, open-mindedness, fairness, and receptivity to new facts.
- Understand that the other person has a valid view of the situation. If you were born as them with their brain and undergoing their experiences, you would by definition feel the same way they do. Your job is to understand what led them to believe what they believe.
- Express sympathy for their situation. “You have the absolute right to be upset. If I were in your shoes, I would be too.”
- Listen first. Give your opponents a chance to talk through. Do NOT interrupt.
- Ask people where they feel the problems are. Ask for their opinions on how best to proceed. Ask lots of questions instead of stating imperatives.
- Look for areas of agreement. Try to build bridges of understanding. Talk about common goals, and what you agree on.
- When ready, ask a series of questions that will lead them independently to your conclusion. Start with undeniable areas of agreement, then build in layers to your ultimate point in terms they will agree with.
- Emphasize how your position serves the other person’s interests and incentives.
- Volunteer the downsides of your approach, and ask how they feel about it. They will tend to moderate your position, and talk themselves out of it.
- Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you.
Checklist for Giving Feedback and Improving Behavior
Next, think about this checklist for giving feedback and improving behavior to apply the How to Win Friends and Influence People principles.
- Praise and appreciate constantly, on the background, without asking for anything. This neutralizes any future sting of feedback.
- When introducing a point of feedback, start by praising other specific things that were done well.
- Introduce the point of improvement.
- Talk about your own related mistakes, suggesting you know how difficult the task can be.
- Ask questions instead of giving orders. What do you think about this? Do you think that would work? Ask for suggestions on how to improve things, to get them to have a personal stake in their own ideas.
- Give the person a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait were already one of her outstanding characteristics.
- Make the fault seem easy to correct. Make clear it is not a matter of ability or talent.
- She already has the underlying skills, she just needs a bit of practice.
- Connect the improvement to something else she has already done.
- Message the improvement in terms of the person’s own interests. Target what they care about (doing better work; getting off of work earlier; ascending in her career).
You can use these How to Win Friends and Influence People principles as you read the book as your guide.
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Here's what you'll find in our full How to Win Friends and Influence People summary :
- The 6 ways to make people like you
- How you can give feedback to others and improve their behavior
- An essential checklist for handling arguments in a productive way
