A LOT of people are put off by the name of the book. I would highly suggest you not judge Carnegie's book by it's cover. It is filled with brass-tacks advice and concrete examples of how to improve your own life and the lives of others around you. Though the title may seem 'manipulative', the book is anything but that. Consider the title as a marketing gimmick from 1933 and read the book nonetheless.

Indeed. The central point of the book is really the importance of human empathy. If you want to influence people, you have to consider their needs and wants rather that just being self-absorbed and entitled all the time.

True, but it's hard to force oneself to care about other people, to be honest. Many are naturally self-centered, and it's not easy to trick/convert one's mind into not being self-centered. There are some tips like finding a common interest, but not enough. The book has gaps in that aspect.

incidentally, Dale Carnegie didn't write that title. The main title and all the chapter titles were written by an advertising copywriter named Vic Schwab. Arguably the titles made it the publishing phenomenon it is. Schwab also wrote a book that probably changed the lives of many marketers. It's title is "How to write a good advertisement"

I found the content manipulative and I honestly can't understand why this book is so revered. Maybe my expectations were set too high but reading it left me feeling underwhelmed.

I agree. The content was in sync with the title. There were some decent advises and observations for example regarding how to be more tactful, but in general the book seemed to be about faking and manipulating your way to victory. It's very sad if people feel they have to cut corners this way by programming themselves to react certain ways, instead of trying to find genuine happiness that delivers the genuine smile and interest towards people etc.

I read that book. It definitely changed how I look at people.

It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection.

This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with. How you actually feel isn't important, though for many it's likely to be by far the easiest and most reliable way to get there.

Dale Carnegie provided me with a very useful set of tools that I can use to achieve the outcomes I want. For that I'm appreciative.

In another book titled "Never split the difference" the author distincts empathy and sympathy. You can be empathic aka. understand how and why the other person feel. This helps you understand the other person and ask the right questions. You don't necessarily have to agree with it (sympathy).

Both have an important role in your connections with other people but its useful if you learn to separate them.

What makes an emotional connection genuine? I firmly believe that Dale Carnegie actually cared about his readers, and was telling them these things in order to make them happier, and make the world a better place. And I am grateful for his efforts. Isn't that a valid emotional connection, even though we never met in person?

Or think about it another way... when you listen to music by Bach, do you feel an emotional connection? Do you see it as crass or alienated, or are you feeling something that a long-dead composer wanted you to feel, and grateful for the experience?

I agree! I also firmly believe that Dale Carnegie cared deeply about the reader he modeled in his head.

In the context of Dale Carnegie, I think that a genuine connection requires the active involvement of two people interacting with one another. For all that the emotions involved are unquestionably valid, I do not consider the genuine emotion one person feels for an imaginary other person to be a genuine emotional connection with another human being.

Bach, to my knowledge, did not like to rattle on about the importance of synchronous emotional engagement.

Bach, above all, wanted his listeners to experience a connection with God. Not necessarily the dogma-bound God as defined by a specific religion - he did after all compose for both Catholic and protestant masters - but certainly some all-pervading sense of the divine which, if allowed to act as mediator between us and Bach and all of creation, does appear to act as some sort of emotional engagement - indirect, yes, but also transcending the barrier of time and certainly high up on the composer's list of priorities.

It’s been my experience that people can tell genuine empathy from fake.

I agree! It's been my experience that people genuinely believe they can reliably tell real empathy from fake.

It may be possible that the detection heuristics a given individual relies upon might, upon occasion, be a bit less reliable than could be hoped for. I've witnessed both false positives and false negatives.

Again, you're right. People do earnestly and honestly believe in their ability to detect genuineness.

I wasn't even the person you responded to, and I still felt the warm fuzzies.

The book emphasizes this fact. If you don't actually care about the person you're trying to influence, if you aren't acting in what you believe is their best interest, they can tell (usually). We have marvelous words in English for this, like "smarmy" and "skeezy".

> This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with.

You have proposed an Emotional Turing Test! The price for failure looks high!

It gets even more interesting when you figure you that we're already all playing it! We're all judges, and both false positives and false negatives are already common.

I'd concur that the book was a huge eye-opener for me. Earlier, I used to think that I only needed to be right (for e.g., while making technical design decisions) and just say it out when I disagreed. This book taught me that the way you put forward your thoughts also matters. You can be right without being a dick and without screwing up your relationships with others.

I followed up this book with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That was another fantastic book for me.

For me, these two books fit right into the category of those that literally changed my life.

Agreed. Relationships are how we get things done in life. Reaching consensus, asking for help, motivation - all based around relationships with others.

Since How to Win Friends is already mentioned, I'll add Musashi here. There are so many lessons it's hard to pick them all out, plus I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

7 Habits made me think about certain things differently, but I had many people tell me that it really changed their life. Didn't do that for me, but "change your life" is a really high bar. Definitely How to Win Friends did.

It took me way to long to listen to my dad's advice and read that book. It has a very bad title and will probably cause immediate social ban if caught reading it at school as a teenager (also kids/teen dynamics are sometimes 100% opposite than adult dynamics, being nice and non critic as a teenager can be super risky in some social settings, it's all about not caring and being sarcastic, thank god this period ends at some point, to most of us), but nevertheless, it's the must-have book to transition from the annoying, hot tempered, emotional, entitled, short fused, sarcastic and boasting teenager I was into an adult.

The Lifetime Conversation Guide by van Fleet is good follow-up to that with more specific tips:

https://www.amazon.com/Lifetime-Conversation-Guide-James-Fle...

+1 for the book. In my case, I couldn't really follow or properly understand the advice in that book until I stumbled upon The Charisma Myth and followed the exercises there. Only then I had enough social skills to apply Dale Carnegie's tips.