Dale Carnegie: How To Win Friends and Influence People

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It is a book that tells "how" without telling "why". Any aspie who applies the principles in their everyday interactions would find themselves perhaps having some success but still not being sure what is going on.. that was my experience anyway.... I think the why is the most important thing to find out and that can take quite a long time... sort of like trying to become fluent in a strange new language.

I read that book a couple years ago. If anything, it damaged my ability to socialize. I got more nervous around other people because it made me more aware that I had a problem. It was way too dependent on smiling and body language.

It mostly comes down to perceptions of confidence. Why do you smile? Because that is a way of displaying confidence in the security of your position. The specifics change, but the gross mechanics are the same as any other animal in the kingdom. Things that are perceived as agitation, such as twitchiness or elevated voice volume or rapid eye movements, instill a feeling of distrust. It is taken as a sign of potential abuse and malicious intent. Lack of facial expression is perceived as an attempt to mask your motivations. Same with a lack of body language. Overdo the same things and it comes off as not genuine and you get the same situation. Monotone voice can give the same vibe, but also tend to be something that happens to people when they get angry.

Social interaction is manipulation. You will need to get past thinking otherwise. Understand there is a difference between the manipulation involved in selling yourself as an interesting and fun person to be around because you are, and selling yourself as able solve something for someone because you want their money. People want to be around people who make them feel like they are improved by having them around. What criteria an individual judges that by will vary greatly not just person to person, but moment to moment. Much of this is based on shallowness and superficial judgments, but you can't always just dive into the deep end of the pool. If the water is too cold to even start wading into the shallow end of someones pool, you either find a way to warm the waters from the outside or you find a new pool.

If somebody is self conscious about being short they might be uncomfortable around tall people, it makes them more aware of it. Many people, and I do mean many, are self conscious about social interaction. That is not even close to being an aspie thing. The problem largely arises from the ease with which our social awkwardness is often times identified, and awareness of you being nervous makes them nervous and little things get amplified into big things and communication starts breaking down and it snowballs into a situation traumatic to your sense of confidence. Now you are even MORE nervous about future social encounters.

So how do you break the cycle? You need to establish how to project your confidence of self. Body language and speech are common ways to do so, but if you have trouble with those there are other ways. Hygiene and dress are important ones because they are outward projections of how you treat yourself. I'm not saying go get a mani/pedi and start spending $200 for shirts at a minimum here, but showering every day, deodorant, teeth brushing, always wearing clean clothes, attire appropriate to the setting, they all make a big difference to the first impression you give.

Now, there is a way to largely bypass all of this. Every culture I've personally interacted with, is impressed by feats of skill. Especially in the culture of the USA, people will look past all kinds of issues if they judge you as a person of expertise. Seek out environments where it is appropriate to make displays of your skill in whatever it is you have skill at. People will want to engage you about what you are capable of, they will seek you out and be hoping they meet your approval. They are less likely to be put off by you droning on if that is exactly what they were hoping you might do, so they could learn. Our tendency to hyper focus on our interest becomes our strength here, because that lends itself to being highly proficient at said interest, and if others share that interest they will want to benefit from our capabilities.

DC's emphasis on having to make sales is spot on. In order to get ahead in the world, or, at least, find a job you like, you have to sell yourself. More recent work has focused on networking, such as Keith Ferazzi's Never Eat Alone. I took a two-week course at taxpayers' expense to become a better leader, that is, to better influence people. The problem is that I lack a prerequisite for all of this: I'm not an NT. I can't simply network with just anyone, because my AS deters people and I can't read them. In my leadership class, they wanted us to bond. We with ASDs don't do that. Out of the 38 other people in the class, I have been in touch with exactly zero. That course was touchy-feely, requiring a lot of empathy. My lack of empathy and detecting social clues was on full display. For example, I did not know about people congregating at the drinks fountain during breaks until an instructor pointed it out. I didn't go because I had no need to go: I had pitchers of water available. I didn't notice the others leaving the classroom. I just thought they wanted use the bathroom and do utilitarian stuff like that. I learned a lot of stuff at the conscious level. My attempts to use it have not worked. And my agency wants me to become a manager! "Beware of what you wish for, for you may actually get it." An Aspie with no patience for or understanding of others' problems and motivations is not exactly management material.

Ferazzi emphasizes building relationships by offering something to others, without expectation of reciprocity. That's easy for an NT, who has some idea what others want. His ideas about building social support are nothing new, as psychologists have been expounding their virtues. But having an ASD makes the mind-reading and reciprocity required difficult, if not impossible.

@Crassus:

In my organization, competence is not rewarded. Rather, they're more interested in how well you work and play with others. I have gotten furious about some of the idiots who have been promoted. My attempts to find another job, which have been going on for years, have been utterly unsuccessful. I can interview well, I think, with the right organization, but either they promote from within or want something else (what else, I can't really determine). I think my last interview may have been troubled by my inability to look one interviewer in the eye, even though I provided him the solution to a problem, for which I was not even being tested.

Competence is rewarded, but competence at what? You don't have to actually be good at something, you just have to convince other people you are good at something they value. Work places value group integration and team effort. Learn to how to make the people that make the decisions think you are integrated into the company in an acceptable manner and that you provide utility to the efforts of the company. If everybody else is convincing them you are disruptive, you are disruptive. If you convince them those people are whiners and they are able to tell the whiners to shut up and stop whining, you are not disruptive. They don't know what you are capable of, they know what they perceive and use past experience to predict what you are capable of.

As a manger, it is not your job to be patient with and understanding for the problems and motivations of others. It is your job to use your perceptions and experience to take actions you deem most appropriate to accomplish goals. It is your job to establish what the goals are. You are patient with small problems, such as well if you have a cold you have a cold, take your sick days. Easier to be patient than to hire and train somebody new in that position usually. If you feel your goals are better served by hiring somebody new and training them, then you are no longer patient with the issue.

What is the article called? Thank you.

The man's work may be dated, but it's a standard for anyone who needs to work with customers/clients and wants to keep a business afloat.

Yeah, some people want their space (even with NTs), but you will find that the main reason why people stay with a service provider or moves to another person hinges largely on how well they are treated and respected.

If for no other reason, the book will help you understand what makes for good business practices. After all, the people who would be offended by your trying to please them is a tiny fraction of the number who would be impressed by it.

I would propose that where AS people are affected is that we don't properly judge how much is enough so we either do too much or too little and that is the issue.

I read that book when I was about 25. I felt there was some good in it, but an awful lot of bad also.

I was intrigued to read his notion that individuals tend to have this powerful sense of ego, that they feel that they're always in the right - he quoted Al Capone, who even after his conviction declared that he'd never done anything wrong. I vowed never to see myself as so egotistical as that, though that was way beside the point of Carnegie's observation. His point was that it can be used to get people to like you and to influence them.

So, his advice was to show an interest in people so they'll like you. I rapidly discovered a snag - that I really wasn't particularly interested in the details of other people's lives, except where their experiences overlapped with my own, or where I just happened to be curious. At least the book got me to shut up and start to listen to people a bit more though - I realised that he was correct, that nobody likes a dude who's totally into their own head. It seems he had a talent for just drinking in the details of anybody's interests, but I can only take so much of it before I blank out, and it just felt too damned false for me to try to do much else but stick to showing interest in what I was genuinely interested in, so beyond making a bit more effort to come out of myself, all in all his advice had little effect, though what effect he did have on me was for the better.

It also strikes me now that his notion of "friendship" must have been a very shallow one that might allow a person to find a spouse and con them into marriage, but without the depth of real friendship, such alliances would ultimately fall apart. You can only fool a person for so long, and the closer you get, the harder it is for the pretense to work. His methods are not sustainable, and would seem to rely on a steady stream of suckers to replace the ones who have finally worked out what he's up to. But perhaps I'm underestimating the capacity of the neurotypical to tolerate false behaviour.

That's the part about winning friends - as for "influencing people," I didn't bother to read much of that. I felt that winning friends was all I wanted to do, and that influencing them was unnecessary. These days I guess I'd agree that influencing friends might be quite a desirable thing on occasion, but only via honest and open methods - and from what I'd read there and what I've picked up about Carnegie, I doubt that his methods were the kind of things that anybody decent would want to do to friends.

As others on this thread have suggested, Carnegie had no problem with being downright sneaky and manipulative - I recall one of his ideas was to "get them to think it was their idea in the first place." If I caught anybody working that crap on me I'd kick them out of my life, and I'd feel very guilty if I were to practise it myself.

I think it was Carnegie who wrote another similar book about "How to succeed in business," in which he made a big thing about 90% of the money and happiness in the world was in the hands of 10% of the population. To me, that's a terrible truth that all decent people should work to end. But to him, all he could see was getting himself (and maybe a few of his followers) into that 10% and perpetuating the status quo - i.e. he's a right-winger. Therefore I can have no truck with his ideals, and will never be content to embrace the rich-poor divide, whether it's measured in money or in happiness. When you refuse to embrace that divide, you have a social conscience.

That powerful sense of ego lends itself to establishing that the way you have been pretending to be is the way you are. I found the opposite to be true, the longer and harder I tried to convince myself I actually was my NT Social Mask the harder it was to decompress afterwards and the more I seemed to rebel against myself. I'm still good at just zoning out and playing around with my fantasies and memories and turning on the auto recorder and eventually I've got an idea of how to apply leverage to a person to move them in the way I want them to move. I just find I have less and less desire to actually do it. I become more and more content with who I am and what I have. The Four Noble Truths speak to me, and I listen.

I've read this book 3 years ago.
There was one advice in it, that imitating people would make them respect you more because it would make them feel like they're doing something right. As a result, I wrote a comment in one popular girl's yearbook saying how she's very confident and that I want to be more like her. Result: ridicule.

Yes.....I tend to think that egotists are in a state of perpetual conflict in trying to hold onto the belief that they are in some way special, in the face of daily evidence to the contrary. I don't say it makes a person any happier to let go of the myth - there is a condition known as "depressive realism" - but I do think there is a sense of ease that comes from accepting the fact of out own insignificance as individuals. Of course it remains true that if I am injured, I am the one who feels the pain and I am the one who suffers the incapacity, and in many ways such as that I will always be special to myself, and in that sense I am under pressure to care about myself more carefully than others would feel the need to care about me, but that's not quite the same matter as the one I'm talking about here.

Here's a list of chapters from HTWFAIP, from which the general tone of the book may readily be deduced - his topic titles generally took the form of little proverbs, which the body of the text (which is not reproduced on the Wepage) would amplify, in a style which seemed to me quite nauseating and patronising. But I must confess that a lot of his little parables don't seem particularly appallng, although there are a few that reek of what I would call "unenlightenment":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win ... nce_People
I'd love to know why the section containing his tips for a happy marriage was removed 26 years after his death.

That is what it is. See Robert Greene's 48 laws of power. Or some dude like that.



"How To be a better Salesman". Yeah I consider that morally questionable, using body language and whatnot against people.

It was another time, Main Street, local sales, and a few who traveled. If your lot was stuck in sales, no real talent, his social psychology can increase sales.

Taking the same to all of life's relationships does work, the surface shown, but while to me it would be hollow, most lives are hollow, and a cheerful store clerk who remembers your name might be the high point of their day.

His methods would work for someone who sold insurance, cars, a fast and short term relationship.

Back in the fifties you were married to the town you grew up in, the people you went to school with, and played a role in that drama.

Modern life? Much faster, no relationships, a total turn over of people you know in five years, including spouses and children.

No more lifetime jobs, retirement, staying in one place. The modern half life is a few years, and that is a different game.

People used to stay married, for everything else was just as bad, or worse, now they divorce, and everything else is just as bad or worse.

I have been working web marketing, the ultimate stranger, yet it works, if you sell what they want without a problem.

For mass appeal, his methods work, in the new impersonal world. Computers remember your name, everything you have bought, and do not ask about the now ex wife, or give the, you are new around here, to a new customer.

I never got along in the face to face world, for everybody wants to see what they can run, and I am different, and rude.

The Internet is deal me or may your electrons fade. I fit, here is the deal, fast, money back if it is not what you want.

Personal relationship is fading, I shop by price, and speed of delivery.

I do not want what anyone is selling, I want just what I want.

We have our problems, but it is the NT world based on social relationships that is falling apart.

People who want to con me try to get me on the phone, email leaves a record that can be cited. They are sure they can talk me into something, I tell them I am deaf.

Trillions are changing hands very quickly with a few email notes, and the reading body language, voice tone, face, eye contact, is gone.

All of Dale's skills are mostly over.

^
Well, his stuff would never work on me......nor on my grandfather, who used to declare that he couldn't understand the way people got taken in by sales gimmickry - his way of shopping was simple:

1. Decide what you need
2. Go and get it
3. Don't buy anything else

Exactly the same as your "I do not want what anyone is selling, I want just what I want."
Yet he was born around 1900.......I suspect that the British working class saw things a little differently to the better-heeled Americans of Carnegie's old world. When you've got almost nothing, you become immune to sales psychlogy, or you perish. Evolution selects against gullibility when resources are scarce.

But I suspect his psychology would work better on a purely social level - winning friends and all that - I think there's a lot of chronic loneliness out there....the need for love never really dies.

What surprises me now after all this time is some of the phrasing of his proverbs:

Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely
Quite what did he mean by "sincerely"? If the other person really is important to you, then fine, but how can it be sincere in a sales situation, where time is money and they give you their attention only until they've got your money? You can prove this easily - send an inquiry to a supplier, saying you might want to buy a lot of stuff from them. Instant reply. Now buy something, and send an inquiry about a complicated problem you've got with the stuff - chances are you'll be kept waiting, and waiting........I know he was talking about winning friends and my example is about selling stuff, but then I think that for him, there was no difference . I think that with his "sincerity" proverb he forgot to add - "fake that, and you've got it made." But then, that would have given the game away. And like most fake "how-to" manuals, the trick is to give 'em something that doesn't quite work.

Become genuinely interested in other people.
What did he mean by "genuine" ? This is the proverb that made me realise I wasn't suitable material - I realised that my genuine interest in other people had serious limits. Maybe Dale was hoping I wouldn't be so realistic as to admit that to myself? Presumably it was my AS causing the limit, but at the time I just felt that I must be some kind of selfish freak.

I was using a narrower definition of competence to mean actually doing the job well. And, yes, team effort can be a part of that. But group integration? That's conformity, my bane. I don't even know how to conform, so I don't bother trying. Sadly, it's the conformists, the ones who toe the line rather than those, like me, who buck the conventional wisdom who are rewarded. The irony is that, years later, people realize that I'm right.



I have plenty of awards to demonstrate my utility. It's the inability to work and play well with others that has stalled my advancement.



Intellectually, I am very disruptive. But, isn't that a good thing? After all, I'm trying to do things better and faster, and my innovations have become standard practice.



That is, I have to get into spats with NTs, which I will automatically lose. They're the ones who have sucked up to and otherwise not perturbed managers. Besides, mental illness seems to be common among my managers. I had one second-line manager who I believe has borderline personality disorder. At first, I walked on water. Then, I inadvertently implied that she was wrong about something, so I became the devil. I now have a third-line manager with symptoms of avoidant personality disorder. My psychiatrist said, "How did he ever become a manager?" My current second-line manager is very narcissistic, but not pathologically so. Still, she lies and never apologizes.



Management is defined as control. Managers establish goals, allocate resources: workers and materiel, and monitor the results. Simply doing management works well in a piecework or assembly line environment. However, people are not automatons. Once you get away from the assembly line, a manager has to lead. The manager has to understand the motivations and abilities of his subordinates and know how to lead them. He frequently has to put up with their personal problems. My manager had to deal with my most recent depression, which really harmed my performance and made me very unpleasant to be around. I was doing some s****y work and it got to me. So, I went crazy, and my manager had to change my environment. (Sadly, you sometimes have to go crazy to get your way.) The manager also has to be able to play politics with and influence his superiors. In my organization (government), the managers often get inane requests out of the blue from above.

Put an Aspie like me in management and disaster will follow. I have no empathy, so I can only know what I consciously observe. I have a hard enough time following the unwritten, constantly changing rules with unpredictable exceptions. It only gets worse as you go up the ladder.

My organization's fundamental problem is that it lacks a technical promotion track. So, you can get complete idiots promoted because they make nice better. You have to be an NT to even know how to make nice with the loonies managing you. (Well, not all of the managers are loonies, but I have identified two with symptoms of major mental illness.)

I'm pretty skeptical of self-help books. Most of em are full of s**t. They always have the same old magical idea that raw willpower, wishing, or repeating affirmations like a broken record will cure your problems. Not to mention the same old corny ass phrases they use (Be yourself! Just be confident! If you believe it you can achieve it!)