EIGHT THINGS THIS BOOK WILL
HELP YOU ACHIEVE
1. Get out of a mental rut, think new thoughts, acquire new visions, discover new
ambitions.
2. Make friends quickly and easily.
3. Increase your popularity.
4. Win people to your way of thinking.
5. Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.
2

6. Handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and
pleasant.
7. Become a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
8. Arouse enthusiasm among your associates.
This book has done all these things for more than fifteen million readers in thirtysix languages.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Biographical Sketch of Dale Carnegie........................................................................... 5
How This Book Was Written And Why........................................................................... 15
Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book............................................ 21
PART ONE: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People............................................ 25
1 - IF YOU WANT TO GATHER HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE BEEHIVE..... 25
2 - THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH PEOPLE.................................................. 37
3 - HE WHO CAN DO THIS HAS THE WHOLE WORLD WITH HIM...................... 48
PART TWO: Ways to Make People Like You............................................................... 65
1 - DO THIS AND YOU’LL BE WELCOME ANYWHERE......................................... 65
2 - A SIMPLE WAY TO MAKE A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION............................... 75
3 - IF YOU DON’T DO THIS, YOU ARE HEADED FOR TROUBLE......................... 82
4 - AN EASY WAY TO BECOME A GOOD CONVERSATIONALIST..................... 89
5 - HOW TO INTEREST PEOPLE................................................................................ 97
6 - HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU INSTANTLY............................................. 101
PART THREE: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking....................................... 112
1 - YOU CAN’T WIN AN ARGUMENT...................................................................... 112
2 - A SURE WAY OF MAKING ENEMIES—AND HOW TO AVOID IT................... 118
3 - IF YOU’RE WRONG, ADMIT IT............................................................................ 127
4 - A DROP OF HONEY............................................................................................... 134
5 - THE SECRET OF SOCRATES................................................................................ 141
6 - THE SAFETY VALVE IN HANDLING COMPLAINTS......................................... 146
7 - HOW TO GET COOPERATION............................................................................. 150
8 - A FORMULA THAT WILL WORK WONDERS FOR YOU.................................. 155
9 - WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS.............................................................................. 159
3

10 - AN APPEAL THAT EVERYBODY LIKES........................................................... 166
11 - THE MOVIES DO IT. TV DOES IT....WHY DON’T YOU DO IT?...................... 171
12 - WHEN NOTHING ELSE WORKS, TRY THIS..................................................... 175
PART FOUR: How to Change People Without Giving Offense..................................... 179
1 - IF YOU MUST FIND FAULT, THIS IS THE WAY TO BEGIN............................. 179
2 - HOW TO CRITICIZE....AND NOT BE HATED FOR IT........................................ 184
3 - TALK ABOUT YOUR OWN MISTAKES FIRST................................................... 187
4 - NO ONE LIKES TO TAKE ORDERS..................................................................... 191
5 - LET THE OTHER PERSON SAVE FACE............................................................... 193
6 - HOW TO SPUR PEOPLE ON TO SUCCESS......................................................... 196
7 - GIVE A DOG A GOOD NAME............................................................................... 200
8 - MAKE THE FAULT SEEM EASY TO CORRECT.................................................. 204
9 - MAKING PEOPLE GLAD TO DO WHAT YOU WANT....................................... 208

4

A Shortcut to Distinction - A Biographical Sketch of Dale Carnegie
by Lowell Thomas
It was a cold January night in 1935, but the weather couldn’t keep them away. Two
thousand five hundred men and women thronged into the grand ballroom of the
Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Every available seat was filled by half-past
seven. At eight o’clock, the eager crowd was still pouring in. The spacious balcony
was soon jammed. Presently even standing space was at a premium, and hundreds
of people, tired after navigating a day in business, stood up for an hour and a half
that night to witness - what?
A fashion show?
A six-day bicycle race or a personal appearance by Clark Gable?
No. These people had been lured there by a newspaper ad. Two evenings
previously, they had seen this full-page announcement in the New York Sun staring
them in the face:
Learn to Speak Effectively
Prepare for Leadership
Old stuff? Yes, but believe it or not, in the most sophisticated town on earth, during
a depression with 20 percent of the population on relief, twenty-five hundred people
had left their homes and hustled to the hotel in response to that ad.
The people who responded were of the upper economic strata - executives,
employers and professionals.
These men and women had come to hear the opening gun of an ultramodern,
ultrapractical course in “Effective Speaking and Influencing Men in Business”- a
course given by the Dale Carnegie Institute of Effective Speaking and Human
Relations.
Why were they there, these twenty-five hundred business men and women?
Because of a sudden hunger for more education because of the depression?
5

Apparently not, for this same course had been playing to packed houses in New
York City every season for the preceding twenty-four years. During that time, more
than fifteen thousand business and professional people had been trained by Dale
Carnegie. Even large, skeptical, conservative organizations such as the
Westinghouse Electric Company, the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, the
Brooklyn Union Gas Company, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, the
American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the New York Telephone
Company have had this training conducted in their own offices for the benefit of
their members and executives.
The fact that these people, ten or twenty years after leaving grade school, high
school or college, come and take this training is a glaring commentary on the
shocking deficiencies of our educational system.
What do adults really want to study? That is an important question; and in order to
answer it, the University of Chicago, the American Association for Adult
Education, and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools made a survey over a two-year period.
That survey revealed that the prime interest of adults is health. It also revealed that
their second interest is in developing skill in human relationships - they want to
learn the technique of getting along with and influencing other people. They don’t
want to become public speakers, and they don’t want to listen to a lot of high
sounding talk about psychology; they want suggestions they can use immediately in
business, in social contacts and in the home.
So that was what adults wanted to study, was it?
“All right,” said the people making the survey. "Fine. If that is what they want,
we’ll give it to them.”
Looking around for a textbook, they discovered that no working manual had ever
been written to help people solve their daily problems in human relationships.
Here was a fine kettle of fish! For hundreds of years, learned volumes had been
written on Greek and Latin and higher mathematics - topics about which the
average adult doesn’t give two hoots. But on the one subject on which he has a
thirst for knowledge, a veritable passion for guidance and help - nothing!
This explained the presence of twenty-five hundred eager adults crowding into the
6

grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in response to a newspaper
advertisement. Here, apparently, at last was the thing for which they had long been
seeking.
Back in high school and college, they had pored over books, believing that
knowledge alone was the open sesame to financial - and professional rewards.
But a few years in the rough-and-tumble of business and professional life had
brought sharp disillusionment. They had seen some of the most important business
successes won by men who possessed, in addition to their knowledge, the ability to
talk well, to win people to their way of thinking, and to "sell" themselves and their
ideas.
They soon discovered that if one aspired to wear the captain’s cap and navigate the
ship of business, personality and the ability to talk are more important than a
knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard.
The advertisement in the New York Sun promised that the meeting would be highly
entertaining. It was. Eighteen people who had taken the course were marshaled in
front of the loudspeaker - and fifteen of them were given precisely seventy-five
seconds each to tell his or her story. Only seventy-five seconds of talk, then “bang”
went the gavel, and the chairman shouted, “Time! Next speaker!”
The affair moved with the speed of a herd of buffalo thundering across the plains.
Spectators stood for an hour and a half to watch the performance.
The speakers were a cross section of life: several sales representatives, a chain store
executive, a baker, the president of a trade association, two bankers, an insurance
agent, an accountant, a dentist, an architect, a druggist who had come from
Indianapolis to New York to take the course, a lawyer who had come from Havana
in order to prepare himself to give one important three-minute speech.
The first speaker bore the Gaelic name Patrick J. O'Haire. Born in Ireland, he
attended school for only four years, drifted to America, worked as a mechanic, then
as a chauffeur.
Now, however, he was forty, he had a growing family and needed more money, so
he tried selling trucks. Suffering from an inferiority complex that, as he put it, was
eating his heart out, he had to walk up and down in front of an office half a dozen
7

times before he could summon up enough courage to open the door. He was so
discouraged as a salesman that he was thinking of going back to working with his
hands in a machine shop, when one day he received a letter inviting him to an
organization meeting of the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking.
He didn’t want to attend. He feared he would have to associate with a lot of college
graduates, that he would be out of place.
His despairing wife insisted that he go, saying, “It may do you some good, Pat. God
knows you need it.” He went down to the place where the meeting was to be held
and stood on the sidewalk for five minutes before he could generate enough selfconfidence to enter the
room.
The first few times he tried to speak in front of the others, he was dizzy with fear.
But as the weeks drifted by, he lost all fear of audiences and soon found that he
loved to talk - the bigger the crowd, the better. And he also lost his fear of
individuals and of his superiors. He presented his ideas to them, and soon he had
been advanced into the sales department. He had become a valued and much liked
member of his company. This night, in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Patrick O'Haire
stood in front of twenty-five hundred people and told a gay, rollicking story of his
achievements. Wave after wave of laughter swept over the audience. Few
professional speakers could have equaled his performance.
The next speaker, Godfrey Meyer, was a gray-headed banker, the father of eleven
children. The first time he had attempted to speak in class, he was literally struck
dumb. His mind refused to function. His story is a vivid illustration of how
leadership gravitates to the person who can talk.
He worked on Wall Street, and for twenty-five years he had been living in Clifton,
New Jersey. During that time, he had taken no active part in community affairs and
knew perhaps five hundred people.
Shortly after he had enrolled in the Carnegie course, he received his tax bill and was
infuriated by what he considered unjust charges. Ordinarily, he would have sat at
home and fumed, or he would have taken it out in grousing to his neighbors. But
instead, he put on his hat that night, walked into the town meeting, and blew off
steam in public.
8

As a result of that talk of indignation, the citizens of Clifton, New Jersey, urged him
to run for the town council. So for weeks he went from one meeting to another,
denouncing waste and municipal extravagance.
There were ninety-six candidates in the field. When the ballots were counted, lo,
Godfrey Meyer’s name led all the rest. Almost overnight, he had become a public
figure among the forty thousand people in his community. As a result of his talks,
he made eighty times more friends in six weeks than he had been able to previously
in twenty-five years.
And his salary as councilman meant that he got a return of 1,000 percent a year on
his investment in the Carnegie course.
The third speaker, the head of a large national association of food manufacturers,
told how he had been unable to stand up and express his ideas at meetings of a
board of directors.
As a result of learning to think on his feet, two astonishing things happened. He was
soon made president of his association, and in that capacity, he was obliged to
address meetings all over the United States. Excerpts from his talks were put on the
Associated Press wires and printed in newspapers and trade magazines throughout
the country.
In two years, after learning to speak more effectively, he received more free
publicity for his company and its products than he had been able to get previously
with a quarter of a million dollars spent in direct advertising. This speaker admitted
that he had formerly hesitated to telephone some of the more important business
executives in Manhattan and invite them to lunch with him. But as a result of the
prestige he had acquired by his talks, these same people telephoned him and invited
him to lunch and apologized to him for encroaching on his time.
The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction. It puts a person in the limelight,
raises one head and shoulders above the crowd. And the person who can speak
acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he or
she really possesses.
A movement for adult education has been sweeping over the nation; and the most
spectacular force in that movement was Dale Carnegie, a man who listened to and
critiqued more talks by adults than has any other man in captivity. According to a
9

cartoon by "Believe-It-or- Not” Ripley, he had criticized 150,000 speeches. If that
grand total doesn’t impress you, remember that it meant one talk for almost every
day that has passed since Columbus discovered America. Or, to put it in other
words, if all the people who had spoken before him had used only three minutes and
had appeared before him in succession, it would have taken ten months, listening
day and night, to hear them all.
Dale Carnegie’s own career, filled with sharp contrasts, was a striking example of
what a person can accomplish when obsessed with an original idea and afire with
enthusiasm.
Born on a Missouri farm ten miles from a railway, he never saw a streetcar until he
was twelve years old; yet by the time he was forty-six, he was familiar with the farflung corners of the earth, everywhere from Hong Kong to Hammerfest; and, at one
time, he approached closer to the North Pole than Admiral Byrd’s headquarters at
Little America was to the South Pole.
This Missouri lad who had once picked strawberries and cut cockleburs for five
cents an hour became the highly paid trainer of the executives of large corporations
in the art of self-expression.
This erstwhile cowboy who had once punched cattle and branded calves and ridden
fences out in western South Dakota later went to London to put on shows under the
patronage of the royal family.
This chap who was a total failure the first half-dozen times he tried to speak in
public later became my personal manager. Much of my success has been due to
training under Dale Carnegie.
Young Carnegie had to struggle for an education, for hard luck was always
battering away at the old farm in northwest Missouri with a flying tackle and a body
slam. Year after year, the “102” River rose and drowned the corn and swept away
the hay. Season after season, the fat hogs sickened and died from cholera, the
bottom fell out of the market for cattle and mules, and the bank threatened to
foreclose the mortgage.
Sick with discouragement, the family sold out and bought another farm near the
State Teachers’ College at Warrensburg, Missouri. Board and room could be had in
town for a dollar a day, but young Carnegie couldn’t afford it. So he stayed on the
10

farm and commuted on horseback three miles to college each day. At home, he
milked the cows, cut the wood, fed the hogs, and studied his Latin verbs by the light
of a coal-oil lamp until his eyes blurred and he began to nod.
Even when he got to bed at midnight, he set the alarm for three o’clock. His father
bred pedigreed Duroc-Jersey hogs - and there was danger, during the bitter cold
nights, that the young pigs would freeze to death; so they were put in a basket,
covered with a gunny sack, and set behind the kitchen stove. True to their nature,
the pigs demanded a hot meal at 3 A.M. So when the alarm went off, Dale Carnegie
crawled out of the blankets, took the basket of pigs out to their mother, waited for
them to nurse, and then brought them back to the warmth of the kitchen stove.
There were six hundred students in State Teachers’ College, and Dale Carnegie was
one of the isolated half-dozen who couldn’t afford to board in town. He was
ashamed of the poverty that made it necessary for him to ride back to the farm and
milk the cows every night. He was ashamed of his coat, which was too tight, and his
trousers, which were too short. Rapidly developing an inferiority complex, he
looked about for some shortcut to distinction. He soon saw that there were certain
groups in college that enjoyed influence and prestige - the football and baseball
players and the chaps who won the debating and public-speaking contests.
Realizing that he had no flair for athletics, he decided to win one of the speaking
contests. He spent months preparing his talks. He practiced as he sat in the saddle
galloping to college and back; he practiced his speeches as he milked the cows; and
then he mounted a bale of hay in the barn and with great gusto and gestures
harangued the frightened pigeons about the issues of the day.
But in spite of all his earnestness and preparation, he met with defeat after defeat.
He was eighteen at the time - sensitive and proud. He became so discouraged, so
depressed, that he even thought of suicide. And then suddenly he began to win, not
one contest, but every speaking contest in college.
Other students pleaded with him to train them; and they won also.
After graduating from college, he started selling correspondence courses to the
ranchers among the sand hills of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. In spite
of all his boundless energy and enthusiasm, he couldn’t make the grade. He became
so discouraged that he went to his hotel room in Alliance, Nebraska, in the middle
of the day, threw himself across the bed, and wept in despair. He longed to go back
11

to college, he longed to retreat from the harsh battle of life; but he couldn’t. So he
resolved to go to Omaha and get another job. He didn’t have the money for a
railroad ticket, so he traveled on a freight train, feeding and watering two carloads
of wild horses in return for his passage, After landing in south Omaha, he got a job
selling bacon and soap and lard for Armour and Company. His territory was up
among the Badlands and the cow and Indian country of western South Dakota. He
covered his territory by freight train and stage coach and horseback and slept in
pioneer hotels where the only partition between the rooms was a sheet of muslin.
He studied books on salesmanship, rode bucking bronchos, played poker with the
Indians, and learned how to collect money. And when, for example, an inland
storekeeper couldn’t pay cash for the bacon and hams he had ordered, Dale
Carnegie would take a dozen pairs of shoes off his shelf, sell the shoes to the
railroad men, and forward the receipts to Armour and Company.
He would often ride a freight train a hundred miles a day. When the train stopped to
unload freight, he would dash uptown, see three or four merchants, get his orders;
and when the whistle blew, he would dash down the street again lickety-split and
swing onto the train while it was moving.
Within two years, he had taken an unproductive territory that had stood in the
twenty-fifth place and had boosted it to first place among all the twenty-nine car
routes leading out of south Omaha. Armour and Company offered to promote him,
saying: “You have achieved what seemed impossible.” But he refused the
promotion and resigned, went to New York, studied at the American Academy of
Dramatic Arts, and toured the country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of
the Circus.
He would never be a Booth or a Barrymore. He had the good sense to recognize
that, So back he went to sales work, selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard
Motor Car Company.
He knew nothing about machinery and cared nothing about it. Dreadfully unhappy,
he had to scourge himself to his task each day. He longed to have time to study, to
write the books he had dreamed about writing back in college. So he resigned. He
was going to spend his days writing stories and novels and support himself by
teaching in a night school.
Teaching what? As he looked back and evaluated his college work, he saw that his
training in public speaking had done more to give him confidence, courage, poise
12

and the ability to meet and deal with people in business than had all the rest of his
college courses put together, so he urged the Y.M.C.A. schools in New York to give
him a chance to conduct courses in public speaking for people in business.
What? Make orators out of business people? Absurd. The Y.M.C.A. people knew.
They had tried such courses - and they had always failed. When they refused to pay
him a salary of two dollars a night, he agreed to teach on a commission basis and
take a percentage of the net profits - if there were any profits to take. And inside of
three years they were paying him thirty dollars a night on that basis - instead of two.
The course grew. Other "Ys" heard of it, then other cities. Dale Carnegie soon
became a glorified circuit rider covering New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and
later London and Paris. All the textbooks were too academic and impractical for the
business people who flocked to his courses. Because of this he wrote his own book
entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business. It became the official
text of all the Y.M.C.A.s as well as of the American Bankers’ Association and the
National Credit Men’s Association.
Dale Carnegie claimed that all people can talk when they get mad. He said that if
you hit the most ignorant man in town on the jaw and knock him down, he would
get on his feet and talk with an eloquence, heat and emphasis that would have
rivaled that world famous orator William Jennings Bryan at the height of his career.
He claimed that almost any person can speak acceptably in public if he or she has
self-confidence and an idea that is boiling and stewing within.
The way to develop self-confidence, he said, is to do the thing you fear to do and
get a record of successful experiences behind you. So he forced each class member
to talk at every session of the course. The audience is sympathetic. They are all in
the same boat; and, by constant practice, they develop a courage, confidence and
enthusiasm that carry over into their private speaking.
Dale Carnegie would tell you that he made a living all these years, not by teaching
public speaking - that was incidental. His main job was to help people conquer their
fears and develop courage.
He started out at first to conduct merely a course in public speaking, but the
students who came were business men and women. Many of them hadn’t seen the
inside of a classroom in thirty years. Most of them were paying their tuition on the
installment plan. They wanted results and they wanted them quick - results that they
13

could use the next day in business interviews and in speaking before groups.
So he was forced to be swift and practical. Consequently, he developed a system of
training that is unique - a striking combination of public speaking, salesmanship,
human relations and applied psychology.
A slave to no hard-and-fast rules, he developed a course that is as real as the
measles and twice as much fun.
When the classes terminated, the graduates formed clubs of their own and continued
to meet fortnightly for years afterward. One group of nineteen in Philadelphia met
twice a month during the winter season for seventeen years. Class members
frequently travel fifty or a hundred miles to attend classes. One student used to
commute each week from Chicago to New York. Professor William James of
Harvard used to say that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent
mental ability. Dale Carnegie, by helping business men and women to develop their
latent possibilities, created one of the most significant movements in adult
education
LOWELL THOMAS
1936

14

How This Book Was Written And Why
by Dale Carnegie
During the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century, the publishing houses of
America printed more than a fifth of a million different books. Most of them were
deadly dull, and many were financial failures. “Many,” did I say? The president of
one of the largest publishing houses in the world confessed to me that his company,
after seventy-five years of publishing experience, still lost money on seven out of
every eight books it published.
Why, then, did I have the temerity to write another book? And, after I had written it,
why should you bother to read it?
Fair questions, both; and I'll try to answer them.
I have, since 1912, been conducting educational courses for business and
professional men and women in New York. At first, I conducted courses in public
speaking only - courses designed to train adults, by actual experience, to think on
their feet and express their ideas with more clarity, more effectiveness and more
poise, both in business interviews and before groups.
But gradually, as the seasons passed, I realized that as sorely as these adults needed
training in effective speaking, they needed still more training in the fine art of
getting along with people in everyday business and social contacts.
I also gradually realized that I was sorely in need of such training myself. As I look
back across the years, I am appalled at my own frequent lack of finesse and
understanding. How I wish a book such as this had been placed in my hands twenty
years ago! What a priceless boon it would have been.
Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are
in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Research done a few years ago under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching uncovered a most important and significant fact - a
fact later confirmed by additional studies made at the Carnegie Institute of
Technology. These investigations revealed that even in such technical lines as
engineering, about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to one’s technical
knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering-to personality
and the ability to lead people.
15

For many years, I conducted courses each season at the Engineers’ Club of
Philadelphia, and also courses for the New York Chapter of the American Institute
of Electrical Engineers. A total of probably more than fifteen hundred engineers
have passed through my classes. They came to me because they had finally realized,
after years of observation and experience, that the highest-paid personnel in
engineering are frequently not those who know the most about engineering. One
can for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering, accountancy,
architecture or any other profession at nominal salaries. But the person who has
technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to
arouse enthusiasm among people-that person is headed for higher earning power.
In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said that “the ability to deal with
people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee.” “And I will pay more for
that ability,” said John D., “than for any other under the sun.”
Wouldn’t you suppose that every college in the land would conduct courses to
develop the highest-priced ability under the sun? But if there is just one practical,
common-sense course of that kind given for adults in even one college in the land,
it has escaped my attention up to the present writing.
The University of Chicago and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools conducted a survey to
determine what adults want to study.
That survey cost $25,000 and took two years. The last part of the survey was made
in Meriden, Connecticut. It had been chosen as a typical American town. Every
adult in Meriden was interviewed and requested to answer 156 questions—
questions such as “What is your business or profession? Your education? How do
you spend your spare time? What is your income? Your hobbies? Your ambitions?
Your problems? What subjects are you most interested in studying?” And so on.
That survey revealed that health is the prime interest of adults and that their second
interest is people; how to understand and get along with people; how to make
people like you; and how to win others to your way of thinking.
So the committee conducting this survey resolved to conduct such a course for
adults in Meriden. They searched diligently for a practical textbook on the subject
and found-not one. Finally they approached one of the world’s outstanding
authorities on adult education and asked him if he knew of any book that met the
needs of this group. “No,” he replied, "I know what those adults want. But the book
16

they need has never been written.”
I knew from experience that this statement was true, for I myself had been
searching for years to discover a practical, working handbook on human relations.
Since no such book existed, I have tried to write one for use in my own courses.
And here it is. I hope you like it.
In preparation for this book, I read everything that I could find on the subject—
everything from newspaper columns, magazine articles, records of the family
courts, the writings of the old philosophers and the new psychologists. In addition, I
hired a trained researcher to spend one and a half years in various libraries reading
everything I had missed, plowing through erudite tomes on psychology, poring over
hundreds of magazine articles, searching through countless biographies, trying to
ascertain how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with people. We read their
biographies, We read the life stories of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to
Thomas Edison. I recall that we read over one hundred biographies of Theodore
Roosevelt alone. We were determined to spare no time, no expense, to discover
every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages for winning
friends and influencing people.
I personally interviewed scores of successful people, some of them world-famousinventors like Marconi and Edison; political leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and
James Farley; business leaders like Owen D. Young; movie stars like Clark Gable
and Mary Pickford; and explorers like Martin Johnson—and tried to discover the
techniques they used in human relations.
From all this material, I prepared a short talk. I called it “How to Win Friends and
Influence People.” I say “short.” It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded
to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes. For years, I gave this talk
each season to the adults in the Carnegie Institute courses in New York.
I gave the talk and urged the listeners to go out and test it in their business and
social contacts, and then come back to class and speak about their experiences and
the results they had achieved. What an interesting assignment! These men and
women, hungry for self- improvement, were fascinated by the idea of working in a
new kind of laboratory - the first and only laboratory of human relationships for
adults that had ever existed.
This book wasn’t written in the usual sense of the word. It grew as a child grows. It
17

grew and developed out of that laboratory, out of the experiences of thousands of
adults.
Years ago, we started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard.
The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets,
each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experiment and
research came this book.
The rules we have set down here are not mere theories or guesswork. They work
like magic. Incredible as it sounds, I have seen the application of these principles
literally revolutionize the lives of many people.
To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he
had driven and criticized and condemned his employees without stint or discretion.
Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After
studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his
philosophy of life. His organization is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new
enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have
been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class:
“When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees
actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all
my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.”
This employer gained more profit, more leisure and—what is infinitely more
important—he found far more happiness in his business and in his home.
Countless numbers of salespeople have sharply increased their sales by the use of
these principles. Many have opened up new accounts—accounts that they had
formerly solicited in vain. Executives have been given increased authority,
increased pay. One executive reported a large increase in salary because he applied
these truths. Another, an executive in the Philadelphia Gas Works Company, was
slated for demotion when he was sixty-five because of his belligerence, because of
his inability to lead people skillfully. This training not only saved him from the
demotion but brought him a promotion with increased pay.
On innumerable occasions, spouses attending the banquet given at the end of the
course have told me that their homes have been much happier since their husbands
or wives started this training.
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People are frequently astonished at the new results they achieve. It all seems like
magic. In some cases, in their enthusiasm, they have telephoned me at my home on
Sundays because they couldn’t wait forty-eight hours to report their achievements at
the regular session of the course.
One man was so stirred by a talk on these principles that he sat far into the night
discussing them with other members of the class. At three o’clock in the morning,
the others went home. But he was so shaken by a realization of his own mistakes, so
inspired by the vista o a new and richer world opening before him, that he was
unable to sleep. He didn’t sleep that night or the next day or the next night.
Who was he? A naive, untrained individual ready to gush over any new theory that
came along? No, Far from it. He was a sophisticated, blasé dealer in art, very much
the man about town, who spoke three languages fluently and was a graduate of two
European universities.
While writing this chapter, I received a letter from a German of the old school, an
aristocrat whose forebears had served for generations as professional army officers
under the Hohenzollerns. His letter, written from a transatlantic steamer, telling
about the application of these principles, rose almost to a religious fervor.
Another man, an old New Yorker, a Harvard graduate, a wealthy man, the owner of
a large carpet factory, declared he had learned more in fourteen weeks through this
system of training about the fine art of influencing people than he had learned about
the same subject during his four years in college. Absurd? Laughable? Fantastic? Of
course, you are privileged to dismiss this statement with whatever adjective you
wish. I am merely reporting, without comment, a declaration made by a
conservative and eminently successful Harvard graduate in a public address to
approximately six hundred people at the Yale Club in New York on the evening of
Thursday, February 23, 1933.
“Compared to what we ought to be,” said the famous Professor William James of
Harvard, “compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are
making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the
thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses
powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use,”
Those powers which you “habitually fail to use”! The sole purpose of this book is to
help you discover, develop and profit by those dormant and unused assets.
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“Education,” said Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton University, “is
the ability to meet life’s situations.”
If by the time you have finished reading the first three chapters of this book—if you
aren’t then a little better equipped to meet life’s situations, then I shall consider this
book to be a total failure so far as you are concerned. For “the great aim of
education,” said Herbert Spencer, “is not knowledge but action.”
And this is an action book.
DALE CARNEGIE 1936

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Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book
1. If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is one indispensable
requirement, one essential infinitely more important than any rule or technique.
Unless you have this one fundamental requisite, a thousand rules on how to study
will avail little, And if you do have this cardinal endowment, then you can achieve
wonders without reading any suggestions for getting the most out of a book.
What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous
determination to increase your ability to deal with people.
How can you develop such an urge? By constantly reminding yourself how
important these principles are to you. Picture to yourself how their mastery will aid
you in leading a richer, fuller, happier and more fulfilling life. Say to yourself over
and over: "My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small
extent upon my skill in dealing with people.”
2. Read each chapter rapidly at first to get a bird's-eye view of it. You will probably
be tempted then to rush on to the next one. But don’t—unless you are reading
merely for entertainment. But if you are reading because you want to increase your
skill in human relations, then go back and reread each chapter thoroughly. In the
long run, this will mean saving time and getting results.
3. Stop frequently in your reading to think over what you are reading. Ask yourself
just how and when you can apply each suggestion.
4. Read with a crayon, pencil, pen, magic marker or highlighter in your hand. When
you come across a suggestion that you feel you can use, draw a line beside it. If it is
a four-star suggestion, then underscore every sentence or highlight it, or mark it
with “****.” Marking and underscoring a book makes it more interesting, and far
easier to review rapidly.
5. I knew a woman who had been office manager for a large insurance concern for
fifteen years. Every month, she read all the insurance contracts her company had
issued that month. Yes, she read many of the same contracts over month after
month, year after year. Why? Because experience had taught her that that was the
only way she could keep their provisions clearly in mind.
I once spent almost two years writing a book on public speaking and yet I found I
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