how a person from a poor family taught America to think positively, smile and listen to his interlocutor

135 years ago, on November 24, 1888, Dale Carnegie, author of one of the most popular books in the self-help genre, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” was born. Over the decades since its publication, more than 30 million copies have been purchased, placing it among the top 50 best-selling books in history.

The impact that Dale Carnegie had on America can best be seen in American films and TV series. Their characters constantly smile at each other, nod enthusiastically while listening to their interlocutor, and convince people in whose lives some kind of crisis has occurred that the main thing is to pull themselves together and look positively into the future. If you watch old American cinema, it will become clear that this was not always the case.

And all these communication skills were taught to Americans to a large extent by Dale Carnegie, who came from a family of poor farmers, who worried a lot as a child and was afraid of dying of hunger. Now he is called one of the founders of the self-help genre – books about personal growth, self-help, self-knowledge, and so on.

Dale Carnegie himself was not initially a successful and popular person. His book was the result of overcoming his own “ordinariness” and shyness. Carnegie believed that this is why his book will help ordinary people in life and give them tools with which they will become more noticeable and interesting to others.

Farmer speaker

Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 into a family of impoverished farmers near Maryville, Missouri. He later recalled his early years as a very dark time. Parents had to work 16 hours a day, crops were often lost due to floods, and cholera killed pigs. So the family was unable to get out of debt year after year.

As a child, Dale himself was a shy, awkward boy who, according to his own recollections, was constantly worried that the family would lose the farm or that they would have nothing to eat.

After graduating from school, he continued his education at a modest state teacher’s college in the city of Warrensburg in the same Missouri. Almost its only advantage was that education there was free. During his college years, Carnegie was embarrassed by his shabby clothes and the fact that he did not have money to live in the city, so he rode a horse from the farm to class every day.

True, Dale was distinguished in some ways even then – his teachers and college comrades noted his oratorical talent. Carnegie later said that he acquired his first speaking skills at religious meetings and city events, where popular preachers, entrepreneurs and lecturers sometimes spoke.

At the school, he actively participated in public debates and oratorical competitions organized there with other educational institutions. And already in his second year he became the vice-president of the school – a rare achievement for a sophomore. He continued to be ashamed of his poor clothes, but he found something that could outweigh his appearance in the eyes of others – charm and ability to speak.

Dale Carnegie courses

After college, Carnegie began working—not as a teacher, but as a traveling salesman. Biographers note that this work helped him develop his abilities – after all, now he needed not to out-argue his opponent in educational debates, but to effectively convince people to buy various goods. Carnegie later said that during these years he made some of the conclusions that would later form the basis of his book: smile more, listen to others more, argue less, praise the choices people make.

They say that at the same time he was reading books on psychology that were published in those years. Carnegie wanted to further improve his skills – and in 1911, at the age of 23, he went to New York, enrolling in a six-month drama course. Then he traveled around the country for some time with a troupe of traveling actors.

But still, Dale Carnegie saw in himself the talent of a lecturer who could teach people the art of oratory, and not an actor. And already in 1912, he began teaching what would later become the “Dale Carnegie Course” and form the basis of his famous book. At first, at the Christian volunteer organization YMCA, they didn’t really believe in his success, and the first lectures really didn’t attract many listeners.

However, quite quickly, Carnegie’s lectures began to attract more and more people. Self-development and the desire to become successful were popular in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. So by 1914, Carnegie was earning $500 a week from his lectures (equivalent to about $15,000 today).

His lectures were something between a lecture on public speaking, training for people who want to learn how to sell or simply become more confident, and a session of collective psychotherapy, where listeners willingly talked about themselves.

In the process of teaching, Carnegie came to some conclusions that would later form the basis of his main book. One of the conclusions is that people really like to talk about themselves.

The poor and even average halls were forgotten. Lectures began to take place in perhaps the most famous hall in New York – Carnegie Hall, a gift to the city from steel magnate and billionaire Andrew Carnegie, almost Dale’s namesake.

The surnames were pronounced almost identically (the only difference was the emphasis), but they were written differently. Andrew was Carnegie, Dale was Carnagey. In 1922, Dale decided to correct this confusion and also began to sign Carnegie, deciding that this way students would associate the courses with a successful and wealthy family.

It cannot be said that these were the only courses in his life. During the First World War, he managed to serve for some time in the army – although in the United States itself. After the war he traveled around Europe. Married twice. The first marriage lasted only a few years. Carnegie married for the second time in 1944, at the age of 55, and this marriage lasted until his death.

His second wife was 32-year-old Dorothy Price Vanderpool, who after Carnegie’s death guarded his legacy and began writing books on self-development herself. Among other things, she wrote a book with a title no less long than her husband’s: “How to Help Your Husband Achieve Success in Social and Business Life.”

How to win friends

In the 1920s, Carnegie already had several public speaking schools in different US cities. Also during these years, Carnegie published several books on this topic, for example, Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men (1926). They sold well, but they were far from the success of his main book.

Another topic on which he loved to write books was biographies of famous people. Carnegie believed that such books were a good way to understand the secret of success of these famous and successful people. For example, he wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, as well as collections of short—and motivating—biographies of various figures.

Finally, in 1936, the New York publishing house Simon & Schuster published the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It immediately became a bestseller. A million copies were sold within the first year.

It is difficult to meet a person who has never encountered the advice from this book in any form. Smile and call people by name more often. Show a keen interest in people and their hobbies. Listen more to your interlocutor and speak less yourself. Try not to criticize people, but praise them more often. Pretend that the good idea you expressed actually occurred to your interlocutor.

A review in The New York Times—generally quite positive of the book—described its advice as both sound and superficial. Carnegie, among other things, based his theory on the fact that people proceed not only – and not so much – from rational considerations, but from emotions and desires. And also on the fact that people just want a little attention to themselves, recognition of their importance, sincere or at least seemingly so interest.

The book came out at a time when millions of Americans were looking for at least some opportunity to become more successful and improve something in their lives.

In 1948, Carnegie published another book that became famous, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Apparently, the experience of constant anxiety and uncertainty that he himself went through in his youth influenced him.

Dale Carnegie died in 1955 at the age of 66. By this time, the circulation of his book exceeded 5 million. It was released in 31 languages. And his courses, which by that time were called the “Dale Carnegie Institute,” were in 750 American cities, and 450 thousand people graduated from them. Among the book’s fans are such different people as a billionaire Warren Buffett and cult founder and serial killer Charles Manson.

One of the biographies of Mikhail Gorbachev says that only after reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” did he begin to understand Americans better and negotiate more effectively with them. And US President Lyndon Johnson in his youth from 1963 to 1969 taught public speaking courses using the Carnegie method for some time.

A manipulative person?

The book has always had many not only admirers, but also ill-wishers. One of the main complaints expressed from the very beginning is the glorification, according to critics, of outright insincerity and even cynicism. They pointed out that, according to Carnegie, it does not matter whether the thoughts and hobbies of the interlocutor are important to you, the main thing is to feign interest in them.

Among the active critics was the American writer Sinclair Lewis. He said that Carnegie was essentially teaching people a kind of fraud: “Smile and pretend to be interested in people’s hobbies for the sole purpose of extracting something from them.”

And the American psychologist Everett Leo Shostrom even published a book, “The Manipulative Man,” in which he argued primarily with Carnegie’s ideas. By the way, for the first time in Russian it was published under the title “Anti-Carnegie”.

According to critics, the advice from Carnegie’s book only helps to learn how to communicate superficially and create the appearance of success, and not to truly make friends and achieve something in life. As the American historian Donald Meyer, who devoted the book to various areas of pop psychology and “positive thinking,” noted, “as far as how to win friends, one of the characteristic features of this famous book is that it says practically nothing about friendship.” .

Some critics said that Carnegie himself could hardly be called a man surrounded by a large number of friends. At the same time, many people who knew Carnegie noted that he himself was quite consistent: he was friendly, attentive, and a pleasant person to talk to. He himself has repeatedly insisted that his book and methodology are not a “bag of tricks”, but a “new way of life” that must be sincerely accepted.

Many critics speak of Carnegie as the founder of the entire movement of self-development and self-help, which is regularly criticized for its absolutization of positive thinking, the idea that it is enough to simply take life into your own hands, and the combination of selfish narcissism with the requirement to be effective and constantly improve. In general, for all those shortcomings with which modern pop psychology is associated.

However, Dale Carnegie personally, with his rather simple and fairly sound advice, is unlikely to be responsible for such a development of self-help literature.

We must also understand that the book was published in a completely different society with different ideas about life. Stephen Watts, author of the 2013 biography of Carnegie, Self-Help Messiah, credits How to Win Friends and Influence People with making a significant contribution to the transformation of America. According to Watts, it contributed to the transition of American society from “Victorian” strict morality and restraint to a modern format of self-realization, consumption and following one’s desires.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya