Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Win Friends and Influence People, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Interest vs. Selflessness
Importance and Humility
Positivity vs. Negativity
Sincerity and Appreciation vs. Insincerity and Flattery
Summary
Analysis
People have more faith in their own ideas than in others’ ideas. Rather than ramming one’s opinions down another person’s throat, it’s wiser to make suggestions and let the other person come to their own conclusion. Once, Adolph Seltz, a sales manager in a car showroom, met with his sales team. He asked what they expected of him, and he wrote their ideas down. Then, he asked what he should expect from them, and their responses came quick and fast: honesty, initiative, optimism, and teamwork. They left the meeting with much more energy than if he had told them what he expected of them—people like to feel that they are acting of their own accord.
Branching off of the previous chapter, Carnegie transitions to another lesson in humility. Proposing ideas and taking credit for them only makes you feel important, while others feel like they are left without agency. Instead, it’s important to maintain humility yourself, inviting collaboration as in the example with Adolph Seltz. While he could have come up with expectations for his team, the fact that they came up with their own expectations for themselves made them more enthusiastic about fulfilling them.
Themes
Eugene Wesson made sketches for a studio that created designs for textile manufacturers. After 150 failed attempts to sell his sketches, he took a new approach: he gave the manufacturers several unfinished sketches and asked how he should finish them so that the manufacturers could use them. They gave him suggestions and he finished them accordingly—and they bought them all. By asking for their ideas, Wesson was able to succeed.
In Wesson’s case, rather than believing his work was flawless and blaming the company for his failure, he accepted input and let the company sell itself on his sketches. Being humble about his ideas in this way allowed him to be more successful.
Themes
One manufacturer found the same success when asking doctors how to improve their X-ray machines—the doctors’ input improved the machines and then made the doctors want to buy them, because they appreciated their own ideas.
Similarly, this manufacturer was able to create a better product by inviting input from doctors. It also enabled the company to sell its products more widely, illustrating the benefit of humility.
Themes
Colonel Edward M. House was very influential in national affairs when President Wilson occupied the White House. He found that the best way to convince Wilson of an idea was to plant it in his mind casually, so as to interest him in it of his own accord. It was also important that House didn’t care about getting credit for his own ideas; he instead simply wanted to enact the idea in the first place.
Here, Carnegie emphasizes that humility is crucial. It doesn’t matter to House that he gets credit for his ideas—the most important part is that his ideas are used at all. In addition, this helps him maintain a good relationship with Wilson, whereas insisting that Wilson use his ideas or claiming credit for them would only have caused resentment.
Themes
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Carnegie experienced this himself: he planned on fishing and canoeing on a trip to New Brunswick. He wrote the tourist bureau for information and was bombarded with advertisements. Then, one camp owner sent him the names of several New Yorkers who stayed at his camp and invited Carnegie to call them himself and ask about their experience there. The camp let him sell himself on the idea—and as a result, it was the one that Carnegie visited.
Carnegie even experienced this from the perspective of the consumer. Because the company asked him to form an opinion, simply steering him in the right direction, he felt much more important and autonomous when making the decision. And in this way, they were able to get his business.
Themes
Carnegie concludes the chapter with a metaphor from Lao-tse: that rivers and seas receive the tributes of mountain streams because they keep themselves lower than the streams. “So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them.”
This metaphor and quote sum up the importance of humility, highlighting how the most powerful rivers and seas only have that power because they’re lower than the mountain streams. As such, people must do the same: to have true power and wisdom, one must remain humble.
Themes
