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
Carnegie’s friend became engaged at 40 and took dancing lessons with his fiancée. The first teacher said he did not dance well, but the second teacher told him that his fundamentals were right, and that he wouldn’t have trouble learning a few steps. The first teacher discouraged him by emphasizing mistakes, whereas the second teacher praised the things he did right and told him he was a natural-born dancer. He knows she was trying to be nice, but he became a better dancer because she said so. She encouraged him and made him want to improve. Carnegie found the same thing when someone encouraged him that he would have a natural flair for bridge.
This chapter provides further examples of the idea that positivity is always better than negativity. The first teacher called attention to the man’s mistakes, and as a result, he got discouraged. The second teacher, by contrast, encouraged him and made him believe that he could get better. Only encouragement and minimizing his mistakes allowed him to improve, whereas criticism nearly made him give up.
Themes
Speaking of bridge, famous bridge teacher Ely Culbertson came to America in 1922 and tried to get several jobs but failed at all of them. He played some bridge, but he was a poor card player and asked many questions about each round after it was played, frustrating his fellow players. Then he met a bridge teacher, fell in love with her, and married her. She told him that he analyzed his cards meticulously and was a genius at the game—this encouraged him to teach bridge professionally.
Culbertson’s story is very similar to Carnegie’s friend’s story. Initially, people were frustrated with Culbertson’s gameplay and as a result, he felt discouraged. But his wife’s encouragement, by contrast, helped to foster his talent, and as a result, led him to great success—again highlighting the power of encouragement over criticism.
Themes
Clarence Jones found that making faults seem easy to correct completely changed his son’s life. His son was badly scarred in a car accident and spent most of his childhood in special education classes—he was two years behind his age group. But he loved to work on radio and TV sets and wanted to be a TV technician. His dad encouraged him and pointed out that he needed math to qualify for training.
Jones not only focused on encouraging his son, but he also adopted the strategies that Carnegie proposed in the first part of the book. Seeing things from his son’s perspective (knowing that he wanted to be a TV technician) helped him convince his son to improve at math.
Themes
To help David, Jones made flashcards for the multiplication and division tables, repeating the cards until David got each one right. He made a big deal out of each card David got right, and gradually they reduced his time for going through the cards. In this way, David discovered that learning was easy and fun. His grades in algebra improved significantly, and his reading and drawing also improved. He later won a city-wide science fair and remained on the honor roll through high school, proving that he could easily correct his mistakes and changing his whole life.
Again, Carnegie emphasizes the transformative power of encouragement. Not only did David improve in math, but he also learned a much more valuable lesson in realizing that learning could be fun. This encouragement then led him to improve all around, to the point that he was able to live up to his full potential.
Themes
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