How to Win Friends and Influence People: Part 4, Chapter 8 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.

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.

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.

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.