How To Win Friends And Influence People, the 1936 book that started the modern self-help movement, will be of particular benefit to you if you fall into any of the following categories: 1) You live in the 1930s; 2) You are a hard-working 1930s businessman looking to land that promotion, or show your appreciation of your wife, whose vocation is cooking your meals and helping you out of your 1930s coat each evening; 3) You are a hard-working 1930s businessman who doesn't yet have a wife but wants to ingratiate himself with a certain pretty "salesgirl" at the department store where you buy your 1930s coats.
In other words, it's a bit dated. Yet, extraordinarily, Dale Carnegie's book continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year, has never been out of print and, at the time of writing, is the 13th most popular self-help book on Amazon. The total number of copies sold is creeping towards 20m. Evidently, something about it still appeals strongly, so I thought I'd investigate.
"That's £7.99, please," said the man in the bookshop. I muttered a thank you. Had I read the book, I'd have looked him in the eye, smiled and said, "Thank you, Neil! I really appreciate your helping me today, Neil. Why don't you tell me a bit about yourself, Neil?"
Carnegie's rules for smooth social interaction and success in life involve never criticising other people openly, praising them at every opportunity, and "becoming genuinely interested" in their jobs and hobbies, which is a laudable goal, except that in Carnegie's own examples it never amounts to anything more than pretending to be fascinated. "Always make the other person feel important," Carnegie writes. Oh, and: "Remember that a person's name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language."
All this is either brilliantly empathetic, or coldly manipulative: I can't figure out which. Cigar-chomping captains of industry are saluted for keeping their workers productive through nothing but charm; the mining baron John D Rockefeller is praised for subduing striking workers by making them feel wanted - as opposed to, say, increasing their wages. The truculent British part of my brain kept objecting to this as horribly fake, even as the other part pointed out that "fake it till you make it" is a perfectly acceptable way of going about things.
The problem is not so much the initial fakery as the self-consciousness it induces. Watching yourself all day as you fine-tune your methods of interacting with people is a near-perfect way of driving yourself insane; eventually, you give up and slip back into living your life instead of watching yourself live it, at which point you revert to your natural temperament. Some have suggested my natural temperament involves an element of grumpiness. Usually, I'd reject this crossly, but having read Carnegie - who says you should never tell another person they're wrong - I'd like to say: You're right! That's fascinating. Now, tell me about yourself.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
