The fourteenth book that I have finished reading this year is Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. When I was in secondary school, a friend recommended this book to me. To this day, it is still widely popular; when I was reading this book in the airport, the passenger in front of me also had this book in his hands. In the process of writing this book, Carnegie and his assistant read biographies of many successful people (including US presidents) to discover which similar traits lead them to their positions. The answer is simple: put yourself in the other person’s shoes, be a good listener, don’t force your ideas upon others, let them do the talking/thinking and respect their opinions. Easier said than done, really. When I was reading, I felt that I knew all these methods, but it remains difficult to apply them at every occasion (well, that’s not the expectation either). Maybe I should stick some of these suggestions in my room to constantly remind myself (lol).?

Another thing that stands out is the idea of “thinking for the other person” rather than “getting something out of that person for yourself”. The building blocks of a healthy relationship are genuine appreciation and trust rather than calculations of gains and losses. In that sense, praise is also an essential ingredient to encouragement; of course, it has to be sincere praise, not flattery. If we adjust our mindsets to dwell less on the successes and failures, and to enjoy the warmth of good relations (see how I used ‘a(chǎn)nd’ instead of ‘but’), life might be less stressful.?

Despite the many useful advices in this book, as a trained researcher I cannot be 100% convinced by its anecdotal nature. Most of the examples given are real life cases that occurred to students on Carnegie’s course, or from biographies of politicians. However, there is no statistical evidence whatsoever, calling the reliability and validity of this book into question; how do I know the percentage of people who built good relationships using these methods? Are there any control groups? Of course, I can imagine if evidence from psychology research are incorporated, the jargon would simply bore readers who are not familiar with these terms. In that case, I think Jane McGonigal did a much better job in her book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”, which I had read in 2021. She balances descriptions of the games she developed with the results of her research, reaching a sweet equilibrium. Perhaps contemporary researchers can verify the methods in this book using well-planned studies and write a book similar to Brown, Roediger III and McDaniel’s “make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning” to satisfy the thirst for authentic experimental data (maybe this is already being done).