IRB 2: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

For my second IRB I am choosing to read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.  I stumbled upon this title when searching simply good non-fiction books.  The title stood out to me, being an odd title, and so I chose to look into it.  This book was one of the first ever self-help books.  It was started in the 1930s as an edited transcript of what Dale Carnegie said at one of his talks.  From there it grew to be one of the most famous books of its genre.  Dale Carnegie was a successful businessman turned lecturer.  When he became a lecturer he was even more successful even spurring Dale Carnegie training, which is still around to this day.  Carnegie put many people through his training including Warren Buffet who was so influenced by it that he still hangs the diploma on his wall.  This book has been revised most recently in 1981 with new anecdotes but still the majority of the ideas have not changed and only a couple was omitted.  This pair of sections included a section on how to write good business letters, which was the shortest in the entire book, and also a section on how to have a better marital life.  I do not know why these sections were omitted but they work out to be more positive for me as I am not yet married and letters in business are essentially obsolete.   This book was written with the intent of helping people to better themselves.  Its ideas can be stretched to any number of topics from business to everyday life because although the situation may change the general idea of it will not.  This book is a way of understanding how to succeed in the world by understanding how it works.