How to Win Friends and Influence People

Summary ##

The prototype self help book / click bait article.

Ways to manipulate people and win your way: handle them, make them like you, win them to your way of thinking, and change them.

## Why I picked it up ##

It's a classic. It's so classic it's a meme. It's been on my to-read list probably since before I was born.

## Who recommended it to me ##

Society.

## Who I'd recommend it to ##

The historically curious.

## What I liked ##

I liked the very first part, because it was about ways to conduct yourself: don't complain, don't criticize, recognize the good in people, appreciate their point of view.

## What I didn't like ##

Each subsequent chapter and part after that grew more and more to be about ways to manipulate others, and consequently less and less enjoyable to read about. I think there was an accumulative effect of "ickiness" that I felt after reading chapter after chapter of little ways to treat people as resources to tap, obstacles to surmount.

Also the part when he congratulated Rockefeller's address to the coal mine strikers in Colorado? Amazingly tone deaf, insensitive, and inappropriate to leave out the other primary way he won the strikers over to his side: convince the US National Guard to wholesale murder entire families of innocents.

Reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

After that point, the rest of the book felt really tasteless to me, and couldn't quite escape the feeling that this was a book by, about, and for the Carnegies, Rockellers, Roosevelts, and Schwabs of the world: rich successful businessmen in the 1910s and 1920s.

Nitpick: this version of the audiobook had this constant trumpeting fanfare at odd parts of the recording. I wonder if it wasn't originally to signify the end of the side of a cassette tape to urge the listener to turn the tape over.

## What I want to remember ##

- Don't criticize, don't argue