Hey guys what is up welcome back to my blog I’m so thankful that you guys took the time out of your day to read my blog post. Hope you all are safe from the COVID-19. I have been reading a lot of books in quarantine and How to win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie offers some really good advice on how to deal with the different types of people in the world.
The book speaks about the qualities that leaders need to have and the most important thing to remember when reading the book is that it is not ‘Fake it till you make it’ rather it tells people how to handle things and be genuine while doing it. Some people I feel really misunderstand the book and force themselves to follow the rules of the book without actually having any of genuine empathy or compassion for the other person. The book gives you basic and easy outlines such as ‘Don’t criticize, complain or condemn’ or ‘Give honest and sincere appreciation’. Emphasis on honest and sincere. The book goes deep into each of these basic guidelines providing you with stories and experiences of real people who took this course from the author Dale Carnegie himself. The wisdom in the book is really timeless and evergreen. These guidelines are so profound and yet so simple. I will discuss some points from the book right now.
My personal favourite was ‘Don’t criticize, complain or condemn’ because I personally connect with it the most. I think that I complain the most among my friends. You could give me a topic and I would rant on and on about it. Try it if you want to. DM me a topic on any of my social media and I for sure will write you a good rant about it focusing on all the negatives. I have heard these teachings any other places too especially in ancient Vedic texts which explain that one should control the tongue as it is the root cause of all arguments. Controlling the tongue is very difficult because we all are taught to speak our minds. What we weren’t taught is that we should consider who we are speaking to before opening our mouths. Teaching a donkey the physics of the universe is fruitless. Similarly we should consider who are speaking to and if they have the mental capacity to understand our words only then do we speak. Now that that’s out of the way let’s get to complaining and criticizing. A necessary skill is that I picked up is that we should never complain when we are in the heat of the moment. Because decisions made in emotions are always bad. Instead keep your mouth tight shut and let your anger cool off, then reflect on the situation and you will see that you won’t even want to complain anymore. Same for criticism and condemn.
Another point that I liked was ‘Give honest and sincere appreciation’. These points teach the 2 extremes of knowing when to speak and when not to. In this case you need to know what to speak. I never appreciated any work that I saw. Everything I saw was just another ‘thing’ to me. Practicing this was fairly easy. I’m sure this isn’t the way it’s meant to implemented but when scrolling through your Instagram feed or explore page, when you like something don’t just leave a 100 emoji or a thumbs up instead just type a few words about what and why you liked the post. This gives the creator a genuine smile on their face (Trust me I have experienced that feeling). When we just press the like button because it’s ‘whatever’ we’re actually hindering our ability to see the good in other in real life. A way to practice this in real life is when you see someone or when someone shows you their work, find a thing that you genuinely like and point it out that it was done great. Even if you are shown a video that was horrible, irrelevant, or some other mess up but if you see that the text animations are well done, point it out and then tell them what’s wrong with the other things. Remember as Dale says in the book don’t use ‘but’ after the compliment use ‘and’. The word ‘But’ often makes people feel that the praise isn’t genuine.
The book is definitely a must read for all people. It’s basically a guide to life in the most pure way possible with tons and tons of examples that you can personally connect to. I highly recommend the book so please check it out and send me your realizations after you read it.
So that is it for this post guys hope you got some value from this. Thank you guys for reading to the end hit me up on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn with your thoughts and if you have any ideas which I should write about. Stay safe from the COVID-19. Thank you again and I’ll see you all next week.
Harshit's reviews 