How to win friends and influence people (pt 1/4)

A few months ago a friend recommended me a book and when he said his name my eyes opened and I looked at him suspiciously, "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.

The first time I heard the name I could not help thinking that the only thing that book could give me was a tool to impersonate someone and thus get their influence. I was completely wrong.

A while later the same friend gave me a version adapted for the digital era of that book for my birthday. The first thing that came to mind was that he thought I had no friends and much worse that I didn't know how to get them. Again, I was completely wrong.

When I started reading it, I realized that this wonderful book is nothing more than a mere collection of all the things we would like to do but that many times the whirlwind of the society in which we live does not allow us to do so.

That is why I felt compelled to gather my opinions about this book and each of its chapters. I will divide the book into its 4 parts. In this article I will talk about the 1st part, briefly explaining chapter by chapter what this beautiful book left me.

Index
Part one
Bury your boomerang.
Affirm the good.
Connect with intrinsic desires.

1.A. Bury your boomerang.
Every time we find ourselves in a situation of discussion with someone it is very likely that we will seek to demonstrate that our position is better than that of the other, and we will use everything we have in our power to achieve it, even a criticism.

At the time of criticizing the first thing the person will feel is the need to defend themselves and most likely do so with another attack, starting a huge snowball that never ends unless someone hides his boomerang and cuts the cycle or not I started it.

1 B. Affirm the good.
We all have the innate desire to know that we are valued, no matter how strong and resistant we are to the outside world, there is nothing that pleases us more than feeling that in the context in which we develop we are truly valued.

This chapter tells the story of a person who had problems to be sure of what he could do but with but with the simple phrase "You are one of the bravest people I know" it was enough for that person to give a minimum step to show his ability

What struck me most in this chapter was not the phrase, but whoever said it was a person who throughout the story remains positive and marks the good of others. If at any moment he detects something bad, he transforms it in a very genuine way into an opportunity for change both for him and for the other person.

1 C. Connect with intrinsic desires.
I am very "lucky" to have ideas all the time, most of them sound excellent in my head but at the time of carrying them out I realize that they are not as excellent as I thought.

After going through many of them and having read this book I realized that to deliver true value in what I do I have to connect with the intrinsic desire of the person who can get to use my idea, understand what it really wants . This can be extrapolated to any type of relationship, understand what the other person really wants puts us in context and probably helps us understand how we could help them.

This chapter tells the story of how R.W. Emerson, American philosopher and poet, who along with his son were trying to get a calf into the corral but the calf refused to enter. The girl who works with them in the house sees everything from afar and approaches the calf by extending her thumb and letting the calf turn on him as if it were the mother's tit, thus making him enter in a quiet way into the corral.

If a book could judge each of us by a single sentence, what would it think?
Hopefully one day this wonderful book will come to your hands and make you think how you did it with me.

In the coming weeks I will be uploading the rest of the opinions on the other chapters, follow me on twitter (@jcburolleau) to be aware!