How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

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One of my favorite books. I highly recommend that everybody who has Autism or Aspergers should read it (or listen to the audiobook).

It can significantly help your social skills, as it has done for me.

It's aload of toss

Bribe people. it's a book on how to be a cocksucker.

I don't like the idea of 'winning' affection......I prefer to actually get to know people who are open minded about me, and just avoid those who dismiss me as someone they want nothing to do with. Maybe I am taking the title too literally.......but that is what it suggests to me so I assume I won't like the book and probably won't read it.

Laz: One of the main points of the book is to serve the interests of the people who you want to serve your interests; mutuality. Carnegie never expressed directly or indirectly that you need to be servile or "kiss up" to gain friends.

Sweetleaf: You can't judge a book simply by its title. The words "win" and "influence" could be associated to some people with the word "manipulation", but this book is far from that.

I've read it. It does provide an interesting point of view on social interaction and relating to people. It's not the end-all-be-all that the title suggests, but I agree that it is a worthy read.

I've read it, found it useful, if a bit overlong (most books are) and labours every point. I'd recommend borrowing it, reading the chapter titles and subheadings, then taking it back.

I agree, it is not the end-all solution. It's helpful. The reward doesn't come in reading it. It comes in executing it.

This is a terrible book that teaches a person to be a passive-aggressive manipulator.
It should be called "How to lose friends and be a passive-aggressive f***"

load of crap, it just tells you to be insincere and fake interest in people. I even read it before uni and tried to follow it and a bitchy friend of mine complained that I seemed fake and she could see i was doing social skills by rote. it might work for NT salesmen, but not for aspies.

Hmm, I can't remember the wording, but there's a difference between being interested and smiling, and faking interest and smiling. I know a lot of people might think that you can't be interested without actually being naturally interested, or you can't smile properly without naturally smiling, but I find that's not entirely true.

True, but the cocksuckers are getting ahead in life.

I remember the book being more about business, like it said if you meet a man at a lunch who can help you with your business, and he likes stamps, then ask him lots of questions about stamp collecting, and he will remember you and like you. bit manipulative I thought. I prefer the books about making real friendships, like getting to know people and sharing information/disclosing about each other in conversations.

Finding common ground is a common way to connect to people in all kinds of relationships. I think in the NT world, people are always forming these little emotional connections, even in the sphere of business. It's about creating rapport. Ideally, you find something to bond over that you are both honestly interested in talking about. Win Win.

I used to think such things were a bit dishonest, then I learned that emotions are just another kind of information, and that you don't need to be dishonest in order to wish to create good feeling between yourself and those you relate to. Just an honest desire to create good feeling.

You can use the information to be manipulative. Or you can use that in an honest way. Like any information, you need to assess it and integrate it into your own way of doing things, and discard what doesn't work.

I don't even recall the book very well, so it might well be really awful. I don't remember it being utterly awful though, or a manipulation bible.

For those reading the title too literally, note the book was written in 1937 and they had different speech patterns then, especially in written form. The audio book preface actually goes so far as to explain this.

I listened to both the abridged and unabridged audio books. The unabridged version was better in that it contained much better information about how and why things work. The second half got very tedious for me personally, because it mainly kept repeating the same information over and over and applying it to only slightly different scenarios that, in my mind, should be common sense.

It also got into things that I found extremely difficult, and was never able to try in practice because they were so far out of my comfort zone and involved the ability to "think on my feet". While I found them fascinating to hear about, it was also a reminder of how far I am behind others in that regard.

Overall, though, it is one of the best I've heard / read, and I've been through quite a few.

We Aspies have our special interests, and this book just demonstrates that from another person's perspective, talking only about your special interest looks one-sided. Whether it is business or personal friendships, genuinely trying to find a compromise in a negotiation looks friendly and is the unselfish thing to do. That can be viewed as manipulative if you make a compromise to benefit only your interests. Being legitimately friendly involves taking an interest in someone else's interests, including sports, even if you don't like them. Those people who like sports don't necessarily want to hear about model trains, but they may just become interested if you put up with sports for a bit. The book hints at these things frequently through business scenarios.

I think it's a good book.
I think "The Art of War" is the evil, manipulative book. (Read it as a defensive measure only)

I actually already read this book (well, the first half anyway), but i hated it.
what it is telling me is that to make friends, i got to be a complete and utter A-hole to them; which makes no sense and goes against myself, so this does not work for me; all it did was tell my why i didn't have friends in high school, turns out, i was the jerk; in this writers eyes...:S