How To Win Friends And Influence People | Page 2

complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts
smooth and pleasant.
• 7. Become a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
• 8. Arouse enthusiasm among your associates.

This book has done all these things for more than ten million readers
in thirty-six languages.

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Preface to Revised Edition

How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published in 1937
in an edition of only five thousand copies. Neither Dale Carnegie nor
the publishers, Simon and Schuster, anticipated more than this
modest sale. To their amazement, the book became an overnight
sensation, and edition after edition rolled off the presses to keep up
with the increasing public demand. Now to Win Friends and
InfEuence People took its place in publishing history as one of the
all-time international best-sellers. It touched a nerve and filled a
human need that was more than a faddish phenomenon of post-
Depression days, as evidenced by its continued and uninterrupted
sales into the eighties, almost half a century later.

Dale Carnegie used to say that it was easier to make a million dollars
than to put a phrase into the English language. How to Win Friends
and Influence People became such a phrase, quoted, paraphrased,
parodied, used in innumerable contexts from political cartoon to
novels. The book itself was translated into almost every known
written language. Each generation has discovered it anew and has
found it relevant.

Which brings us to the logical question: Why revise a book that has
proven and continues to prove its vigorous and universal appeal?
Why tamper with success?

To answer that, we must realize that Dale Carnegie himself was a
tireless reviser of his own work during his lifetime. How to Win
Friends and Influence People was written to be used as a textbook
for his courses in Effective Speaking and Human Relations and is still
used in those courses today. Until his death in 1955 he constantly
improved and revised the course itself to make it applicable to the
evolving needs of an every-growing public. No one was more

sensitive to the changing currents of present-day life than Dale
Carnegie. He constantly improved and refined his methods of
teaching; he updated his book on Effective Speaking several times.
Had he lived longer, he himself would have revised How to Win
Friends and Influence People to better reflect the changes that have
taken place in the world since the thirties.

Many of the names of prominent people in the book, well known at
the time of first publication, are no longer recognized by many of
today's readers. Certain examples and phrases seem as quaint and
dated in our social climate as those in a Victorian novel. The
important message and overall impact of the book is weakened to
that extent.

Our purpose, therefore, in this revision is to clarify and strengthen
the book for a modern reader without tampering with the content.
We have not "changed" How to Win Friends and Influence People
except to make a few excisions and add a few more contemporary
examples. The brash, breezy Carnegie style is intact-even the thirties
slang is still there. Dale Carnegie wrote as he spoke, in an intensively
exuberant, colloquial, conversational manner.

So his voice still speaks as forcefully as ever, in the book and in his
work. Thousands of people all over the world are being trained in
Carnegie courses in increasing numbers each year. And other
thousands are reading and studying How to Win Friends and
lnfluence People and being inspired to use its principles to better
their lives. To all of them, we offer this revision in the spirit of the
honing and polishing of a finely made tool.

Dorothy Carnegie (Mrs. Dale Carnegie)

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How This Book Was Written-And Why
by
Dale Carnegie

During the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century, the
publishing houses of America printed more than a fifth of a million
different books. Most of them were deadly dull, and many were
financial failures. "Many," did I say? The president of one of the
largest publishing houses in the world confessed to me that his
company, after seventy-five years of publishing experience, still lost
money on seven out of every eight books it published.

Why, then, did I have the temerity to write another book? And, after
I had written it, why should you bother to read it?

Fair questions, both; and I'll try to answer them.

I have, since 1912, been conducting educational courses for business
and professional men and women in New York. At first, I conducted
courses in public speaking only - courses designed to train adults, by
actual experience, to think on their feet and express