Six Ways to Make People Like You – Part 4 of 6

This is the seventh post in a multi-part series where I share the highlights of the sections/subsections of the book How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

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Six Ways to Make People Like You

Principle 4: Be a good listener; encourage others to talk about themselves

  • Listen intently because you’re genuinely interested. This kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone.
  • Sometimes just being a good listener and encouraging others to talk changes someone’s perspective of you.
  • Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that.
  • Companies pay expensive rent, buy goods economically, spend lots of money in advertising and then hire clerks who haven’t the sense to be good listeners (e.g., interrupt customers, contradict them, irritate them).

meeting-over-coffee

  • People that want to complain ultimately want a feeling of importance. Most people look to get this feeling by kicking and complaining.
  • We want a sympathetic listener to help us unburden ourselves when we’re in trouble.
  • People that burst right in an interrupt you in the middle of a sentence are boors, intoxicated with their own egos, drunk with the sense of their own importance.
  • People that talk only of themselves think only of themselves, and those people are hopelessly uneducated. They are uneducated no matter how instructed they may be.

To be a good conversationalist…

  • Be an attentive listener.
  • Be interested.
  • Ask questions that other people will enjoy answering.
  • Encourage people to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
  • Remember that the people you’re talking to are 100 times more interested in themselves and their wants/problems than they are in you and your problems (e.g., a person’s toothache is more important to them than a famine in China).

Up Next

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.