How to be Authentic and Make Friends Like a 1930s Housewife

At Christmas of 2018, I was gifted the classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Written in 1936, this book’s title tells you what it aims to help you do. 

It was a great read. While there are lessons I learned and beliefs I had reinforced, my favourite part of it is that it made me think. There were some really interesting lines of thought I went down while reading it. I’ll try summarizing most of them here.

Be Like a 1930s Housewife

Likely due to when the book was written, in the 30s when “culture pendulum swung away from more freedom for women to portraying the domestic role as the proper and fulfilling role for women”, Carnegie probably doesn’t notice that much of the advice he offers in the first half of the book amounts to emulating the traditional role of 1930s women. A woman typically would not work and she would be expected to be passive and listen to her husband (I would make a horrible 1930s housewife).

Here is an assorted sampling of techniques from the book that I’d imagine being the advice to be “The Perfect Woman” at the time this book was written (my commentary in bold): 

• Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain. [Wouldn’t want to bother someone, especially not your husband, with your difficulties, trials, and tribulations from the day]
• Give honest and sincere appreciation. [Praise be!]
• Become genuinely interested in other people. [I mean, this one is honestly very good, but I’ll get into a different line of thinking in my “How to be authentic” section]
• Smile. [our somewhat recent change to talking about the street harassment women face, “Just smile, honey”, makes this one feel all too real]
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. [yes, of course, don’t bother your husband with talk about yourself, they definitely won’t be interested in you then, only ask questions about THEIR day]
• Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.[ditto]
• Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely. [make sure he feels like a man!]

To be fair, sometimes I’m being (very) uncharitable. But while I was reading the book I felt a lot of the feedback felt like what I was already implicitly told to do all the time, and in many cases am already doing.

In society, women can feel socialized to be nice, passive, and accommodating to others. And this does lead to benefits in many social situations: In particular, others are likely to like you. 

But at what cost?

How this advice might harm “women” (and some others exhibit the behaviour I’m going to get into)

I think for some (not all!) women this advice could actually be harmful. A commenter in the comment section on this book review said this too: 

“While the advice [mostly] sounds good, I’m really unsure of how it would apply to, say…women. For example, he tells people to apologize more. He tells us to let other people take credit for our ideas. If you’re a well-respected businessman, these are generous, noble gestures. If you’re a woman struggling to get any respect at all, this comes off like “make yourself even more of a doormat.”

Being passive, complimentary, and so on can be beneficial to being liked in the workforce, but this is also a way to get your ideas ignored or have other people take credit for them. For example, in section Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking, “Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.” 

I think that women saying their idea, and then having someone else take all the credit, is already happening. This is something that if you continue to do, or do even more of,  as this book suggests could lead to further perpetuation of this problem. This could be detrimental to one’s career. 

How to be Authentic

As I alluded earlier, one piece of Carnegie’s advice is “Become Genuinely Interested in Other People.” And if you do it as the book suggests, letting your friend talk all about the sports they love and the activities they do that you don’t do in the slightest, that can be all fine and good, except at the end of the day the interaction you had was in no way genuine.

Something I have been attempting to do this year is be authentic. What this means to me is being honest, doing the activities I enjoy, and hanging out with the people that I actually like. And let me tell you, it is way easier to become genuinely interested in other people when they share your values. 

When I was way younger, back in high school, I had a boyfriend who avidly went to church. My family wasn’t not religious per se, but we didn’t go to church and only really talked about the bible during the holidays. However, I really wanted him to like me. So I would listen to him talk about church, and express interest in it, to the point where I’m sure he really believed I would someday go with him. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t genuinely interested in church (from a sort of outside observer perspective)! I was interested in what he got out of it. But I wasn’t interested in someday going and my showing of interest didn’t show who I really was. 

This was both unfair to him and to me. Years before reading it, I was following Carnegie’s advice: becoming genuinely interested and showing that interest. But in the end, my religious boyfriend was not seeing the true me because I was presenting a false version of myself. 

I’ve been trying hard to unlearn the need to have everyone like me all the time. It’s not easy to do in all situations, but has a very large and clear benefit that IS easy: When I hang out with friends, it is more and more becoming time I actively enjoy. I’m choosing to surround myself with people I genuinely care about, who I love. 

I used to think I was a hardcore introvert, since socializing completely wiped me out and I would need to stay at home alone to recharge regularly. But what I’m finding now is that when I’m hanging out with my dear friends, I don’t have fatigue after. I feel more extroverted and energized after each time I socialize.

So, I think at least when it comes to being friends, you can ignore all the advice in this book and instead do the following (book advice first, then my replacement in bold). 

• Become genuinely interested in other people. → Be friends with the folks you are genuinely interested in
• Smile. → This will be all the easier when you surround yourself with those that make you happy
• Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. → When you meet someone you really like, you will feel more eager to learn their name so you can be in contact again in the future. For example, I met someone who shared a deep passion for a niche topic I’m interested in. I was afraid I’d forget their name because I genuinely wanted to see them again and knew learning their name was the only way I could increase the odds of that happening!
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. The easiest way to become a good conversationalist is to become a good listener. To be a good listener, we must actually care about what people have to say. Many times people don’t want an entertaining conversation partner; they just want someone who will listen to them. → This is good advice, but don’t sacrifice who you are to only listen. But do listen and care for your friends.
• Talk in terms of the other person’s interest. The royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most. If we talk to people about what they are interested in, they will feel valued and value us in return. → And we will only care about that value if they share the same values as us. So don’t just talk in terms of the other person’s interest. Learn their interests and values, and if they are compatible with yours, you will talk about this together and form a genuine bond. They will feel valued and value you in return because you share common interests. 
• Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely. The golden rule is to treat other people how we would like to be treated. We love to feel important and so does everyone else. People will talk to us for hours if we allow them to talk about themselves. If we can make people feel important in a sincere and appreciative way, then we will win all the friends we could ever dream of. → Again, this is all easier if you genuinely care for the person because you share common interests, goals, and values. Then of course they are important to you!

Conclusion

Should you read this book? 

Scott Alexander, at Slate Star Codex, talked about an idea that I think has a parallel here: Some people who are very altruistic, forgoing their own personal pleasure, would benefit from reading Ayn Rand, while those who are egoistic and self centred would benefit from reading Peter Singer. And those who are already aligned with one of these authors probably shouldn’t be reading them. For example, if someone already selfish were to read Ayn Rand, they would probably not only not benefit, but become substantially worse. The reverse is also true: If one is having panic attacks because they can never be altruistic enough for their own personal standards, that person shouldn’t read Peter Singer.

How To Win Friends And Influence People probably is really valuable to people who have never really thought of other people. Another reviewer on Goodreads did find this to be the case for themselves. So I guess what I’m saying is, if the ideas in this book are things that you haven’t heard of doing, you probably would benefit from injecting some into your friend making and professional life. But if you already are finding that you do many of the things this book says to do, you may not benefit. You might be the kind of person who could benefit from standing up for your ideas more, talking more, and expressing your own likes and dislikes.

The latter half of the book gets better, but I have thoughts on that that I won’t summarize here. Maybe someday I’ll write another blog post about it. 

And all the above aside: I am really happy I read this book and happy to be on my own personal journey of unlearning certain behaviors. I got a lot out of this book, even if it wasn’t a blind agreement with its thesis. And I hope you got something valuable from reading this post, too, even if you didn’t fully agree.