Dale Carnegie Audiobooks

How to Win Friends and Influence People: the book that drew up modern self-improvement

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Who is Dale Carnegie?

Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and teacher whose courses in public speaking, salesmanship, corporate training and interpersonal skills effectively drew the blueprint for the modern self-improvement industry. He came from nothing – born into poverty on a Missouri farm – and made his name teaching ordinary people the skills that schools and offices never taught them.

His reputation rests on How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), a bestseller that has simply never gone out of fashion, followed by How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) and earlier work including Lincoln the Unknown (1932). At the core of his books sits one disarmingly simple idea: you change other people’s behaviour by first changing your own towards them. Nearly a century of imitators has not improved on it much.

Dale Carnegie in audiobooks

Carnegie was a teacher before he was an author, and the listening experience shows it: anecdote, plain rules and steady encouragement, delivered in prose that was always closer to speech than to literature. How to Win Friends & Influence People is the essential starting point, a complete course in human relations that remains startlingly current, while How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is the quieter companion piece, aimed less at getting ahead than at staying sane. The 1930s American optimism can feel brisk to a British ear, but the underlying counsel wears remarkably well at audiobook pace – and it is far harder to argue with than to follow.