Hi, I’m reading how to win friends and influence people and I’m struggling to understand what this means. I want to understand it so it makes sense to me.
my popularity my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in delaing with people
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He’s saying that he is a happy person because of the way he interacts with people.
If you’re cold to others, you’re likely to have not as many friends and you’ll be less happy.
If you’re open to others and a joy to be around, you’ll likely have a more fulfilled life.
Because he knows how to deal with people, he is happy, popular, and has a high sense of self worth.
It’s exactly what it says — your happiness, popularity, and sense of worth depend on how you treat other people.
Plenty of people have said it including the big man JC in 0BCE — treat others how you want to be treated.
If you treat them well by dealing with them skillfully and with genuine interest like he describes, they will do the same to you. If you don’t, they won’t.
I assume delaing is a typo that’s supposed to say “dealing”. Basically, no matter what you do in life you will always find yourself in situations where you must deal with people. Knowing how to garner loyalty and influence with people by befriending them will take you incredibly far in life.
Nobody has ever felt worse from taking a genuine interest in someone else during an interaction. Often times, by not going into an interaction expecting something from it, you can walk away with something you didn’t have before. New Information, a new connection, a strengthened reputation, etc.
By doing something as simple as learning someone’s name and interests, as described in the book, you are showing them a respect that they typically feel compelled to reciprocate. If you can learn the skill of taking genuine interest in others – and it is a skill – you will find yourself presented with opportunities to achieve and add value that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Social interactions tend to reflect back on your own perceptions of yourself. If you have a lot of positive interactions with people you will tend to feel positively about yourself and negative interactions will make you feel negative. You can be proactive in this by trying to make your social interactions positive and you will end up with better feelings of self worth for it. In the end humans are social animals and having positive interactions with each other makes us feel more secure within society.
He is basically saying that his sense of worth in life is ultimately dependent on what people think about him.
In this, he isn’t wrong. Yes, it’s possible to sink into an unhealthy, obsessive neuroticism about what other people think, to the point of paralysis. In order to prevent this, we often tell people to not worry about what other people think. That they have some kind of innate value or worth that not depend on other’s opinions.
But while this can lead people away from a dysfunctional extreme, it’s also just not true.
Your ability to find a partner and form a happy long-term relationships depends on what your partner thinks about you. Your ability to graduate from school depends on what your teacher thinks about you. Your ability to keep and hold a job depends on what your boss thinks about you. You can’t start or run a business if you don’t care what your customers think. Your ability to make and keep friends depends on what those friends think about you.
Yes, it’s critically important to not lose your sense of self in worrying about what others think to the point of dysfunction, but ultimately we are social creatures, and it is very hard to achieve any sense of happiness without some form of external validation. Humans need other humans to be successful and happy.
That his popularity, his happiness, and sense of worth are DIRECTLY related to his skill in dealing with people.
The better he is at dealing with people… the more popular and more happy he will be. And his sense of worth will also be higher.
It’s an old book, and the phrase “depend to no small extent” was very popular back then.
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