alt Hacker NewsHow to start riding a bicycle in your 40s, if you never developed bike skills? How to snowboard, if you never developed snowboard skills?
… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.
I mean.... Riding a bike is nothing like making friends.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a salesman's guide, Dale Carnegie was an traveling salesman and the book techniques he learned making sales. The techniques you need to be a salesperson is probably not the same techniques to build lasting relationships. These tips are great for brief interactions; they are not for building relationships.
There's a couple of things that need serious caveats -
The "using the person's name" is so well known it's now clocked as exclusively a sleezy sales behavior. Don't do this - you sound like a sleezy salesman.
Asking people endless questions about themselves can really come off as a really weird integration and can be extremely off-putting if not done carefully/correctly and with grace. My mom does this, she asks hundreds of the dumbest most inane questions and she doesn't even listen to the answers to. It's so insufferable that people actively avoid her. I'm sure she read this book and thinks she's a social genius.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17943742-how-to-...
"And also, if you think about these tips of smile and try to avoid arguments and greet somebody enthusiastically a lot of these are tips for making somebody like you immediately... They're not tips for ongoing relationships. They're like, when you show up at somebody's door, how can you make a good impression in the first five minutes and establish trust very quickly?"