You're Not Too Smart For Your Own Good. You're Just Not Persuasive.

If Dale Carneige were still alive, he'd have been 127 years old. And the writer, lecturer, and self-help guru would still want you to know that you're not communicating unless you're doing it with empathy.

Don't get it confused with honesty, or a concern with your co-worker's affairs- that's gossip. Empathy is loftier than you think. Empathy is, according to Carnegie, a people skill that helps you level with others, put yourself in their shoes, and walk a mile in their Nike Fly Knit's, even.

"[It] is so simple, so obvious, that anyone ought to see the truth of it at a glance; yet 90 percent of the people on this earth ignore it 90 percent of the time," says the writer. Which is why, reading his book, How to Win Friends And Influence People, might actually benefit you its working title. You know, to actually have some friends and get people to your thinking.

First published in 1936, HTWFAIP is trawled with comprehensive tips and painstakingly detailed with insightful anecdotes. For a book that has survived reprints since, selling 15 million copies, in 31 languages worldwide, it is a determined, digestible guide. (Yes, that is a part of empathy. On the reader.) His job, a career that has helped Man self-actualize his potential, with tips from "getting people to like you" to winning them over to your ideas, is simple: It's not what you say, but how you say it. 

Today, his ideas has founded a namesake institute that carries itself onward with training programs, to say the least about inspiring top managements and populist tastes alike. Warren Buffet has a copy, shelved on his desk. Simon Pegg starred in the 2008 movie, titled How to Lose Friends And Alienate People, adapted from the parody memoir by Toby Young. The currency of Carnegie's 291 page-long book is a read so powerful it didn't so much endure history than to have future generations enjoy its core ideas enough to spread the word like gospel.

In a chapter where Carnegie analyzes a business letter from an ad-man flawed with self-importance, he offers this in return:

Who cares what your company desires? I am worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the mortgage on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks, the stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn't invited to the Jones's dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning worried, open my mail and here is some whippersnapper off in New York yapping about what his company wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression his letter makes, he would get out of advertising business and start manufacturing sheep dip.

They don't say, but that's exactly how people feel every time you sit on their faces with the highfalutin "I"-mentality. It may be hard not to be an asshole, but people management is one topical interest that'd never pass up from judgement. You don't want to be that guy. 

And neither does Dale Carnegie. He doesn't want you to be "honest to a fault". No, he doesn't want you confusing pompous, condescending honesty with empathy. He wants you to get fixed up with the right manners, instantly. Your job then, reader, is to grab a copy.