Ryan DeJonghe - The Avid Reader

Reading Dale Carnegie is like watching old-time preachers on black & white film. The writing is so unlike anything put out today—it’s just real and relatable (at the cost of being a bit lengthy).

Dale (we’re on a first name basis by now) breaks down all the reasons you may worry and how you break out from that worry. You may already know this, but that worry is killing you. Dale tells you this and why. He’s done his research—picking up every book available to him back in the early 1900s. He wants to give you an honest approach, detailing everything he can, right up to the address of the person he’s talking about.

Besides the actual advice, I really liked his old-school approach: tell you what he’s going to talk about, talk about it, and then tell you what he just talked about. And when I say talk, I mean it like that; reading this feels like Dale is talking to you.

As for the advice, some of it may be dated (specifically about the housewife), but a lot of it is just as good and practical as it was back then. He talks about compartmentalizing your current situation, developing a worse-case scenario plan, and moving forward. There are plenty (maybe too many) stories of people in real-life situations that either put these plans to use or tried to forge through life without the plans.

You could probably get through this book by just reading the summaries, but you’ll get a lot more out of it if you read through it in sections, bit-by-bit.

This book helped me out a lot, but I’m giving it four stars because it did drag on a bit much for today’s standards.