Achieving Excellence with Enthusiasm

I enjoyed reading Dale Carnegie's book. It has very useful information on how to interact with people, it efficiently trains individuals on
how to get along with others and manage people. It has many interesting stories and anecdotes as well as lovely quotes from individuals of all walks of life. His point of view is one of expansion & discovery and he encourages us to develop and profit from dormant and unused assets within ourselves.

One concept that I identified with was the desire to excel, which I think most people share, as well. This book is a valuable guide to achieving excellence with enthusiasm. Another book I highly recommend is "Working on Yourself Doesn't Work," by Ariel and Shya Kane. People who find themselves enjoying Carnegie's book will also find in the Kanes' book a tool to discovering new ways to interact with their lives and a renewed sense of well-being day in and day out.

Carnegie is the founder of emotional intelligence

When I read this book I couldn't help but see the parallels between Carnegie's thinking and the modern emotional intelligence works. This book, despite it's age, speaks to some of the core truths of how people work and provides excellent strategies for how to connect with other people. Carnegie has a keen understanding of what motivates people and I really enjoyed how succinctly he is able to sum things up and give me a useful way to approach my own life.

My favorite "modern" emotional intelligence book is "The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book." It's a good pairing because it includes a free, online emotional intelligence test that has clips from Hollywood movies in the results to illustrate people's behavior in different challenging situations.

Buy friends and coerce people

This is a very funny book. It's not meant to be, but the ideas it tries to put across are machiavelian, childish and short sighted. The underlying theme is that one should do favours for others in order to receive the same from them: hardly a theme to build friendships on.

If you are currently paying people cash to be your "friend", you might find significant financial savings from the ideas in this book: you could be paying them in plenty of other ways.

It makes a great gag gift: you will find yourself passing this around to read out loud at parties.