The Power of Habit P.1

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Prologue

The brain changes as habits change.

“All our life, so far as it has defi nite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892.

Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.

A community is a giant collection of habits occurring among thousands of people.

Part One:  The Habits of Individuals

T H E H A B I T L O O P

First, find a simple and obvious cue.

Second, clearly define the rewards.

Why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Craving is what powers the habit loop.

“wanting evolves into obsessive craving” that can force our brains into autopilot

No one craves scentlessness. On the other hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes cleaning.”

toothpastes contain additives with the sole job of making your mouth tingle after you brush

Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to create a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE
Why Transformation Occurs

The rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

Brad Dufrene: Most people’s habits have occurred for so long they don’t pay
attention to what causes it anymore.

Often, we don’t really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.

If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine.
At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief.

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7 – Don’t Be A “Marriage Illiterate”

According to Dr. Popenoe, failure in marriage is usually due to four causes. He lists them in this order:

• 1. Sexual maladjustment.

• 2. Difference of opinion as to the way of spending leisure time.

• 3. Financial difficulties.

• 4. Mental, physical, or emotional abnormalities.

Rule 7 of “How to Make Your Home Life Happier” is: ‘Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage.

In a Nutshell

Seven Rules For Making Your Home Life Happier

• Rule 1: Don’t nag.

• Rule 2: Don’t try to make your partner over.

• Rule 3: Don’t criticize.

• Rule 4: Give honest appreciation.

• Rule 5: Pay little attentions.

• Rule 6: Be courteous.

• Rule 7: Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage.

For Husbands

1. Do you still “court” your wife with an occasional gift of flowers, with remembrances of her birthday and wedding anniversary, or with some unexpected attention, some unlooked-for tenderness?

2. Are you careful never to criticize her before others?

3. Do you give her money to spend entirely as she chooses, above the household expenses?

4. Do you make an effort to understand her varying feminine moods and help her through periods of fatigue, nerves, and irritability?

5. Do you share at least half of your recreation hours with your wife?

6. Do you tactfully refrain from comparing your wife’s cooking or housekeeping with that of your mother or of Bill Jones’ wife, except to her advantage?

7. Do you take a definite interest in her intellectual life, her clubs and societies, the books she reads, her views on civic problems?

8. Can you let her dance with and receive friendly attentions from other men without making jealous remarks?

9. Do you keep alert for opportunities to praise her and express your admiration for her?

10. Do you thank her for the little jobs she does for you, such as sewing on a button, darning your socks, and sending your clothes to the cleaners?

For Wives

1. Do you give your husband complete freedom in his business affairs, and do you refrain from criticizing his associates, his choice of a secretary, or the hours he keeps?

2. Do you try your best to make your home interesting and attractive?

3. Do you vary the household menu so that he never quite knows what to expect when he sits down to the table?

4. Do you have an intelligent grasp of your husband’s business so you can discuss it with him helpfully?

5. Can you meet financial reverses bravely, cheerfully, without criticizing your husband for his mistakes or comparing him unfavourably with more successful men?

6. Do you make a special effort to get along amiably with his mother or other relatives?

7. Do you dress with an eye for your husband’s likes and dislikes in colour and style?

8. Do you compromise little differences of opinion in the interest of harmony?

9. Do you make an effort to learn games your husband likes, so you can share his leisure hours?

10. Do you keep track of the day’s news, the new books, and new ideas, so you can hold your husband’s intellectual interest?

End

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How To Win Friends And Influence People

Part VI: Seven Rules for Making Your Home Life Happier

1 – How To Dig Your Marital Grave In The Quickest Possible Way.

If you want to keep your home life happy,
• Rule 1 is: Don’t, don’t nag!!!

2 – Love And Let Live

“The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is noninterference with their own peculiar ways of being happy …”

Leland Foster Wood in his book, Growing Together in the Family, has observed: “Success in marriage is much more than a matter of finding the right person; it is also a matter of being the right person.”

If you want your home life to be happy,
• Rule 2 is: Don’t try to make your partner over.

3 – Do This And You’ll Be Looking Up The Time-Tables To Reno

If you want to keep your home life happy, remember Rule 3:
Don’t criticize.

4 – A Quick Way To Make Everybody Happy

Men should express their appreciation of a woman’s effort to look well and dress becomingly. All men forget, if they have ever realized it, how profoundly women are interested in clothes.

If you want to keep your home life happy, one of the most important rules is
• Rule 4: Give honest appreciation.

5 – They Mean So Much To A Woman

Breakfast in bed to a woman does much the same thing as a private club for a man.

So, if you want to keep your home life happy,
• Rule 5 is: Pay little attentions.

6 – If You Want To Be Happy, Don’t Neglect This One

Dorothy Dix: “It is an amazing but true thing that practically the only people who ever say mean, insulting, wounding things to us are those of our own households.”

“Courtesy,” says Henry Clay Risner, “is that quality of heart that overlooks the broken gate and calls attention to the flowers in the yard beyond the gate.” Courtesy is just as important to marriage as oil is to your motor.

So, if you want to keep your home life happy.
• Rule 6 is: Be courteous.

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Part 5 – Letters That Produced Miraculous Results

Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. But nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery.

Let me repeat: the principles taught in this book will work only when they come from the heart. I am not advocating a bag of tricks. I am talking about a new way of life.

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6 – How To Spur People On To Success

Let us praise even the slightest improvement. That inspires the other person to keep on improving.

The psychologist Jess Lair comments: “Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it.

Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. But nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery.

If you and I will inspire the people with whom we come in contact to a realization of the hidden treasures they possess, we can do far more than change people. We can literally transform them.

Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.

  • Principle 6 – Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

7 – Give A Dog A Good Name

“The average person,” said Samuel Vauclain, “can be led readily if you have his or her respect and if you show that you respect that person for some kind of ability.”

In short, if you want to improve a person in a certain aspect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.

Shakespeare said “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

  • Principle 7 – Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

8 – Make The Fault Seem Easy To Correct

  • Principle 8 – Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

9 – Making People Glad To Do What You Want

One of the important rules of human relations: Always make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

The effective leader should keep the following guidelines in mind when it is necessary to change attitudes or behavior:

  • 1. Be sincere. Do not promise anything that you cannot deliver. Forget about the benefits to yourself and concentrate on the benefits to the other person.
  • 2. Know exactly what it is you want the other person to do.
  • 3. Be empathetic. Ask yourself what it is the other person really wants.
  • 4. Consider the benefits that person will receive from doing what you suggest.
  • 5. Match those benefits to the other person’s wants.
  • 6. When you make your request, put it in a form that will convey to the other person the idea that he personally will benefit.
  • Principle 9 – Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

In A Nutshell Be A Leader

  • Principle 1 – Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
  • Principle 2 – Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
  • Principle 3 – Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
  • Principle 4 – Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
  • Principle 5 – Let the other person save face.
  • Principle 6 – Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”
  • Principle 7 – Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
  • Principle 8 – Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
  • Principle 9 – Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

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Part Four – Be a Leader: How to Change People without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1 – If You Must Find Fault, This Is the Way to Begin

Beginning with praise is like the dentist who begins his work with Novocain. The patient still gets a drilling, but the Novocain is pain-killer.

  • Principle 1 – Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

2 – How To Criticize-And Not Be Hated For It

  • Principle 2 – Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

3 – Talk About Your Own Mistakes First

  • Principle 3 – Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the

other person.

4 – No One Likes To Take Orders

Encourage cooperation instead of rebellion.

Resentment caused by a brash order may last a long time; even if the order was given to correct an obviously bad situation.

Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable; it often stimulates the creativity of the persons whom you ask. People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.

An effective leader will use …

  • Principle 4 – Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

5 – Let the Other Person save Face

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.”

A real leader will always follow …

  • Principle 5 – Let the other person save face.

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7 – How To Get Cooperation
– No one likes to feel that he or she is being sold some-thing or told to do a thing.
– A chinese proverb: ” The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.”
• Principle 7 – Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.

8 – A Formula That Will Work Wonders For You
– Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don’t think so. Don’t condemn them.
There is a reason why the other man thinks and acts as he does. Try honestly to put yourself in his place.
– Dr. Gerald S. Nirenberg commented: “Cooperativeeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
– Seeing things through another person’s eyes may ease tensions when personal problems become overwhelming.
• Principle 8 – Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.

9 – What Everybody Wants
– Three-fourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you.
– if you want to win people to your way of thinking, put in practice.
• Principle 9 – Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

10 – An Appeal That Everybody Likes
– In order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives.
• Principle 10 – Appeal to the nobler motives.

11 – The Movies Do It. Tv Does It. Why Don’t You Do It?
– This is the day of dramatization. Merely stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic.
• Principle 11 – Dramatize your ideas.

12 – When Nothing Else Works, Try This
– “All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory” was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.
– That is what every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression. The chance to prove his or her worth, to excel, to win.
• Principle 12 – Throw down a challenge.

In A Nutshell – Win People To Your Way Of Thinking
Principle 1 – The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
Principle 2 – Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
Principle 3 – If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Principle 4 – Begin in a friendly way.
Principle 5 – Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
Principle 6 – Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
Principle 7 – Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
Principle 8 – Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
Principle 9 – Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
Principle 10 – Appeal to the nobler motives.
Principle 11 – Dramatize your ideas.
Principle 12 – Throw down a challenge.

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Part Three – How To Win People To Your Way Of Thinking

  1. You Can’t Win An Argument
    1. When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree.
    2. Be honest, Look for areas where you can admit error and say so.
    3. Apologize for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness.
    4. Your opponents may be right.

Principle 1 – The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

  1. A Sure Way Of Making Enemies -And How To Avoid It
    1. Galileo said: You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
    2. As Lord Chesterfield said to his son: Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
    3. Socrates: One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
  2. You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong.
  3. I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand the other person.
  • Principle 2 – Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
  1. If You’re Wrong, Admit It

“By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.”

  • Principle 3 – If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
  1. A Drop Of Honey
  2. The friendly approach and appreciation can make people change their minds more readily than all the bluster and storming in the world.
  3. Lincoln said: “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
  • Principle 4 – Begin in a friendly way.
  1. The Secret Of Socrates
  2. In talking with people, don’t begin by discussing the things on which you differ.
  3. Get the other person saying “Yes, yes” at the outset.
  4. Chinese proverb: “He who treads softly goes far.”
  • Principle 5 – Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.

6 – The Safety Valve In Handling Complaints

La Rochefoucauld, the French philosopher, said: “If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.”

  • Principle 6– Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.

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Part Two – Ways To Make People Like You

  1. Do This And You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere
  • Principle 1 Become genuinely interested in other people.

2 – A Simple Way To Make A Good First Impression

Professor James V. McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, expressed his feelings about a smile. “People who smile,” he said, “tend to manage teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children. There’s far more information in a smile than a frown. That’s why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment.”

William James: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go

together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …”

“There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, “but thinking makes it so.”

  • Principle 2 – Smile.

3 – If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed For Trouble

  • Principle 3 – Remember that a person’s name is to that person the

sweetest and most important sound in any language.

4 – An Easy Way To Become A Good Conversationalist

Listening is just as important in one’s home life as in the world of business.

  • Principle 4 – Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

5 – How To Interest People

  • Principle 5 – Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

6 – How To Make People Like You Instantly

Always make the other person feel important.

William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be

appreciated.”

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him feel important.

“Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours .”

  • Principle 6 – Make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely.

In a Nutshell – Six Ways To Make People Like You

  • Principle 1 – Become genuinely interested in other people.
  • Principle 2 – Smile.
  • Principle 3 – Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
  • Principle 4 – Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
  • Principle 5 – Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
  • Principle 6 – Make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely.

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Part 1 – Fundamental Techniques In Handling People

1 – “If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive”

Hans Selye, a great psychologist, said, “As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.”

“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.”

  • Principle 1 – Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

2 – The Big Secret of Dealing with People

Some of the things most people want include:

  1. Health and the preservation of life. 2. Food. 3. Sleep. 4. Money and the things money will buy. 5. Life in the hereafter. 6. Sexual gratification. 7. The well-being of our children. 8. A feeling of importance.
  • Principle 2 – Give honest and sincere appreciation.

3 – “He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who

Cannot, Walks a Lonely Way”

William Winter once remarked that “self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.”

“First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”

  • Principle 3 – Arouse in the other person an eager want.

In a Nutshell Fundamental Techniques In Handling People

  • Principle 1 Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
  • Principle 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation.
  • Principle 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.

“Education,” said Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton

University, “is the ability to meet life’s situations,”

Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

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