Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie was born Dale Carnagey in 1888 on a farm near Maryville, Missouri. His family was poor — his father lost the farm to flooding multiple times — but his mother was fiercely ambitious for her children and pushed him toward education. He attended the State Teachers College in Warrensburg, where he could not afford to board and so commuted daily by horse. He threw himself into debate and public speaking to compensate for what he lacked in money and social standing.

After graduating he tried selling correspondence courses, then bacon and lard for Armour and Company, achieving modest success before abandoning sales to pursue acting in New York. The acting career went nowhere. He returned to what he had always done well: public speaking. He persuaded the YMCA to let him teach a course on public speaking in exchange for a percentage of the door receipts. The first night he had run out of material and asked his students simply to talk about something that made them angry. The discussion that followed was better than anything he had prepared. He discovered, in that moment, the principle that would define his career: people are more interested in themselves than in anything you have to say.

The course grew. By the time Simon and Schuster persuaded him to write down his methods in 1936, he had been teaching them for decades. How to Win Friends and Influence People sold 250,000 copies in its first three months. It has never been out of print.