How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age Book Analysis

The book, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, discusses how a person can impact other people in society within their relationships and how to gain their trust as a friend. There are different parts of the book, four to be specific, that targets different aspects of how to exactly make friends and influence people. The first one gives you three ways that can help you get along with others better. The second part lists six ways that can better help you have people like you more. The third part consists of ways that will help you gain and keep people’s trust. The fourth one discusses, in depth, about how to be a good leader. 

What I liked about the book is that instead of just the book being one big part split up into different chapters, it has four parts that discuss different aspects on how to make friends and influence others. This helped me because it kept me interested longer since I knew that each part would only be about what the title of the part stated. It made reading and writing about the book easier because all I would have to do is go to one of the parts that would guide me to the chapter I needed. Another thing that I liked about this book was the third part; where it discusses the ten ways to keep and maintain people’s trust. The one that really stuck with me was the chapter about challenges. In this chapter, it shows how competitions do not have to be negative. It uses basketball players, Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, as an example about how their competitiveness was their motivation. Once Magic had quit playing basketball due to forced retirement, Bird did not want to play anymore; he did not have a reason to. Magic even publicly said that Bird was the most important reason as to why he was so good at the sport. I think this chapter does a very good job at explaining why competitions do not have to leave a negative impact. They can be the reason why somebody does something; it can give motivation and lead to success. This type of thinking has really stuck to me, and I enjoyed reading about it. On the other hand, there are some critiques I would like to make about this book. The first one being that a lot of the examples that are in the chapters seem to focus mainly on business aspects of influencing people and having people like them. For example, in the third chapter of the first part (“Connect with Core Desires”), they discuss how the company Apple created the iMac to make their customers happy. They do connect it with the point of the chapter, but I do not like how they used business examples in the majority of the book. I would have liked to see more examples of how regular people in society can benefit or use what they discuss within the book. When I was reading, it made me think about business and how they do what their customers want in order to be successful rather than how I, the reader, can use what they write to make a random friend. The business examples are not a bad thing, but it makes it harder to apply to a random person you meet in class because there are other factors that are not discussed in the book (id est: how to start a conversation or how to keep a conversation going). Another critique that I see is that many of the chapters overlap with one another.. For example, in the third part of the book, the first chapter (“Avoid Arguments”) and the second chapter (“Never Say, ‘You’re Wrong’”) can be combined together because they are very similar. The first chapter discusses how people should avoid arguments that would have a person insisting another person is right or wrong. Then, the other chapter states how nobody should say other people are wrong. To me, I feel like these two points could have been made in the same chapter and would have been better. They are so similar and they could have made stronger arguments combining them and using them together to make their point.

Overall, I believe that other people within the major of Digital Media Production will find this book interesting and appreciate it. Even though I believe there are some critiques, it is still a good book. Since there are many business examples explained all throughout, it can help someone in Digital Media Production think about how they could use what was discussed with what they want to do. For instance, whether it be in a journal article or a podcast, they are going to have to have people (who they work with and their audience) trust and like them in order to succeed. This book will tell them how to do those things and how to use them in a good way.