What are your thoughts on How to Win Friends and Influence People?

It's quite dated, and there are some blatent white-suburban-privlage references, but if you can get past that, it's not bad for business relationships. If anything, the book is an eye opener to disingenuous relationships.

The biggest take away was recognizing when others are using the techniques. You really notice it if you deal with a salesperson. Go buy a car and watch them flick between different items from the book; trying to use your name as much as possible, trying to figure out and relate to your interests, etc.

For a balanced point of view, you should also read How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People by Jonar C. Nader.

It's not meant to be revolutionary - he even said so himself in the introduction. He just collated the best bits of advice and wisdom on the topic, and presented it in an easily digestible way. It's like an alcoholic asking a therapist for advice, and the therapist says he should stop drinking, and the alcoholic says "that's not very revolutionary". We all have things we screw up and we know how and why, and the answer is something obvious. I think considering the time he wrote it, it was a pretty innovative way of telling people things they already know, but in a way that they might want to start listening.

I think the true title of the book is “How to Make Shallow Friends and Manipulate People”

Great advice for making acquaintances at work but definitely do not apply it to your personal life

Great for making insincere connections with people who take its advice as gospel. Downside: Now you've made a connection with someone who takes its advice as gospel.

It’s great for business relationships

It's a decent starting place. It's really just a curated collection of basically useful advice: take an interest in the interests of others, ask friendly questions, etc. Like you said, nothing revolutionary, but it's a great baseline for someone who struggles in social situations.

As to the addendum, it's like most other skills. Just get out there and get some hours trying, failing, trying better, failing better, etc until you start succeeding more than you fail.

If you're in college, join some clubs and go to parties. If not, bars are still a decent place to get some practice in, but if that's not your thing try to find some moderately social hobbies. Clubs and hobbies are particularly great because you have an implicit topic you can make small talk about. Still, bars and parties are also great because the consequences for failure are particularly low.

HtWFaIP plus college parties are how I developed my social skills, augmented with inherently social jobs. I used to be an anti-social weirdo, and now people look at me incredulously when I tell them I'm an introvert.

So just get some practice. You'll be awkward at first; you'll say the wrong thing, you might offend people a bit, you'll have some awkward silences. But people will forget, and you'll get better over time. In fact, if you're like me, deliberately building this skill can eventually make you more socially capable than the average person.

It's obvioulsy dated. It's advice comes off as trying too hard today (maybe that was true when it was written too). But I think it's helpful. I read it because it was there on the bookshelf, but maybe other books would've helped me more. 'Supercommunicators' was way more valuable, but I'd say covers a deeper level of social skills, 'How to Make Friends...' coveres the basics better.

I'm bad at it.

I found it valuable. Read it in a reading circle exercise as part of some leadership class, where everybody took a pick of a book and did a presentation.

Now, everyone else's books seemed to be about bunching up 'different' individuals in categories and drawing up strategies to get along (or ably lead) these. I said I'd present last and opened with 'We've heard a multitude of ways to classify different people. My book came in at a totally opposite angle, finding the things that are true for all of us and teaching how to work with that.' IMO a much better angle.

Don't think bꝏks like that work on me