Lessons from Dale Carnegie are harder to apply

Carnegie offers great advice on public speaking. The trick is finding a group that will allow you to give your speech.

How to Win Friends and Influence People might have sold more copies, but Dale Carnegie’s book on Public Speaking is equally as important. The main teaching point: Know your topic. Knowledge produces confidence.

While scavenging for yard sale items, I opened a box of books and found a copy of Dale Carnegie’s timeless self-help classic Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business.

I immediately started re-reading this book, which was first published in 1926 (now with different titles.) Carnegie also wrote the timeless classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.  

Carnegie discovered self-help gold from one simple observation - for most people, the fear of public speaking is one of their greatest fears. Carnegie created a course of study that would help people overcome this fear. 

He first pitched his idea to the New York YMCA, which initially rejected his idea. Undeterred, Carnegie began offering the courses on his own. Once the YMCA saw how popular (and lucrative) the courses were, they took him up on his offer to teach the courses through YMCA branches.

Carnegie then wrote several books, which have sold millions of copies and will probably always be the definitive books on how to “influence” others and overcome public speaking fears.

The key point of the Carnegie Program …

The point that resonates the most with me is that an effective public speaker - who wants to influence other people - needs to have a passion for the subject he’s going to discuss. This person then needs to do copious research on this subject and let his ideas percolate over time.

According to Carnegie, a speaker should offer his/her audience original thoughts and ideas and not just regurgitate source material he’d read somewhere else.

Once you have thought a great deal about a subject - and become an expert on a topic - 90 percent of your work is done. Your speech will almost write itself and you’ll have the requisite confidence to deliver it with gusto. 

I’ve rarely been asked to speak in public. However, I’d love to be asked to speak more often because I now feel I have so many topics I could speak knowledgeably about. 

As a writer, I’ve performed copious research on myriad topics. Furthermore, I’m constantly thinking about subjects that interest me, which has allowed me to form fairly original ideas, which I do want to share with others. (This is why I probably became a writer).

In our New Abnormal Covid times, I’ve been impressed and influenced by talented writers, but also by people who have expressed their ideas in public speeches or podcast interviews. You can easily tell the people who “know their stuff.” These people exude a confidence that must flow from in-depth research and never-ending thought.

I use Carnegie’s advice in my journalism …

Many of the lessons taught by Carnegie also apply to writers. For example, the very first freelance article I pitched to a magazine was a story on “shrinkflation” that The American Conservative published.

Without knowing it, I followed Carnegie’s advice and did massive over-kill when researching the topic. While the story was on manufacturers who shrink the size of products to conceal real inflation, the larger topic that interested me was how official government CPI figures are rigged and should not be considered trust-worthy.

My editor told me my story couldn’t be longer than 1,500 words, but I ended up doing weeks of research into how inflation is measured.

Most of this information I couldn’t use in my article, but my story probably benefitted from my macro understanding of real inflation. More significantly, I’m now far more confident discussing inflation, one of the most important issues of our times.

Research allows you to question the experts …

I once got into an email debate with a journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who has written numerous Covid stories for his newspaper,  USA Today and other Gannett newspapers.

I emailed this author to try to get him interested in “early spread.” As we exchanged emails, I told him that I felt like I had become an expert on various Covid topics.

This rubbed this journalist the wrong way as he responded that I was not an expert because I was not a physician or a credentialed scientist.

I replied that one didn’t have to have a specific degree to acquire knowledge about the scores of topics dealing with parts of the Covid story. True, I was no expert in cellular biology, but I had read and thought about so many areas of Covid that I could, no doubt, connect dots and identify themes he would never consider.

Furthermore, I didn’t understand why a supposedly skeptical journalist like this man thought it was taboo to question authorities or alleged experts. In his experience, had the experts ever been wrong about something important?

My debating partner had one advantage over myself, a freelance journalist.  He could show me 30 stories he’d written on Covid topics. In fact, he emailed me links to these 30 stories. In comparison, I’d only had a couple of Covid stories published by UncoverDC. Com.

I skimmed the text of a few of these stories and, just like I thought, they all simply regurgitated the authorized narratives put out by Fauci, the CDC and WHO.

I pointed out to him that his editors had approved and published every one of these stories. In contrast, my freelance story ideas were all rejected by mainstream editors. 

To test this hypothesis, I gave this man 10 “taboo” Covid story ideas he should pitch to his editor and see if he’d approve them for publication. (That’s where our dialogue ended).

I also pointed out that as a freelance writer, I could spend eight to 14 hours a day researching subjects. I told him I’d created files dealing with perhaps hundreds of Covid topics, and each file has at least one link and some files had multiple links and thousands of words of excerpts.

A regular citizen can know much more than the experts …

My sparring partner had no inclination to research these areas, but if he did, he wouldn’t have had time to do this because he had to research and write stories probably every day.

The expert on cellular biology or the doctor who treats respiratory viruses probably spend all their time researching their own theories. They are experts on one tiny area under a microscope, where journalist like myself look at the panoramic view and try to connect disparate dots.

I was trying to educate myself on possible and neglected early spread evidence, Infection Fatality Rates by age and economic demographics, origins questions, data on flu seasons, iatrogenic protocols, lockdown consequences, NPI efficacy, etc. 

I wanted to be familiar with the studies published by The Lancet and heralded by The New York Times, but I also also sought out ignored studies that contrarian scientists could only get published in obscure medical journals.

Add up all my research and a former student whose least favorite class was science had educated myself on basic science, but I also applied social science, political science and economics to my analysis.

I’d argue I became an expert on the macro views of Covid, a point of view rarely presented to consumers of mainstream news.

Research breeds confidence …

Skipping back to the teachings of Mr. Carnegie, I was now confident enough to speak on (or write about) a wide variety of Covid topics. 

But here I present an original thought Carnegie probably couldn’t have predicted in 1926.

I check all of Carnegie’s boxes for producing a compelling speech. I’m knowledgeable, passionate about my subject, want others to think about my thesis and I have something original to say.

The catch is that most audiences wouldn’t want to hear what I had to say.

It occurs to me that if I wanted to deliver a Covid speech in 2020 at a meeting of business people taking a public speaking class through the YMCA, I couldn’t do it - Because the YMCA was closed for more than a year.

The local Rotary Club also wasn’t meeting and, even when they started meeting again, no chapter would want to hear what I had to say.

Mr. Carnegie might tell me to write up my speech and submit it to the local newspapers and magazines.  If he did offer this suggestion, I’d give him a look like he was the most naive millionaire author I’ve ever met.

“Mr. Rice, You’re just going to have to find some organization that does want to hear what you have to say,” he might tell me.

The good news is that a few such organizations still exist. I know some “Covid contrarian writers” are doing well in the alternative speaking circuit, but I’ve yet to be invited to speak (although I am going to an upcoming Brownstone Institute retreat and will get to speak on a topic of my choosing - which is one reason I’m glad I found Mr. Carnegie’s book).

I just saw a video clip of a public figure who has become a leader in the movement to push back against mass illegal immigration in Europe. This man was giving a speech in Germany and,10 minutes into his talk, the police arrived and arrested him!

In other words, in 2024 the art of “influencing people” has never been more challenging. Anyone can write a speech. The contemporary challenge is finding a group that will let you give it.

I don’t think many leaders follow the Carnegie Program …

In re-reading Carnegie’s book, I thought of all the political leaders and CEOs who routinely give speeches … and how awful these speeches are.

Even though most of these talks are ghost-written by professional speech writers, none of them express an original thought.

Thankfully, Kamala Harris - master of the word salad -  has professional speech writers and the same teleprompter “Joe Biden” depended on for four years,  but I’m 99.9 percent confident Ms. Harris has never done a deep dive into any topic and formed any bold or original ideas that she’s champing at the bit to deliver to an audience.

This doesn’t matter though. She’s still won friends and, I guess, influenced a few people (the people who know they can use her to implement their world agenda).

RFK, Jr. might be a disciple of Carnegie …

In politics, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is the one candidate I know who’s spent thousands of hours researching and thinking about topics few others previously thought about.

On Covid, he wrote two 450-page books with more than 4,000 combined footnotes. Kennedy knows more about “vaccines” and “chronic illness” than 99.9 percent of the population, including most scientists.

But Kennedy struggles to find a venue with a mass audience that will listen to his speeches and he’s been banned from the presidential debates.

Kennedy followed the Carnegie program.  He just didn’t anticipate that “free speech” in 2024 means that most groups will never invite him to give a speech. (Although they did before he became an “anti-vaxxer.”)

Dale Carnegie became one of the most influential men of his time by teaching other people how to deliver a compelling speech and increase the influence one has on his peers.

You or I might become just as influential if we could come up with a program that simply allowed important speakers … to be heard by more people.

If I ever get asked to give a speech before a large group, the subject will be on the attempted assassination of free speech. My speech will be on the death of speech.

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