Episode 01 - Bury Your Boomerangs

How to Win Friends and Influence People

To win friends and influence others in today’s world takes less than clever rhetoric. It takes the understated eloquence of grace and self-depreciation.?

As I was reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, I thought I could share some of his lessons in the form of short 500-word articles from each chapter so that readers could get the crux of knowledge from each chapter without going through the entire book. I know reading a book and reading a summary are never going to be the same but who knows after reading the short summaries, you make up your mind to read the whole book as well?:)

So far, I have gone through 2 chapters of the book, and I am sharing the tips and crux of the first chapter in this article:

Episode 1: Bury Your Boomerangs

You might be wondering why this chapter is named as such? Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will find out why, but if you don’t, do not worry about it as I will tell you in the end.

In this age of digitalization, a quick critical remark can be made by anyone of us and forgotten, it could be a tweet, a comment on a Facebook post, or an Instagram picture. We can leave a critical remark and move on with our lives not even imagining that that remark or comment which was just a fun or humor activity for us might tear down the confidence of a person in a moment which he or she gathered from years of effort.?

Remember! One line is enough to make someone’s day and similarly one line is also enough to shatter someone’s confidence. Therefore, in this era of globalization when messages cross borders in no time, we must be extremely careful not to hurt feelings and this essentially makes the first lesson from Carnegie’s world-famous “How to win friends and influence people”. If you want to make good long-lasting relationships and want to make a positive influence on people, remember to never criticize, condemn, or complain. May that be your child, spouse, parents, a friend, co-worker, or a stranger. Always remember this first lesson!

“Bury your boomerangs and your words will guide forge a much quicker path to success.”

Next thing, it takes very hard to admit when we are wrong about something, but it seems very easy to point out someone else’s mistake. If one wants to be truly influential, he or she has to practice holding back bad remarks and critiques or as Carnegie puts it:

“If I am the problem with the world and you are too, then we can stop worrying about who is right and get on with the work of making our world better.”

We are not perfect, not me not you, no one. So, if we are not perfect, we have to be self-critical first than leave a bad remark for someone else. Now there are points in time when we have to be critical but there are ways to go about it too. We must not do it in public, rather with love and affection in private. In the next chapter, we will explore ways to affirm good things in everyone even when things are bad.?

Final Words:

And yes, you might have guessed already why this chapter is named Bury your Boomerangs! It is because when we are criticizing someone or insulting or making them look down, we must remember, “When we point 1 finger at someone, other fingers are pointing towards us”. The reason is simple, the moment you use a medium to criticize, the subject of your criticism is compelled to defend. And when another is defensive, there is little you can say to raise through the barriers he has raised.

To state simply, whatever actions we let go toward other people, they will eventually come back to us, like a boomerang. Do you remember Sokka from TLA?

Who am I?

My name is Asad Ullah Khan, I am a Mechanical Engineer and an aspiring writer. If you are still reading this, that means you liked my work, and it is an honor for me to have you here. Every reader means a lot to me, and I wish I can come to each one of my readers in-person to pay my regards.

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