[Book] Part 1 : How to Win Friends and Influence People in The Digital Age by Dale Carnegie

Hi! Okta's here again, I'm from the DO-Business team🤓

I had a flashback to the year 2017 when my mentor was giving me a book by Dale Carnegie "How to Win Friends and Influence People in The Digital Age". Yes, it's quite some time ago for me when I first read it. It's a powerful and timeless book. Now, I'm currently reading it for the second time. This will be the first part of my blog series about the key takeaways that I got from this book. So stay tuned!

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Our business team had several challenges when we wanted to start selling in Japan. It wasn’t easy when we started and is still very challenging until now. Let me tell you a brief story about this. Erina and I spent a lot of time researching about how to actually start the real selling of our coffee and cocoa product, but we faced obstacles on several parts such as the selling platform, payment method, shipment, market research, etc. We kept updating our progress to the team until one day we realized that we just mixed up the problem and didn't really understand what the core problem was that made us stuck in the end. Then, our CEO encouraged us to find the main problem and to study more. He affirmed that it's great when the Business Team has the intention to expand our market to Japan and we better ask the why many times behind every problem to figure out the right solutions.

We finally found out that the main problem was the payment method, so we had been starting the selling with manual payment until now. The next challenge is how to build the selling operations more sustainable in the future.

Carnegie says "All great progress and problem solving with others begins when at least one party is willing to place what is already good on the table." We know that everyone makes mistakes, and all of us want to feel appreciated and valued. We can choose to affirm people rather than put people down. And the first key take away is :

Affirm What’s Good

By receiving the good affirmation from our CEO, we were able to step back and see the bigger picture. After acknowledging what’s right, we can see what’s wrong as the remaining puzzle piece. Often times we skip this step and that’s where we remain stuck. That's the power of affirm what's good.

How to Win Friends and Influence People in The Digital Age

How obsessed we can be with the least important, we spent so much time scrolling on the celebrity's social media. Who has time to affirm the good about anything? Perhaps our housekeeper cleaned our room and organized our stuff well?

I encourage everyone to read this book as it's useful in so many situations. It's 100% worth the time! Thank you and see you on my next blog!😊👋🏽