Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie was born November 24, 1888, Maryville, MO. Born poor, he worked as a traveling salesman before teaching public speaking at a YMCA. He was soon lecturing to packed houses and collected his lectures into books. His How To Win Friends and Influence People won him a national following and the Dale Carnegie Institute established chapters throughout the country. He died in 1955.
 As a boy, Carnegie was unskilled in athletics but learned that he could still make friends and earn respect because he had a way with words.
In high school, he frequently attended Chautauqua assemblies. These events brought entertainment to rural communities throughout the country and featured popular speakers, musicians, entertainers and preachers. Carnegie was so inspired by a number of the speakers he heard at these gatherings that he decided to join the school debate team, where he became a skillful orator.
After graduating from high school in 1906, Carnegie attended the local State Teachers College in Warrensburg. His family was too poor to afford the $1 a day it cost for room and board, so Carnegie continued to live at home while riding to and from school daily on horseback.
After graduating from college in 1908, Carnegie took a job as a traveling salesman for the International Correspondence Schools, based out of Alliance, Nebraska. He then took another sales job for the meatpacking business Armour and Company. By 1911, Carnegie had saved up $500, which was enough to quit his job, move to New York City and try to make it as an actor.
 Carnegie was hired as the business manager of a traveling lecture course taught by Lowell Thomas, the writer and broadcaster best known for his coverage of Lawrence of Arabia.
At the conclusion of the Lowell Thomas tour, Carnegie returned to New York and considered what to do next with his life. He recalled how students had offered to pay him money to teach them public speaking and realized that this skill was what helped him succeed as a salesman, so Carnegie had the idea to teach public speaking classes for adults. He successfully pitched the idea to the Y.M.C.A, which provided him a space to begin night classes in return for a cut of the profits.
The classes proved an immediate success. Focused on the everyday needs of businesspeople
Carnegie taught his students how to interview well, make persuasive presentations and forge positive relationships. His students would often come to class each week with stories of how they had put the skills they learned the previous week to successful use in their workplaces. Within two years, the courses had achieved such popularity that Carnegie moved them out of the Y.M.C.A. and founded his own Dale Carnegie Institute to accommodate the growing numbers of students.
Over the next two decades, Carnegie gradually refined his curriculum to better meet the needs of his professional students. He perceived that the most successful businesspeople in any given industry were not those with the most technical know-how, but rather those with the best people skills. 
. In 1931, after years of intense research that included reading hundreds biographies to learn how the world's greatest leaders achieved their success, Carnegie published just such a book: How to Win Friends and Influence People. Despite its modest initial print run of 5,000 copies, the book became a mammoth bestseller. Carnegie's book, like his classes, struck a chord with a population hungry for self-improvement, selling nearly 5 million copies during his lifetime while being translated into every major language.
 Although he wrote thousands of pages of books and gave hours upon hours of lectures, Carnegie's essential message on how to live a successful life can be summed up by his two most fundamental maxims: "Forget yourself; do things for others" and "Cooperate with the inevitable."