After a quite decent amount of people recommended it to me, I started reading the famous best-seller: “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie.

First of all I want to say that this book is just on a different level among self-help books and will always be relevant. I frequently make use of what I learned thanks to it, on a daily basis. 

Shortly after reading a chapter of this book on how to make everyone forgive you, I saw a crystal clear example of this working, for one of my flatmates. 

Basically what the book said was that If you did something wrong, you need to apologize immediately without giving excuses. 

It was late at night during a weekday at my residence. I was walking around the corridor when I suddenly saw a piece of paper stuck on one door from where a lot of noise was coming. 

The piece of paper had a note written on it. It said: “Please stop the noise” or something like that. I was thinking… “Wow my flatmates are going to murder her, she’s making so much noise”

Shortly after that, I entered my room, I was reading my WhatsApp messages when I realized I had some messages from the group chat we had with all our flatmates. 

The ‘noisy girl’ had sent a picture of the note saying something like: “Omg I just saw this, I am so sorry for making so much noise, it won’t happen again, It’s completely my fault if I bothered you with all that noise I was just having fun with some friends and I didn’t know I was that loud… It’s my fault I am so sorry for the noise…”

Then my flatmates replied: “Oh don’t worry it’s not your fault and it wasn’t even that loud” 

Then the smart ‘noisy girl’ continued: “Yes it’s my fault because I was bothering you guys with the noise, I am so sorry etc etc…” 

She kept on apologizing several times like that to an extent that every single flatmate ended up saying that it was fine that it wasn’t her fault and that the person who left the note was stupid for not saying anything it person! 

We don’t even know who left the note!

She changed the narrative from “Omg she is a loud person” to “Poor her, who is the mean person who left the note”

And all that just by apologizing! Not just only once but do it as much as you need it!

After that, I was shocked, I didn’t expect what I learned from that book to be used in practice and work exactly like the book said. 

I guess humans aren’t so different from each other after all...