Narrative analysis of Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how one of Dale Carnegie's historically best selling self‐help books, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, resonates with the contemporary conceptualization of psychological capital (PsyCap).Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a narrative historical interpretation to analyze Dale Carnegie's book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Initially, two of the co‐authors independently identified passages mirroring each of the four PsyCap capacities, while in the final stage a consensus on the interpretation was reached with the remaining co‐authors.FindingsThe components of the PsyCap construct resonate well with the prescriptions that Carnegie narrated and outlined in his best selling book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of this study should be interpreted with a recognition that an alternative critical approach to narrative analysis could have been conducted based on the narrative logic of social power structure.Originality/valueThis paper is unique in placing an emphasis on the insights researchers and practitioners alike can gain by re‐evaluating the self‐help books from the past.