How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
By Amy
I heard that humans have evolved to worry a lot. The ones who don’t worry about anything died more easily. I don’t know how true that is, but I find limiting useless worries to be a rare skill.
How can we break the habit and only worry when it actually helps us?
I came across this great book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. I found it to be full of inspiring stories and practical advice. For me, it’s a good listening material for starting the day as an audiobook.
Here’s what I learnt and the related excerpts (This book is in the public domain)
There are opportunities in circumstances that appear worrying.
Excerpt:
A few years ago, Harlan A. Howard made a decision that completely altered his life. He resolved to make a dull job interesting-and he certainly had a dull one: washing plates, scrubbing counters, and dishing out ice-cream in the high-school lunch-room while the other boys were playing ball or kidding the girls. Harlan Howard despised his job-but since he had to stick to it, he resolved to study ice-cream-how it was made, what ingredients were used, why some ice-creams were better than others. He studied the chemistry of ice-cream, and became a whiz in the high-school chemistry course. He was so interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts State College and majored in the field of “food technology”. When the New York Cocoa Exchange offered a hundred-dollar prize for the best paper on uses of cocoa and chocolate-a prize open to all college students-who do you suppose won it? … That’s right. Harlan Howard.
When he found it difficult to get a job, he opened a private laboratory in the basement of his home at 750 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, a new law was passed. The bacteria in milk had to be counted. Harlan A. Howard was soon counting bacteria for the fourteen milk companies in Amherst-and he had to hire two assistants.
Where will he be twenty-five years from now? Well, the men who are now running the business of food chemistry will be retired then, or dead; and their places will be taken by young lads who are now radiating initiative and enthusiasm. Twenty-five years from now, Harlan A. Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession, while some of his class-mates to whom he used to sell ice-cream over the counter will be sour, unemployed, cursing the government, and complaining that they never had a chance. Harlan A. Howard might never have had a chance, either, if he hadn’t resolved to make a dull job interesting.
How much I enjoy a task doesn’t depend on the task itself, but what I think about it.
Excerpt:
Would you like to know how to make even dishwashing at the kitchen sink a thrilling experience? If so, read an inspiring book of incredible courage by Borghild Dahl. It is called I Wanted to See.
This book was written by a woman who was practically blind for half a century. “I had only one eye,” she writes, “and it was so covered with dense scars that I had to do all my seeing through one small opening in the left of the eye. I could see a book only by holding it up close to my face and by straining my one eye as hard as I could to the left.” But she refused to be pitied, refused to be considered “different”.
As a child, she wanted to play hopscotch with other children, but she couldn’t see the markings. So after the other children had gone home, she got down on the ground and crawled along with her eyes near to the marks. She memorised every bit of the ground where she and her friends played and soon became an expert at running games. She did her reading at home, holding a book of large print so close to her eyes that her eyelashes brushed the pages. She earned two college degrees: an A B. from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Arts from Columbia University.
She started teaching in the tiny village of Twin Valley, Minnesota, and rose until she became professor of journalism and literature at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She taught there for thirteen years, lecturing before women’s clubs and giving radio talks about books and authors. “In the back of my mind,” she writes, “there had always lurked a fear of total blindness. In order to overcome this, I had adopted a cheerful, almost hilarious, attitude towards life.”
Then in 1943, when she was fifty-two years old, a miracle happened: an operation at the famous Mayo Clinic. She could now see forty times as well as she had ever been able to see before.
A new and exciting world of loveliness opened before her. She now found it thrilling even to wash dishes in the kitchen sink. “I begin to play with the white fluffy suds in the dish-pan,” she writes. “I dip my hands into them and I pick up a ball of tiny soap bubbles. I hold them up against the light, and in each of them I can see the brilliant colours of a miniature rainbow.”
As she looked through the window above the kitchen sink, she saw “the flapping greyblack wings of the sparrows flying through the thick, falling snow.” She found such ecstasy looking at the soap bubbles and sparrows that she closed her
book with these words: ” ‘Dear Lord,’ I whisper, ‘Our Father in Heaven, I thank Thee. I thank Thee.’ ”
Imagine thanking God because you can wash dishes and see rainbows in bubbles and sparrows flying through the snow 1 You and I ought to be ashamed of ourselves. All the days of our years we have been living in a fairyland of beauty, but we have been too blind to see, too satiated to enjoy. If we want to stop worrying and start living.
To make worries smaller, read history or think about it in a larger context.
Excerpt:
When I find myself depressed over present conditions, I can, within one hour, banish worry and turn myself into a shouting optimist.
Here is how I do it. I enter my library, close my eyes, and walk to certain shelves containing only books on history. With my eyes still shut, I reach for a book, not knowing whether I am picking up Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico or Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars. With my eyes still closed, I open the book at random. I then open my eyes and read for an hour; and the more I read, the more sharply I realise that the world has always been in the throes of agony, that civilisation has always been tottering on the brink. The pages of history fairly shriek with tragic tales of war, famine, poverty, pestilence, and man’s inhumanity to man. After reading history for an hour, I realise that bad as conditions are now, they are infinitely better than they used to be. This enables me to see and face my present troubles in their proper perspective as well as to realise that the world as a whole is constantly growing better. Here is a method that deserves a whole chapter. Read history! Try to get the viewpoint of ten thousand years-and see how trivial your troubles are, in terms of eternity.
You tend to worry a lot less if you learn to relax and relax often. Relaxing your eyes and your face, then your mind will relax. Imagine yourself as an old sock.
Excerpt:
How do you relax? Do you start with your mind, or do you start with your nerves? You don’t start with either. You always begin to relax with your muscles! Let’s give it a try. To show how it is done, suppose we start with your eyes.
Read this paragraph through, and when you’ve reached the end, lean back, close your eyes, and say to your eyes silently: “Let go. Let go. Stop straining, stop frowning. Let go. Let go.” Repeat that over and over very slowly for a minute ….
Didn’t you notice that after a few seconds the muscles of the eyes began to obey? Didn’t you feel as though some hand had wiped away the tension? Well, incredible as it seems, you have sampled in that one minute the whole key and secret to the art of relaxing. You can do the same thing with the jaw, with the muscles of the face, with the neck, with the shoulders, the whole of the body. But the most important organ of all is the eye. Dr. Edmund Jacobson of the University of Chicago has gone so far as to say that if you can completely relax the muscles of the eyes, you can forget all your troubles! The reason the eyes are so important in relieving nervous tension is that they burn up one-fourth of all the nervous energies consumed by the body. That is also why so many people with perfectly sound vision suffer from “eyestrain”. They are tensing the eyes. Vicki Baum, the famous novelist, says that when she was a child, she met an old man who taught her one of the most important lessons she ever learned. She had fallen down and cut her knees and hurt her wrist. The old man picked her up; he had once been a circus clown; and, as he brushed her off, he said: “The reason you injured yourself was because you don’t know how to relax. You have to pretend you are as limp as a sock, as an old crumpled sock. Come, I’ll show you how to do it.”
If you worry so much that it stops you from thinking clearly, accept the worst case, then you can think about how to improve on it.
Excerpt:
“Finally, common sense reminded me that worry wasn’t getting me anywhere; so I figured out a way to handle my problem without worrying. It worked superbly. I have been using this same anti-worry technique for more than thirty years.
It is simple. Anyone can use it. It consists of three steps:
“Step I. I analysed the situation fearlessly and honestly and figured out what was the worst that could possibly happen as a result of this failure. No one was going to jail me or shoot me. That was certain. True, there was a chance that I would lose my position; and there was also a chance that my employers would have to remove the machinery and lose the twenty thousand dollars we had invested.
“Step II. After figuring out what was the worst that could possibly happen, I reconciled myself to accepting it, if necessary. I said to myself: This failure will be a blow to my record, and it might possibly mean the loss of my job; but if it does, I can always get another position. Conditions could be much worse; and as far as my employers are concerned- well, they realise that we are experimenting with a new method of cleaning gas, and if this experience costs them twenty thousand dollars, they can stand it. They can charge it up to research, for it is an experiment.
“After discovering the worst that could possibly happen and reconciling myself to accepting it, if necessary, an extremely important thing happened: I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of peace that I hadn’t experienced in days.
“Step III. From that time on, I calmly devoted my time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst which I had already accepted mentally.
“I now tried to figure out ways and means by which I might reduce the loss of twenty thousand dollars that we faced. I made several tests and finally figured out that if we spent another five thousand for additional equipment, our problem would be solved. We did this, and instead of the firm losing twenty thousand, we made fifteen thousand. “I probably would never have been able to do this if I had kept on worrying, because one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate. When we worry, our minds jump here and there and everywhere, and we lose all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all those vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.
“This incident that I have related occurred many years ago. It worked so superbly that I have been using it ever since; and, as a result, my life has been almost completely free from worry.”