How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie)

Nobody kicks a dead dog.
Our thoughts make us what we are.
Every day is a new life to a wise man.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
No matter what happens, always be yourself.
If you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !
Those who do not know how to fight worry die young. Alexis Carrel
Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.
Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw stars.
Shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Live in Day-tight compartments.
Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest he wither in despair.
0ne of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate.
So, to prevent fatigue and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
Let’s do as General Eisenhower does: let’s never waste a minute thinking about people we don’t like.
You do not not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you. Dr. Montague
It has been said that nearly all of our worries and unhappiness come from our imagination and not from reality.
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.
Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they got rid of their fears and worries.
Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember “Life is too short to be little”
De minimus non curat lex’— the law does not concern itself with trifles. And neither should the worrier—if he wants peace of mind.
For every ailment under the sun, There is a remedy, or there is none; If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it.
When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.
There is only one way to happiness,” Epictetus taught the Romans, “and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen?” 2. Prepare to accept it if you have to. 3. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.
Let me repeat: do what the Army does—take frequent rests. Do what your heart does—rest before you get tired, and you will add one hour a day to your waking life.
The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if your cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. William James
Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher, warned that we ought to be more concerned about removing wrong thoughts from the mind than about removing ‘tumors and abscesses from the body.’
Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied; and the purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something about applying it.
The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.
Let’s never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurt ourselves far more than we hurt them. Let’s do as General Eisenhower does: let’s never waste a minute thinking about people we don’t like.
…the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.
Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.
Relaxation and Recreation The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy religion, sleep, music, and laughter. Have faith in God—learn to sleep well— Love good music—see the funny side of life— And health and happiness will be yours.
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
No one living has enough emotion and vigor to fight the inevitable and, at the same time, enough left over to create a new life. Choose one or the other. You can either bend with the inevitable sleetstorms of life—or you can resist them and break!
So, I banish about 90 per cent of my worries by taking these four steps: 1. Writing down precisely what I am worried about. Writing down what I can do about it. 3. Deciding what to do. 4. Starting immediately to carry out that decision.
The words “Think and Thank” are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: “Think and Thank”. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.
I know with conviction beyond all doubt that the biggest problem you and I have to deal with—in fact, almost the *only* problem we have to deal with—is choosing the right thoughts. If we can do that, we will be on the highroad to solving all our problems.

When I asked him -Mr.Henry Ford- if he ever worried, he replied: “No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?”
A good deed, “said the prophet Mohammed, “is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another.” Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding efforts on the doer? Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the very thing that produces worry and fear and melancholia.
I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves—before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until ten minutes past midnight. They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.
So let’s be content to live the only time we can possibly live: from now until bedtime. ‘Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, from now until nightfall,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.’
I spent twelve years working with cattle; yet I never saw a Jersey cow running a temperature because the pasture was burning from lack of rain or because of sleet and cold or because her boy friend was paying too much attention to another heffer. The animals confront night, storms, and hunger calmly; so they never have nervous breakdowns or stomach ulcers; and they never go insane.
Professor William James, the father of applied psychology, has been dead since 1910. But if he were alive today, and could hear this formula for facing the worst, he would heartily approve of it. How do I know that? Because he told his own students: ‘Be willing to have it so… Be willing to have it so,’ he said, because ‘…acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.’
Experience has proved to me, time after time, the enormous value of arriving at a decision. It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop going around and round in maddening circles, that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living hells. I find that fifty per cent of my worries vanishes once I arrive at a clear, definite decision; and another forty per cent usually vanishes once I start to carry out that decision.
Do I tend to put off living in the present in order to worry about the future, or to yearn for some ‘magical rose garden over the horizon’? Do I sometimes embitter the present by regretting things that happened in the past—that are over and done with? Do I get up in the morning determined to ‘Seize the day’—to get the utmost out of these twenty-four hours? Can I get more out of life by ‘living in day-tight compartments’? When shall I start to do this? Next week? … Tomorrow? … Today?”
Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.
George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: ‘The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.’ So don’t bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking—and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It’s the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth—and one of the best.
Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes… What kinds of emotional factors tire the sedentary (or sitting) worker? Joy? Contentment? No! Never! Boredom, resentment, a feeling of not being appreciated, a feeling of futility, hurry, anxiety, worry—those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous headache. Yes, we get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body.
What is the answer to this fatigue? Relax! Relax! Relax! Learn to relax while you are doing your work. Relax in odd moments. Let your body go limp like an old sock.” Work, as much as possible, in a comfortable position. Check yourself four or five times a day, and say to yourself, ‘Am I making my work harder than it actually is? Am I using muscles that have nothing to do with the work I’m doing?’ Test yourself again at the end of the day, by asking yourself, ‘Just how tired am I? If I am tired, it is not because of mental work I have done but because of the way I have done it.’
Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car. It exerts enough energy every twenty-four hours to shovel twenty tons of coal onto a platform three feet high. It does this incredible amount of work for fifty, seventy, or maybe ninety years. How can it stand it? Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, explained it. He said ‘Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time. As a matter of fact, there is a definite rest period after each contraction. When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day.
When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-“There are no atheists in foxholes.” But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: “Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective.” At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?
Some readers are going to snort at the idea of making so much over a hackneyed proverb like ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk.’ I know it is trite, commonplace, a platitude. I know you have heard it a thousand times. But I also know that these hackneyed proverbs contain the very essence of the distilled wisdom of all ages. They have come out of the fiery experience of the human race and have been handed down through countless generations. If you were to read everything that has ever been written about worry by the great scholars of all time, you would never read anything more basic or more profund than such hackneyed proverbs as ‘Don’t cross your bridges until you come to them’ and ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk.’ If we ony applied those two proverbs—instead of snorting at them-—we wouldn’t need this book at all. In fact, if we applied most of the old proverbs, we would lead almost perfect lives. However, knowledge isn’t power until it is applied; and the purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something about applying it.

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How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie)