How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

By

Dale Carnegie

~~~~

Copyright - 1948 / 1958 (This book)

First Printing - 1948

Library of Congress Catalog Number - Unknown

ISBN - Unknown

Scan Version : v 1.0

Format : Text with cover picture.

Date Scanned: Jan/15/2002

Posted to (Newsgroup): alt.binaries.e-book

-Salmun

~~~~

Contents

Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You

Preface - How This Book Was Written-and Why

Part One - Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry

1 - Live in "Day-tight Compartments"

2 - A Magic Formula for Solving Worry Situations

3 - What Worry May Do to You

Part Two - Basic Techniques In Analysing Worry

4 - How to Analyse and Solve Worry Problems

5 - How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Your Business Worries

Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book

Part Three - How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You

6  - How to Crowd Worry out of Your Mind

7  - Don't Let the Beetles Get You Down

8  - A Law That Will Outlaw Many of Your Worries

9  - Co-operate with the Inevitable

10 - Put a "Stop-Loss" Order on Your Worries

11 - Don't Try to Saw Sawdust

Part Four - Seven Ways To Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace And Happiness

12 - Eight Words that Can Transform Your Life

13 - The High, Cost of Getting Even

14 - If You Do This, You Will Never Worry About Ingratitude

15 - Would You Take a Million Dollars for What You Have?

16 - Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You

17 - If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade

18 - How to Cure Melancholy in Fourteen Days

Part Five - The Golden Rule For Conquering Worry

19 - How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry

Part Six - How To Keep From Worrying About Criticism

20 - Remember That No One Ever Kicks a Dead Dog

21 - Do This-and Criticism Can't Hurt You

22 - Fool Things I Have Done

Part Seven - Six Ways To Prevent Fatigue And Worry And Keep Your Energy And Spirits High

23 - How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life

24 - What Makes You Tired-and What You Can Do About It

25 - How the Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue-and Keep Looking Young

26 - Four Good Working Habits That Will Help Prevent Fatigue and Worry

27 - How to Banish the Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, and Resentment

28 - How to Keep from Worrying About Insomnia

Part Eight - How To Find The Kind Of Work In Which You May Be Happy And Successful

29 - The Major Decision of Your Life

Part Nine - How To Lessen Your Financial Worries

30 - "Seventy Per Cent of All Our Worries ..."

Part Ten - "How I Conquered Worry" (32 True Stories)

• "Six Major Troubles Hit Me All At Once" By C.I. Blackwood

• "I Can Turn Myself into a Shouting Optimist Within an Hour" By Roger W. Babson

• "How I Got Rid of an Inferiority Complex" By Elmer Thomas

• "I Lived in the Garden of Allah" BY R.V.C. Bodley

• "Five Methods I Use to Banish Worry" By Professor William Lyon Phelps

• "I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today" By Dorothy Dix

• "I Did Not Expect to Live to See the Dawn" BY J.C. Penney

• "I Go to the Gym to Punch the Bag or Take a Hike Outdoors" By Colonel Eddie Eagan

• "I Was 'The Worrying Wreck from Virginia Tech'" By Jim Birdsall

• "I Have Lived by This Sentence" By Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo

• "I Hit Bottom and Survived" By Ted Ericksen

• "I Used to Be One of the World's Biggest Jackasses" By Percy H. Whiting

• "I Have Always Tried to Keep My Line of Supplies Open" By Gene Autry

• "I Heard a Voice in India" BY E. Stanley Jones

• "When the Sheriff Came in My Front Door" By Homer Croy

• "The Toughest Opponent I Ever Fought Was Worry" By Jack Dempsey

• "I Prayed to God to Keep Me Out of an Orphan's Home" By Kathleen Halter

• "I Was Acting Like an Hysterical Woman" By Cameron Shipp

• "I Learned to Stop Worrying by Watching My Wife Wash Dishes" By Rev. William Wood

• "I Found the Answer-Keep Busy!" By Del Hughes

• "Time Solves a Lot of Things" By Louis T. Montant, Jr.

• "I Was Warned Not to Try to Speak or to Move Even a Finger" By Joseph L. Ryan

• "I Am a Great Dismisser" By Ordway Tead

• "If I Had Not Stopped Worrying, I Would Have Been in My Grave Long Ago" By Connie Mack

• "One at a Time, Gentlemen, One at a Time" By John Homer Miller

• "I Now Look for the Green Light" By Joseph M. Cotter

• How John D. Rockefeller Lived on Borrowed Time for Forty-five Years

• "Reading a Book on Sex Prevented My Marriage from Going on the Rocks" BY B.R.W.

• "I Was Committing Slow Suicide Because I Didn't Know How to Relax" By Paul Sampson

• "A Real Miracle Happened to Me" By Mrs. John Burger

• "Setbacks" BY Ferenc Molnar

• "I Was So Worried I Didn't Eat a Bite of Solid Food for Eighteen Days" By Kathryne Holcombe Farmer

------------------------------

Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You

1. Gives you a number of practical, tested formulas for solving worry situations.

2. Shows you how to eliminate fifty per cent of your business worries immediately.

3. Brings you seven ways to cultivate a mental attitude that will bring you peace and happiness.

4. Shows you how to lessen financial worries.

5. Explains a law that will outlaw many of your worries.

6. Tells you how to turn criticism to your advantage.

7. Shows how the housewife can avoid fatigue-and keep looking young.

8. Gives four working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry.

9. Tells you how to add one hour a day to your working life.

10. Shows you how to avoid emotional upsets.

11. Gives you the stories of scores of everyday men and women, who tell you in their own words how they stopped worrying and started living.

12. Gives you Alfred Adler's prescription for curing melancholia in fourteen days.

13. Gives you the 21 words that enabled the world-famous physician, Sir William Osier, to banish worry.

14. Explains the three magic steps that Willis H. Carrier, founder of the air-conditioning industry, uses to conquer worry.

15. Shows you how to use what William James called "the sovereign cure for worry".

16. Gives you details of how many famous men conquered worry-men like Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times; Herbert E. Hawkes, former Dean of Columbia University; Ordway Tead, Chairman of the Board of Higher Education, New York City; Jack Dempsey; Connie Mack; Roger W. Babson; Admiral Byrd; Henry Ford; Gene Autry; J.C. Penney; and John D. Rockefeller.

------------------------------

Preface

How This Book Was Written-and Why

Thirty-Five years ago, I was one of the unhappiest lads in New York. I was selling motor-trucks for a living. I didn't know what made a motor-truck run. That wasn't all: I didn't want to know. I despised my job. I despised living in a cheap furnished room on West Fifty-sixth Street-a room infested with cockroaches. I still remember that I had a bunch of neckties hanging on the walls; and when I reached out of a morning to get a fresh necktie, the cockroaches scattered in all directions. I despised having to eat in cheap, dirty restaurants that were also probably infested with cockroaches.

I came home to my lonely room each night with a sick headache-a headache bred and fed by disappointment, worry, bitterness, and rebellion. I was rebelling because the dreams I had nourished back in my college days had turned into nightmares. Was this life? Was this the vital adventure to which I had looked forward so eagerly? Was this all life would ever mean to me-working at a job I despised, living with cockroaches, eating vile food-and with no hope for the future? ... I longed for leisure to read, and to write the books I had dreamed of writing back in my college days.

I knew I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by giving up the job I despised. I wasn't interested in making a lot of money, but I was interested in making a lot of living. In short, I had come to the Rubicon-to that moment of decision which faces most young people when they start out in life. So I made my decision-and that decision completely altered my future. It has made the last thirty-five years happy and rewarding beyond my most Utopian aspirations.

My decision was this: I would give up the work I loathed; and, since I had spent four years studying in the State Teachers' College at Warrensburg, Missouri, preparing to teach, I would make my living teaching adult classes in night schools. Then I would have my days free to read books, prepare lectures, write novels and short stories. I wanted "to live to write and write to live".

What subject should I teach to adults at night? As I looked back and evaluated my own college training, I saw that the training and experience I had had in public speaking had been of more practical value to me in business-and in life-than everything else I had studied in college all put together. Why? Because it had wiped out my timidity and lack of confidence and given me the courage and assurance to deal with people. It had also made clear that leadership usually gravitates to the man who can get up and say what he thinks

I applied for a position teaching public speaking in the night extension courses both at Columbia University and New York University, but these universities decided they could struggle along somehow without my help.

I was disappointed then-but I now thank God that they did turn me down, because I started teaching in Y.M.C.A. night schools, where I had to show concrete results and show them quickly. What a challenge that was! These adults didn't come to my classes because they wanted college credits or social prestige. They came for one reason only: they wanted to solve their problems. They wanted to be able to stand up on their own feet and say a few words at a business meeting without fainting from fright. Salesmen wanted to be able to call on a tough customer without having to walk around the block three times to get up courage. They wanted to develop poise and self-confidence. They wanted to get ahead in business. They wanted to have more money for their families. And since they were paying their tuition on an installment basis-and they stopped paying if they didn't get results-and since I was being paid, not a salary, but a percentage of the profits, I had to be practical if I wanted to eat.

I felt at the time that I was teaching under a handicap, but I realise now that I was getting priceless training. I had to motivate my students. I had to help them solve their problems.

I had to make each session so inspiring that they wanted to continue coming.

It was exciting work. I loved it. I was astounded at how quickly these business men developed self-confidence and how quickly many of them secured promotions and increased pay. The classes were succeeding far beyond my most optimistic hopes. Within three seasons, the Y.M.C.A.s, which had refused to pay me five dollars a night in salary, were paying me thirty dollars a night on a percentage basis. At first, I taught only public speaking, but, as the years went by, I saw that these adults also needed the ability to win friends and influence people. Since I couldn't find an adequate textbook on human relations, I wrote one myself. It was written-no, it wasn't written in the usual way. It grew and evolved out of the experiences of the adults in these classes. I called it How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Since it was written solely as a textbook for my own adult classes, and since I had written four other books that no one had ever heard of, I never dreamed that it would have a large sale: I am probably one of the most astonished authors now living.

As the years went by, I realised that another one of the biggest problems of these adults was worry. A large majority of my students were business men-executives, salesmen, engineers, accountants: a cross section of all the trades and professions-and most of them had problems! There were women in the classes-business women and housewives. They, too, had problems! Clearly, what I needed was a textbook on how to conquer worry-so again I tried to find one. I went to New York's great public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street and discovered to my astonishment that this library had only twenty-two books listed under the title WORRY. I also noticed, to my amusement, that it had one hundred and eighty-nine books listed under WORMS. Almost nine times as many books about worms as about worry! Astounding, isn't it? Since worry is one of the biggest problems facing mankind, you would think, wouldn't you, that every high school and college in the land would give a course on "How to Stop Worrying"?

Yet, if there is even one course on that subject in any college in the land, I have never heard of it. No wonder David Seabury said in his book How to Worry Successfully: "We come to maturity with as little preparation for the pressures of experience as a bookworm asked to do a ballet."

The result? More than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous and emotional troubles.

I looked over those twenty-two books on worry reposing on the shelves of the New York Public Library. In addition, I purchased all the books on worry I could find; yet I couldn't discover even one that I could use as a text in my course for adults. So I resolved to write one myself.

I began preparing myself to write this book seven years ago. How? By reading what the philosophers of all ages have said about worry. I also read hundreds of biographies, all the way from Confucius to Churchill. I also interviewed scores of prominent people in many walks of life, such as Jack Dempsey, General Omar Bradley, General Mark Clark, Henry Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dorothy Dix. But that was only a beginning.

I also did something else that was far more important than the interviews and the reading. I worked for five years in a laboratory for conquering worry-a laboratory conducted in our own adult classes. As far as I know, it is the first and only laboratory of its kind in the world. This is what we did. We gave students a set of rules on how to stop worrying and asked them to apply these rules in their own lives and then talk to the class on the results they had obtained. Others reported on techniques they had used in the past.