How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Dale Carnegie

by Dale Carnegie

One night a century ago, when a screech owl was screeching in the woods along the shore of Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau dipped his goose quill into his homemade ink and wrote in his diary: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.” To put it another way: we are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence. Yet that is precisely what Gilbert and Sullivan did. They knew how to create gay words and gay music, but they knew distressingly little about how to create gaiety in their own lives. They created some of the loveliest light operas that ever delighted the world: Patience, Pinafore, The Mikado. But they couldn’t control their tempers. They embittered their years over nothing more than the price of a carpet! Sullivan ordered a new carpet for the theatre they had bought. When Gilbert saw the bill, he hit the roof. They battled it out in court, and never spoke to one another again as long as they lived. When Sullivan wrote the music for a new production, he mailed it to Gilbert; and when Gilbert wrote the words, he mailed it back to Sullivan. Once they had to take a curtain call together, but they stood on opposite sides of the stage and bowed in different directions, so they wouldn’t see one another. They hadn’t the sense to put a stop-loss order on their resentments, as Lincoln did. Once, during the Civil War, when some of Lincoln’s friends were den...

Lesson from Thereou, Lincoln, Gilbert and Sullivan