How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Dale Carnegie

by Dale Carnegie

Winston Churchill said when he was working eighteen hours a day at the height of the war. When he was asked if he worried about his tremendous responsibilities, he said: “I'm too busy. I have no time for worry.” Charles Kettering was in that same fix when he started out to invent a self-starter for automobiles. Mr. Kettering was, until his recent retirement, vice-president of General Motors in charge of the world-famous General Motors Research Corporation. But in those days, he was so poor that he had to use the hayloft of a barn as a laboratory. To buy groceries, he had to use fifteen hundred dollars that his wife had made by giving piano lessons; later, had to borrow five hundred dollars on his life insurance. I asked his wife if she wasn’t worried at a time like that. “Yes,” she replied, “I was so worried I couldn’t sleep; but Mr. Kettering wasn’t. He was too absorbed in his work to worry.”