How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Dale Carnegie

by Dale Carnegie

Ben Fortson. I met him in a hotel elevator in Atlanta, Georgia. As I stepped into the elevator, I noticed this cheerful-looking man, who had both legs missing, sitting in a wheel-chair in a corner of the elevator. When the elevator stopped at his floor, he asked me pleasantly if I would step to one corner, so he could manage his chair better. “So sorry,” he said, “to inconvenience you”-and a deep, heart-warming smile lighted his face as he said it. When I left the elevator and went to my room, I could think of nothing but this cheerful cripple. So I hunted him up and asked him to tell me his story. “It happened in 1929,” he told me with a smile. “I had gone out to cut a load of hickory poles to stake the beans in my garden. I had loaded the poles on my Ford and started back home. Suddenly one pole slipped under the car and jammed the steering apparatus at the very moment I was making a sharp turn. The car shot over an embankment and hurled me against a tree. My spine was hurt. My legs were paralysed. “I was twenty-four when that happened, and I have never taken a step since.” Twenty-four years old, and sentenced to a wheel-chair for the rest of his life! I asked him how he managed to take it so courageously, and he said: “I didn’t.” He said he raged and rebelled. He fumed about his fate. But as the years dragged on, he found that his rebellion wasn’t getting him anything except bitterness. “I finally realised,” he said, “that other people were kind and courteous to me. So ...

Ben Fortson - The Man Who lost both his legs at 24