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“Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry.” Yes, from dissipation of their energies—and worry because they never seem to get their work done.
GOOD WORKING HABIT NO. 2 Do things in the order of their importance.
His plan called for writing five pages each day for nine heartbreaking years, even though he made a total of thirty dollars in those nine years—about a penny a day. Even Robinson Crusoe wrote out a schedule of what he would do each hour of the day.
When you face a problem, solve it then and there if you have the facts necessary to make a decision. Don’t keep putting off decisions.
Learn to organize, deputize and supervise.
One of the chief causes of fatigue is boredom.
It is a well-known fact that your emotional attitude usually has far more to do with producing fatigue than has physical exertion.
Then I made this important discovery: if I do my work as if I really enjoy it, then I do enjoy it to some extent. I also found I can work faster when I enjoy my work. So there is seldom any need now for me to work overtime. This new attitude of mine gained me the reputation of being a good worker.
And when one of the department superintendents needed a
private secretary, he asked for me for the job—because, he said, I was willing to do extra work without being sulky! This matter of the power of a changed mental attitude,” wrote Miss Golden, “has been a tremen...
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“Kaltenborn, you have to do this if you want to eat. Since you have to do it—why not have a good time doing it? Why not imagine every time you ring a doorbell that you are an actor before the footlights and that there’s an audience out there looking at you? After all, what you are doing is just as funny as something on the stage. So why not put a lot of zest and enthusiasm into it?” Mr. Kaltenborn told me that these daily pep talks helped him transform a task that he had once hated and dreaded into an adventure that he liked and made highly profitable.
These words are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius first wrote them in his book on Meditations: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” By talking to yourself every hour of the day, you can direct yourself to think thoughts of courage and happiness, thoughts of power and peace. By talking to yourself about the things you have to be grateful for, you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and sing. By thinking the right thoughts, you can make any job less distasteful. Your boss wants you to be interested in your job so that he or she will make more
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People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. – Dale Carnegie
“Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.”
The science of genetics informs us that you are what you are largely as a result of twenty-four chromosomes contributed by your father and twenty-four chromosomes contributed by your mother. These forty-eight chromosomes comprise everything that determines what you inherit. In each chromosome there may be, says Amram Scheinfeld, “anywhere from scores to hundreds of genes—with a single gene, in some cases, able to change the whole life of an individual.” Truly, we are “fearfully and wonderfully” made.
Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes. One of England’s most distinguished psychiatrists, J. A. Hadfield, says in his book The Psychology of Power. “The greater part of the fatigue from which we suffer is of mental origin; in fact exhaustion of purely physical origin is rare.”
Remember that a
tense muscle is a working muscle. Ease up! Save energy for important duties.”
Unless your entire body is as limp and relaxed as an old rag doll, you are at this very moment producing nervous tensions and muscular tensions. You are producing nervous tensions and nervous fatigue!
Let’s be clear about this: I am not advocating ignoring all criticism. Far from it. I am talking about ignoring only unjust criticism.
“Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.”
Mr. Schwab declared that he had adopted that old German’s words as his motto: “Just laugh.” That motto is especially good when you are the victim of unjust criticism. You can answer the man who answers you back, but what can you say to the man who “just laughs”?
About ninety percent of the things in our lives are right and about ten percent are wrong. If we want to be happy, all we have to do is to concentrate on the ninety percent that are right and ignore the ten percent that are wrong. If we want to be worried and bitter and have stomach ulcers, all we have to do is to concentrate on the ten percent that are wrong and ignore the ninety percent that are glorious.
“In bed for a year! To be an invalid—perhaps to die! I was terror-stricken! Why did all this have to happen to me? What had I done to deserve it? I wept and wailed. I was bitter and rebellious. But I did go to bed as the doctor advised. A neighbor of mine, Mr. Rudolf, an artist, said to me, ‘You think now that spending a year in bed will be a tragedy. But it won’t be. You will have time to think and get acquainted with yourself. You will make more spiritual growth in these next few months than you have made during all your previous life.’