How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

by Dale Carnegie

‘Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.’

the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.

good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdowns.

“I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass. When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which we feel that we must accomplish that day, hut if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass through the day slowly and evenly, as do the grains of sand passing through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.”

“Every day is a new life to a wise man.” I typed that sentence out and pasted it on the windshield of my car, where I saw it every minute I was driving. I found it wasn’t so hard to live only one day at a time. I learned to forget the yesterdays and to not think of the tomorrows. Each morning I said to myself, “Today is a new life.”