How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

by Dale Carnegie

leadership usually gravitates to the man who can get up and say what he thinks.

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

You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can’t possibly live in either of those eternities—no, not even for one split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let’s be content to live the only time we can possibly live: from now until bedtime. “Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”

“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.”

“How strange it is, our little procession of life!” wrote Stephen Leacock. “The child says, ‘When I am a big boy.’ But what is that? The big boy says, ‘When I grow up.’ And then, grown up, he says, ‘When I get married.’ But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to ‘When I’m able to retire.’ And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.”

“Think,” said Dante, “that this day will never dawn again.” Life is slipping away with incredible speed. We are racing through space at the rate of nineteen miles every second. Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.

So, the first thing you should know about worry is this: if you want to keep it out of your life, do what Sir William Osler did: Shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Live in Day-tight Compartments.

When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means, we have everything to gain!

So Rule 2 is: If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H Carrier by doing these three things: Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen?” Prepare to accept it if you have to. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world—and loses his health? Even if he owned the whole world, he could sleep in only one bed at a time and eat only three meals a day. Even a new employee can do that—and probably sleep more soundly and enjoy his food more than a high-powered executive.

“Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.”

“If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.”

If we bother with facts at all—and Thomas Edison said in all seriousness, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour of thinking”—if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think—and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts—the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices!

The great scientist, Pasteur, spoke of “the peace that is found in libraries and laboratories.” Why is peace found there? Because the men in libraries and laboratories are usually too absorbed in their tasks to worry about themselves. Research men rarely have nervous breakdowns. They haven’t time for such luxuries.

Most of us have little trouble “losing ourselves in action” while we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day’s work. But the hours after work—they are the dangerous ones. Just when we’re free to enjoy our own leisure, and ought to be happiest—that’s when the blue devils of worry attack us. That’s when we begin to wonder whether we’re getting anywhere in life; whether we’re in a rut; whether the boss “meant anything” by that remark he made today; or whether we’re losing our sex appeal.

“I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”

“The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.”

Disraeli said: “Life is too short to be little.” “Those words,” said André Maurois in This Week magazine, “have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget… . Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody.

Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember “Life is too short to be little.”

“Let’s examine the record.” Let’s ask ourselves: “What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur?”