How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

by Dale Carnegie

The late Edward S. Evans of Detroit almost killed himself with worry before he learned that life “is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.” Brought up in poverty, Edward Evans made his first money by selling newspapers, then worked as a grocer’s clerk. Later, with seven people dependent upon him for bread and butter, he got a job as an assistant librarian. Small as the pay was, he was afraid to quit. Eight years passed before he could summon up the courage to start out on his own. But once he started, he built up an original investment of fifty-five borrowed dollars into a business of his own that made him twenty thousand dollars a year. Then came a frost, a killing frost. He endorsed a big note for a friend—and the friend went bankrupt. Quickly on top of that disaster came another: the bank in which he had all his money collapsed. He not only lost every cent he had, but was plunged into debt for sixteen thousand dollars.