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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "How To Stop Worrying And Start Living," Dale Carnegie presents an accessible and pragmatic guide to overcoming anxiety and stress that has resonated with readers since its publication in 1948. Utilizing a conversational tone paired with poignant anecdotes, Carnegie distills psychological insights and practical strategies into approachable life lessons. The book reflects the mid-20th century's growing interest in self-help and personal development, offering timeless wisdom on prioritizing mental well-being over destructive worry through structured, actionable advice. Dale Carnegie's diverse background, which included a stint as a salesman and a passionate interest in public speaking, fueled his desire to empower individuals to improve their lives and cultivate positive attitudes. Drawing from his extensive experience in teaching communication skills, Carnegie recognized how pervasive worry can undermine personal effectiveness and relationships. His dedication to helping others led him to compile various techniques and insights that promote resilience and a proactive mindset. This seminal work is highly recommended for anyone seeking to liberate themselves from the chains of anxiety. Carnegie's insightful frameworks not only provide a roadmap to emotional freedom but also inspire readers to reframe their challenges into opportunities for growth and fulfillment. Engage with this transformative text to discover the keys to a more peaceful and productive life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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How To Stop Worrying And Start Living (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection gathers Dale Carnegie’s complete program on relieving anxiety and cultivating action, alongside the culminating gallery of firsthand accounts that apply those principles. From Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You through Part Ten’s “How I Conquered Worry,” the arrangement presents a coherent journey: foundational facts, analytic tools, habit-breaking strategies, mental attitudes, and real-world victories. Each section and chapter contributes a distinct step toward practical serenity. Placing the instructional parts beside narratives by C. I. Blackwood, Dorothy Dix, Jack Dempsey, J. C. Penney, and others underscores a central aim: to show tested wisdom moving from page to practice.
The through-line is pragmatic humanism: clear decisions replacing corrosive rumination, acceptance joined with purposeful effort, and values embodied in the ordinary day. Part One establishes fundamental facts about worry, then introduces a “magic formula” and the image of living in “day-tight compartments.” Part Two teaches analysis and prioritization, while Part Three replaces habits of anxiety with habits of action. Subsequent parts frame character, criticism, energy, vocation, and money as ethical fields for these same tools. The curatorial aim is to foreground continuity across titles, revealing a single toolkit adapted to many situations rather than siloed advice.
Progress builds intentionally across the sequence. After establishing facts and techniques, Parts Three and Four cultivate attitudes—gratitude, restraint, self-knowledge, and the alchemy of turning lemons into lemonade—while Part Five concentrates the book’s ethic into a unifying rule. Parts Six and Seven address external pressures and physiology: criticism, fatigue, work habits, boredom, and insomnia. Part Eight considers finding the right field of work, and Part Nine addresses financial concerns. “Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book” and the concise “In a Nutshell” summaries amplify learning by reinforcing memory and encouraging consistent application.
Unlike many standalone presentations of similar material, this volume intentionally juxtaposes principle and testimony. Carnegie’s chapters outline methods such as co-operating with the inevitable, placing a stop-loss on worry, and refusing to saw sawdust. The concluding sequence of thirty-two true accounts by contributors like Gene Autry, E. Stanley Jones, Homer Croy, Kathleen Halter, and Ordway Tead shows those methods refracted through varied lives. The curatorial aim is not a novelty of arrangement, but emphasis: the same tools appear in business, sport, ministry, and home. The result is a composite portrait of practice rather than isolated theory.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
The parts speak to one another in layered ways. Part One’s call to live in day-tight compartments creates a cadence repeated throughout later chapters and stories, where attention narrows to the actionable present. Part Two’s analytic steps reappear when storytellers describe triage, decision, and acceptance. Part Three’s habit substitutions animate narratives about busyness, physical exertion, or service. Part Four’s moral focus—gratitude, magnanimity, and self-respect—colors recollections by Percy H. Whiting and Cameron Shipp. Each voice returns to a shared lexicon of risk, choice, and meaning, building a chorus rather than a sequence of isolated solos.
Recurring motifs unify the whole. The mechanical clarity of a “stop-loss” order reframes emotion as bounded risk; “don’t try to saw sawdust” rebukes fixation on the past; making lemonade from lemons models creative transmutation. “No one ever kicks a dead dog” recasts criticism as a sign of relevance, while “green light” evokes forward momentum. Moral dilemmas recur: resist or accept, retaliate or forgive, worry or work. These motifs echo in narratives like Louis T. Montant, Jr.’s reminder that time resolves much, Joseph M. Cotter’s search for signals, and John Homer Miller’s disciplined incrementalism.
Contrasts in tone generate productive tension. Carnegie’s chapters adopt a brisk, didactic clarity, stating propositions and tactics in memorable phrases. The narratives in Part Ten, by contrast, are confessional and particular, moving through setbacks, faith, humor, or grit. Jack Dempsey frames worry as an opponent; E. Stanley Jones invokes revelation; Dorothy Dix crafts stoic resolve; Ordway Tead practices deliberate dismissal. Joseph L. Ryan’s medical crisis sits beside Del Hughes’s insistence on purposeful busyness. The range of voices—business leader J. C. Penney, entertainer Gene Autry, and many others—creates a polyphony that tests and enlarges the core guidance.
Subtle allusions knit instruction and testimony. The counsel to co-operate with the inevitable reverberates in Louis T. Montant, Jr.’s “Time Solves A Lot Of Things” and in R. V. C. Bodley’s serene recollections. The habit of crowding worry out aligns with Del Hughes’s “I Found The Answer—keep Busy!” and Colonel Eddie Eagan’s recourse to physical exertion. The restraint urged in “The High Cost Of Getting Even” shadows Percy H. Whiting’s transformation. Even the caution against sawing sawdust echoes in John Homer Miller’s “One At A Time Gentleman, One At A Time,” advocating measured effort over fretting.
Intersections multiply across later parts. The guidance on criticism—“Do This—and Criticism Can’t Hurt You” and “Fool Things I Have Done”—interacts with self-revealing accounts like “I Used To Be One Of The World’s Biggest Jackasses,” where humility disarms anxiety. The fatigue sequence converses with Paul Sampson’s “I Was Committing Slow Suicide Because I Didn’t Know How To Relax,” showing how rest and rhythm underwrite courage. Insomnia receives practical treatment, mirrored by stories where sleepless fear yields to routine. Financial worry and vocational choice, treated in Parts Eight and Nine, meet pragmatic resolve in business-centered testimonies by J. C. Penney and others.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection endures because it fuses clarity with breadth. It treats worry not as an abstraction but as a pattern touching work, family, reputation, energy, and money. The program moves from understanding to method to habit and character, then validates itself through lived narratives. Its watchwords—day-tight compartments, stop-loss thinking, co-operating with the inevitable—remain intelligible amid contemporary pressures. By aligning ethical reflection with concrete routines, the book provides a usable philosophy of attention, choice, and resilience. The presence of many professions and temperaments suggests portability: principles hold across contexts, while practice is tailored to circumstance.
Over time, readers and commentators have returned to these chapters and stories for their economy and demonstrable usefulness. The fusion of concise maxims with first-person verification has been repeatedly praised in general discussions of life-guidance literature. The thirty-two narratives have often been singled out for accessibility and range, giving the work a grounded realism that complements its principles. Without staking claims to novelty, the collection has invited ongoing debate about the balance between acceptance and ambition, generosity and justice, risk and security. Its continuing citation across business, education, ministry, and sport indicates durable relevance beyond any specific moment.
The cultural afterlife is equally notable. Phrases drawn from the chapters—day-tight compartments, stop-loss order, don’t saw sawdust, make lemonade—have circulated as shorthand for composure and action. The presence of voices such as Gene Autry, Jack Dempsey, J. C. Penney, Dorothy Dix, E. Stanley Jones, and Rev. William Wood demonstrates cross-domain uptake, where entertainment, athletics, commerce, and faith communities adapt the same ideas. Citations and retellings in talks and training frequently use these stories as parables of focus, humility, and courage. The collection thus functions as a portable repertoire of practices and images for steady living.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
How To Stop Worrying And Start Living (Unabridged) emerged from the crucible of depression, war, and early Cold War uncertainty. Dale Carnegie wrote for readers whose lives were shaped by the New Deal workplace, wartime mobilization, and postwar reorganizations of family and labor. The collection’s business-fluent idiom reflects office hierarchies, salesmanship, and the creed of rising through conduct rather than birth. Veterans returning to civilian employment, migrants to booming cities, and small proprietors like J. C. Penney’s customers faced new tempos and risks. Against rationing memories and inflation anxieties, Carnegie’s day-tight counsel positioned personal agency as a stabilizer within expanding corporate and bureaucratic power.
Class dynamics course through the contributors’ lives. Stories by industrialists, entertainers, and athletes—J. C. Penney, Gene Autry, Jack Dempsey—model aspirational pathways legitimated by mid-century capitalism. Their presence signals how celebrity and enterprise intertwined with moral instruction, turning success narratives into civics lessons. Meanwhile, salaried clerks, salespeople, and housewives show the anxieties of middle strata negotiating punch clocks and household budgets. The book’s techniques promise composure without challenging wage relations; instead, they translate workplace discipline into personal habit. Within expanding unions and managerial ranks, Carnegie’s approach offered a nonconfrontational toolkit, aligning private serenity with productivity goals prized by employers, advertisers, and chambers of commerce.
Gendered power is explicit in sections like chapter 25, How The Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue—and Keep Looking Young. Domestic labor is framed as both duty and performance, echoing employment manuals while assuming unpaid care work. Dorothy Dix’s contribution lends the authority of an advice columnist, yet stories by Kathleen Halter and Mrs. John Burger reveal vulnerable dependence on kin, charity, or prayer when institutions failed. Male voices such as Roger W. Babson, William Lyon Phelps, and Elmer Thomas speak from public authority. The asymmetry mirrors civic norms: men managed firms and forums; women were tasked with maintaining composure, looks, and service.
Racial hierarchy haunts the collection by its silences. Most narrators are white Americans or British figures, consistent with segregated publishing markets and audience targeting in the 1930s–40s. E. Stanley Jones’s mission in India and R. V. C. Bodley’s Garden of Allah reminiscence carry imperial vantage points, presenting non-Western settings as stages for Western self-discovery. Absent are voices under Jim Crow or colonial rule encountering worry within legalized subordination. The book’s universal tone thereby presumes racial privilege even while promising democratic uplift. Such framing dovetailed with domestic propaganda extolling unity while leaving structural inequalities unaddressed in practical, individualized advice.
Religious and civic institutions shape the anthology’s moral register. Part Five centers a Golden Rule for conquering worry, fusing Protestant ethics with republican neighborliness. E. Stanley Jones represents missionary networks braided with geopolitics, while John D. Rockefeller’s longevity anecdote invokes philanthropy as industrial self-justification. In the United States, wartime chaplains, fraternal lodges, and service clubs provided platforms for Dale Carnegie’s lectures and courses. Censorship was largely commercial: editors, sponsors, and family-oriented magazines screened tone and vocabulary rather than ideas. The book advances respectability via clean speech, sobriety, and perseverance, compatibly circulating through schools, churches, service bureaus, and corporate training rooms.
Media infrastructures amplified the work’s reach. Dorothy Dix’s syndicated advice columns, Gene Autry’s radio and film persona, and Jack Dempsey’s sports celebrity exemplify publicity channels that normalized personal testimony as civic pedagogy. Carnegie’s classes functioned like a lay academy, franchised across cities and veteran centers, parallel to adult night schools expanded by the GI Bill. Postwar advertising budgets linked well-being to branded routines, so chapters on fatigue, boredom, and insomnia read as both humane counsel and performance management. The anthology thus sits within a negotiated power space: mass culture invited participation while guided by corporate sponsors, editors, and impresarios.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The collection crystallizes a pragmatic ethic: truth is what works to reduce worry. Dale Carnegie’s numbered steps, nutshell summaries, and case-led chapters privilege actionable knowledge over theory. Part One’s day-tight compartments and Part Two’s analytic techniques exemplify procedural thinking taught in night courses and training manuals. Repetition and mnemonic phrasing aid retention, acknowledging readers balancing study with shift work or caregiving. The aesthetic is didactic yet companionable, using anecdote to validate method. Rather than heroic introspection, the book treats emotional life as a practical craft cultivated through habit, rehearsal, and conversation among peers and exemplars.
Efficiency science shadows the rhetoric. Chapters like How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Tour Business Worries and Four Good Working Habits translate shop floor discipline to the desk and dinner table. Time-and-motion consciousness appears in counsel on schedules, batch-processing tasks, and minimizing rework, reframed as serenity. The stop-loss metaphor borrows from trading discipline, urging bounded downside and swift acceptance. Even rest is optimized: advice on fatigue and insomnia treats sleep as recoverable capacity for tomorrow’s output. The language of quotas, margins, and habits recasts morale as productivity, marrying personal tranquility to the era’s managerial metrics.
Psychological currents inform the tone without clinical jargon. The mental hygiene movement’s emphasis on adjustment appears in steps for reframing worry, disputing catastrophic thoughts, and keeping minds busy. Sections on melancholy and insomnia suggest behavioral experiments—exercise, routine, social contact—long before many readers could access therapy. Testimonies by Louis T. Montant, Jr., Paul Sampson, and Kathryne Holcombe Farmer depict bodily symptoms as social signals, integrating diet, rest, and community into the cure. The confessional mode invites identification, not diagnosis. By emphasizing practice over pathology, the anthology refracts emerging psychologies into accessible, non-stigmatizing rituals of daily self-regulation.
Interart resonances are constant. Jack Dempsey brings sporting dramaturgy; Gene Autry channels the Western’s code of cheerful grit; Dorothy Dix translates the cadence of newspaper letters into oral counseling; Ferenc Molnar carries theatrical timing. Their presences situate the text alongside radio serials, tent meetings, Chautauquas, and travelling lectures. The anecdote operates like a song chorus—memorable, repeatable, communal. As electrified homes tuned to broadcasts, the book’s paragraphs mimic segments that could be read aloud at clubs or kitchens. This portability, bridging stage, page, and microphone, made worry-management a performable art, encouraging readers to rehearse lines and gestures.
Ethically, the project blends stoic acceptance with civic reciprocity. Co-Operate With The Inevitable and Don’t Try To Saw Sawdust counsel limits to control; Put A Stop-Loss Order On Your Worries borrows market discipline; The High Cost Of Getting Even warns against retaliatory cycles corroding communities. Part Four’s eight words and gratitude exercises rehearse neighborly humility linked to prosperity’s responsibilities. Religious inflections surface in testimonies by Rev. William Wood and E. Stanley Jones, yet the collection remains ecumenical, inviting diverse readers to try experiments in kindness, forgiveness, and self-command. Its aphorisms aspire to portable ethics for crowded, plural democracies.
Literary positioning avoids the era’s avant-gardes for an intentionally plain style. Short sections, highlighted maxims, and cumulative repetition echo pulpit sermonry and sales clinics rather than Modernist opacity. True stories in Part Ten function as realist exempla, disputing charges of abstraction by showing techniques embodied in recognizable workplaces, farms, kitchens, classrooms, and boxing rings. Rivalries are pragmatic: the anthology competes less with manifestos than with distraction, fatigue, and despair. Clarity is the aesthetic wager. In a moment saturated by newsreels and headlines, Carnegie’s apparatus curates attention, staging reading as a disciplined practice allied to speaking and listening.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
After publication, economic expansion and suburbanization reframed the anthology as a manual for mobility. Corporations adopted Dale Carnegie’s courses for supervisors and sales teams, while veterans and immigrants used the book to Americanize affect as well as accent. In an era celebrating genial managers, testimonies by Roger W. Babson and William Lyon Phelps read as endorsements for humane authority. The managerial state’s spread—from highways to hospitals—made worry-management a civic virtue, aligning self-control with public order. The text’s longevity owes much to its portability into workshops, church basements, and union halls, where speaking clubs rehearsed confidence as citizenship.
From the 1960s onward, critics interrogated the costs of relentless positivity. Feminist readers revisited How The Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue—and Keep Looking Young, assessing how beauty mandates and invisible labor were naturalized as wellness. Labor historians questioned advice that individualizes strain rather than contesting schedules or pay. Yet many found durable tools: Co-Operate With The Inevitable offered grief language amid war losses and layoffs. As clinical psychology professionalized, readers compared anecdotes with structured techniques; some testimonies, like those by Paul Sampson or Ordway Tead, were recast as proto-behavioral experiments, shorn of stigma and compatible with group workshops and classrooms.
Decolonization sharpened readings of global vignettes. E. Stanley Jones in India and R. V. C. Bodley in North Africa were reconsidered as windows onto missionary and colonial mentalities that rendered local worlds as backdrops for Western equanimity. Later scholars asked how such scenes obscure indigenous strategies for confronting worry under imperial extraction. Translations spread the anthology across languages, but reception varied: some contexts emphasized communal duty over self-making, while others welcomed entrepreneurial optimism. The volume’s claims to universality became case studies in how self-help rhetorics travel, sometimes reinforcing hierarchies, sometimes offering adaptable scripts for dignity amid reconstruction.
Preservation and media history also reframed access. Abridged and unabridged editions circulated in cheap paperbacks, hardcovers for libraries, and later audiobooks voiced like friendly lectures. The rights regime kept the work under copyright, encouraging authorized editions with prefaces contextualizing Part Ten’s names—C. I. Blackwood, J. C. Penney, Gene Autry—whose celebrity capital once guaranteed attention. Academic syllabi increasingly taught the anthology as a document of mid-century rhetorical culture rather than as unexamined gospel. Meanwhile, recordings of Dale Carnegie’s courses, where available, preserved the performative dimension, aligning prose rhythms with oratorical pacing that shaped uptake in clubs and classrooms.
Contemporary readers, navigating burnout and financial shocks, find fresh resonance in day-tight compartments, stop-loss thinking, and the law that outlaws many worries. Digital culture’s perpetual alerts magnify the need to curate attention, a task the book treats as civic as well as personal. Yet reassessment insists on broader inclusion: scholars note whose worries were foregrounded and whose were sidelined. New editions and seminars increasingly incorporate testimonies by women such as Dorothy Dix, Kathleen Halter, and Mrs. John Burger to balance authority. The work endures as both historical artifact and living toolkit, inviting critique while offering pragmatic practices.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You
Outlines the practical benefits readers can expect—clearer thinking, reduced anxiety, better relationships, and improved health—from applying the book’s methods.
Preface — How This Book Was Written—and Why
Explains the case histories, interviews, and testing behind the book and sets its aim: a toolkit of field-tested, usable strategies to manage everyday worry.
Part One — Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry
Introduces core principles: live in day‑tight compartments, use a three‑step ‘worst‑case’ formula to face problems, and recognize the physical and mental costs of worry.
Part Two — Basic Techniques in Analysing Worry
Teaches systematic problem‑solving—get the facts, define the issue, consider options, decide and act—to cut personal and business worries, plus guidance for using the book effectively.
Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book
Practical reading and practice tips—focus on relevance, apply ideas immediately, review summaries, and use the case stories as templates—to build lasting habits.
Part Three — How to Break the Worry Habit Before It Breaks You
Offers daily tactics to crowd out worry: keep constructively busy, ignore trifles, use the law of averages, accept the inevitable, set stop‑loss limits, and stop reliving the past.
Part Four — Seven Ways to Cultivate a Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace and Happiness
Shows how to shape a resilient outlook: govern your thoughts, avoid revenge, expect and overlook ingratitude, practice gratitude, be yourself, turn setbacks into advantages, and lift mood through purposeful activity.
Part Five — The Golden Rule for Conquering Worry
Condenses the book’s philosophy into a guiding rule—do your best today, then let go—illustrated through Carnegie’s parents’ example of faith, service, and acceptance.
Part Six — How to Keep from Worrying About Criticism
Reframes criticism as evidence of impact; advises weighing the source, profiting from fair critique, and disarming attacks by promptly admitting your own mistakes.
Part Seven — Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue and Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High
Details energy‑saving routines—rest, posture, pacing, smart scheduling, variety, and attitude—to prevent fatigue, reduce boredom, and remove insomnia as a source of worry.
Part Eight — How to Find the Kind of Work in Which You May Be Happy and Successful
Argues for aligning work with strengths and interests to lessen anxiety, with steps for assessing fit and pursuing a more satisfying vocation.
Part Nine — How to Lessen Your Financial Worries
Offers common‑sense money practices—budgeting, living within means, saving, insuring, and reframing fears—to reduce the bulk of practical, money‑related worries.
Part Ten — How I Conquered Worry: 32 True Stories
Presents first‑person case histories from public figures and everyday people showing diverse, real‑world methods—acceptance, decisive action, exercise, faith, humor, and perspective—to overcome worry.
How To Stop Worrying And Start Living (Unabridged)
Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You
Gives you a number of practical, tested formulas for solving worry situations.
Shows you how to eliminate fifty per cent of your business worries immediately.
Brings you seven ways to cultivate a mental attitude that will bring you peace and happiness.
Shows you how to lessen financial worries.
Explains a law that will outlaw many of your worries.
Tells you how to turn criticism to your advantage.
Shows how the housewife can avoid fatigue-and keep looking young.
Gives four working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry.
Tells you how to add one hour a day to your working life.
Shows you how to avoid emotional upsets.
Gives you the stories of scores of everyday men and women, who tell you in their own words how they stopped worrying and started living.
Gives you Alfred Adler's prescription for curing melancholia in fourteen days.
Gives you the 21 words that enabled the world-famous physician, Sir William Osier, to banish worry.
Explains the three magic steps that Willis H. Carrier, founder of the air-conditioning industry, uses to conquer worry.
Shows you how to use what William James called "the sovereign cure for worry".
Gives you details of how many famous men conquered worry-men like Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times; Herbert E. Hawkes, former Dean of Columbia University; Ordway Tead, Chairman of the Board of Higher Education, New York City; Jack Dempsey; Connie Mack; Roger W. Babson; Admiral Byrd; Henry Ford; Gene Autry; J.C. Penney; and John D. Rockefeller.
Preface - How This Book Was Written-and Why
Thirty-Five years ago, I was one of the unhappiest lads in New York. I was selling motor-trucks for a living. I didn't know what made a motor-truck run. That wasn't all: I didn't want to know. I despised my job. I despised living in a cheap furnished room on West Fifty-sixth Street-a room infested with cockroaches. I still remember that I had a bunch of neckties hanging on the walls; and when I reached out of a morning to get a fresh necktie, the cockroaches scattered in all directions. I despised having to eat in cheap, dirty restaurants that were also probably infested with cockroaches.
I came home to my lonely room each night with a sick headache-a headache bred and fed by disappointment, worry, bitterness, and rebellion. I was rebelling because the dreams I had nourished back in my college days had turned into nightmares. Was this life? Was this the vital adventure to which I had looked forward so eagerly? Was this all life would ever mean to me-working at a job I despised, living with cockroaches, eating vile food-and with no hope for the future? ... I longed for leisure to read, and to write the books I had dreamed of writing back in my college days.
I knew I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by giving up the job I despised. I wasn't interested in making a lot of money, but I was interested in making a lot of living. In short, I had come to the Rubicon-to that moment of decision which faces most young people when they start out in life. So I made my decision-and that decision completely altered my future. It has made the last thirty-five years happy and rewarding beyond my most Utopian aspirations.
My decision was this: I would give up the work I loathed; and, since I had spent four years studying in the State Teachers' College at Warrensburg, Missouri, preparing to teach, I would make my living teaching adult classes in night schools. Then I would have my days free to read books, prepare lectures, write novels and short stories. I wanted "to live to write and write to live".
What subject should I teach to adults at night? As I looked back and evaluated my own college training, I saw that the training and experience I had had in public speaking had been of more practical value to me in business-and in life-than everything else I had studied in college all put together. Why? Because it had wiped out my timidity and lack of confidence and given me the courage and assurance to deal with people. It had also made clear that leadership usually gravitates to the man who can get up and say what he thinks
I applied for a position teaching public speaking in the night extension courses both at Columbia University and New York University, but these universities decided they could struggle along somehow without my help.
I was disappointed then-but I now thank God that they did turn me down, because I started teaching in Y.M.C.A. night schools, where I had to show concrete results and show them quickly. What a challenge that was! These adults didn't come to my classes because they wanted college credits or social prestige. They came for one reason only: they wanted to solve their problems. They wanted to be able to stand up on their own feet and say a few words at a business meeting without fainting from fright. Salesmen wanted to be able to call on a tough customer without having to walk around the block three times to get up courage. They wanted to develop poise and self-confidence. They wanted to get ahead in business. They wanted to have more money for their families. And since they were paying their tuition on an installment basis-and they stopped paying if they didn't get results-and since I was being paid, not a salary, but a percentage of the profits, I had to be practical if I wanted to eat.
I felt at the time that I was teaching under a handicap, but I realise now that I was getting priceless training. I had to motivate my students. I had to help them solve their problems.
I had to make each session so inspiring that they wanted to continue coming.
It was exciting work. I loved it. I was astounded at how quickly these business men developed self-confidence and how quickly many of them secured promotions and increased pay. The classes were succeeding far beyond my most optimistic hopes. Within three seasons, the Y.M.C.A.s, which had refused to pay me five dollars a night in salary, were paying me thirty dollars a night on a percentage basis. At first, I taught only public speaking, but, as the years went by, I saw that these adults also needed the ability to win friends and influence people. Since I couldn't find an adequate textbook on human relations, I wrote one myself. It was written-no, it wasn't written in the usual way. It grew and evolved out of the experiences of the adults in these classes. I called it How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Since it was written solely as a textbook for my own adult classes, and since I had written four other books that no one had ever heard of, I never dreamed that it would have a large sale: I am probably one of the most astonished authors now living.
As the years went by, I realised that another one of the biggest problems of these adults was worry. A large majority of my students were business men-executives, salesmen, engineers, accountants: a cross section of all the trades and professions-and most of them had problems! There were women in the classes-business women and housewives. They, too, had problems! Clearly, what I needed was a textbook on how to conquer worry-so again I tried to find one. I went to New York's great public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street and discovered to my astonishment that this library had only twenty-two books listed under the title WORRY. I also noticed, to my amusement, that it had one hundred and eighty-nine books listed under WORMS. Almost nine times as many books about worms as about worry! Astounding, isn't it? Since worry is one of the biggest problems facing mankind, you would think, wouldn't you, that every high school and college in the land would give a course on "How to Stop Worrying"?
Yet, if there is even one course on that subject in any college in the land, I have never heard of it. No wonder David Seabury said in his book How to Worry Successfully: "We come to maturity with as little preparation for the pressures of experience as a bookworm asked to do a ballet."
The result? More than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous and emotional troubles.
I looked over those twenty-two books on worry reposing on the shelves of the New York Public
Library. In addition, I purchased all the books on worry I could find; yet I couldn't discover even one that I could use as a text in my course for adults. So I resolved to write one myself.
I began preparing myself to write this book seven years ago. How? By reading what the philosophers of all ages have said about worry. I also read hundreds of biographies, all the way from Confucius to Churchill. I also interviewed scores of prominent people in many walks of life, such as Jack Dempsey, General Omar Bradley, General Mark Clark, Henry Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dorothy Dix. But that was only a beginning.
I also did something else that was far more important than the interviews and the reading. I worked for five years in a laboratory for conquering worry-a laboratory conducted in our own adult classes.
As far as I know, it is the first and only laboratory of its kind in the world. This is what we did. We gave students a set of rules on how to stop worrying and asked them to apply these rules in their own lives and then talk to the class on the results they had obtained. Others reported on techniques they had used in the past.
As a result of this experience, I presume I have listened to more talks on "How I Conquered Worry" than has any other individual who ever walked this earth. In addition, I read hundreds of other talks on
"How I Conquered Worry" talks that were sent to me by mail-talks that had won prizes in our classes that are held in more than a hundred and seventy cities throughout the United States and Canada. So this book didn't come out of an ivory tower. Neither is it an academic preachment on how worry might be conquered. Instead, I have tried to write a fast-moving, concise, documented report on how worry has been conquered by thousands of adults. One thing is certain: this book is practical. You can set your teeth in it.
I am happy to say that you won't find in this book stories about an imaginary "Mr. B--" or a vague "Mary and John" whom no one can identify. Except in a few rare cases, this book names names and gives street addresses. It is authentic. It is documented. It is vouched for-and certified.
"Science," said the French philosopher Valery, "is a collection of successful recipes." That is what this book is, a collection of successful and time-tested recipes to rid our lives of worry. However, let me warn you: you won't find anything new in it, but you will find much that is not generally applied. And when it comes to that, you and I don't need to be told anything new. We already know enough to lead perfect lives. We have all read the golden rule and the Sermon on the Mount. Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction. The purpose of this book is to restate, illustrate, streamline, air-condition, and glorify a lot of ancient and basic truths-and kick you in the shins and make you do something about applying them.
You didn't pick up this book to read about how it was written. You are looking for action. All right, let's go. Please read the first forty-four pages of this book-and if by that time you don't feel that you have acquired a new power and a new inspiration to stop worry and enjoy life-then toss this book into the dust-bin. It is no good for you.
DALE CARNEGIE
Part One - Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry
Chapter 1 - Live in "Day-tight Compartments"
In the spring of 1871, a young man picked up a book and read twenty-one words that had a profound effect on his future. A medical student at the Montreal General Hospital, he was worried about passing the final examination, worried about what to do, where to go, how to build up a practice, how to make a living.
The twenty-one words that this young medical student read in 1871 helped him to become the most famous physician of his generation. He organised the world-famous Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford-the highest honour that can be bestowed upon any medical man in the British Empire. He was knighted by the King of England.
When he died, two huge volumes containing 1,466 pages were required to tell the story of his life.
His name was Sir William Osier. Here are the twenty-one words that he read in the spring of 1871-twenty-one words from Thomas Carlyle that helped him lead a life free from worry: "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
Forty-two years later, on a soft spring night when the tulips were blooming on the campus, this man, Sir William Osier, addressed the students of Yale University. He told those Yale students that a man like himself who had been a professor in four universities and had written a popular book was supposed to have "brains of a special quality". He declared that that was untrue. He said that his intimate friends knew that his brains were "of the most mediocre character".
What, then, was the secret of his success? He stated that it was owing to what he called living in "day-tight compartments." What did he mean by that? A few months before he spoke at Yale, Sir William Osier had crossed the Atlantic on a great ocean liner where the captain standing on the bridge, could press a button and-presto!-there was a clanging of machinery and various parts of the ship were immediately shut off from one another-shut off into watertight compartments. "Now each one of you,"
Dr. Osier said to those Yale students, "is a much more marvelous organisation than the great liner, and bound on a longer voyage. What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with 'day-tight compartments' as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past-the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future -the unborn tomorrows. Then you are safe-safe for today! ... Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. ... Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death. ... The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. ... The future is today. ... There is no tomorrow. The day of man's salvation is now. Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. ... Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of 'day-tight compartments'."
Did Dr. Osier mean to say that we should not make any effort to prepare for tomorrow? No. Not at all.
But he did go on in that address to say that 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.
Sir William Osier urged the students at Yale to begin the day with Christ's prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread."
Remember that that prayer asks only for today's bread. It doesn't complain about the stale bread we had to eat yesterday; and it doesn't say: "Oh, God, it has been pretty dry out in the wheat belt lately and we may have another drought-and then how will I get bread to eat next autumn-or suppose I lose my job-oh, God, how could I get bread then?"
No, this prayer teaches us to ask for today's bread only. Today's bread is the only kind of bread you can possibly eat.
Years ago, a penniless philosopher was wandering through a stony country where the people had a hard time making a living. One day a crowd gathered about him on a hill, and he gave what is probably the most-quoted speech ever delivered anywhere at any time. This speech contains twenty-six words that have gone ringing down across the centuries: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
Many men have rejected those words of Jesus: "Take no thought for the morrow." They have rejected those words as a counsel of perfection, as a bit of Oriental mysticism. "I must take thought for the morrow," they say. "I must take out insurance to protect my family. I must lay aside money for my old age. I must plan and prepare to get ahead."
Right! Of course you must. The truth is that those words of Jesus, translated over three hundred years ago, don't mean today what they meant during the reign of King James. Three hundred years ago the word thought frequently meant anxiety. Modern versions of the Bible quote Jesus more accurately as saying: "Have no anxiety for the tomorrow."
By all means take thought for the tomorrow, yes, careful thought and planning and preparation. But have no anxiety.
During the war, our military leaders planned for the morrow, but they could not afford to have any anxiety. "I have supplied the best men with the best equipment we have," said Admiral Ernest J. King, who directed the United States Navy, "and have given them what seems to be the wisest mission. That is all I can do."
"If a ship has been sunk," Admiral King went on, "I can't bring it up. If it is going to be sunk, I can't stop it. I can use my time much better working on tomorrow's problem than by fretting about yesterday's. Besides, if I let those things get me, I wouldn't last long."
Whether in war or peace, the chief difference between good thinking and bad thinking is this: good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdowns.
I recently had the privilege of interviewing Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of one of the most famous newspapers in the world, The New York Times. Mr. Sulzberger told me that when the Second World War flamed across Europe, he was so stunned, so worried about the future, that he found it almost impossible to sleep. He would frequently get out of bed in the middle of the night, take some canvas and tubes of paint, look in the mirror, and try to paint a portrait of himself. He didn't know anything about painting, but he painted anyway, to get his mind off his worries. Mr. Sulzberger told me that he was never able to banish his worries and find peace until he had adopted as his motto five words from a church hymn: One step enough for me.
Lead, kindly Light ...
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
At about the same time, a young man in uniform-somewhere in Europe-was learning the same lesson. His name was Ted Bengermino, of 5716 Newholme Road, Baltimore, Maryland-and he had worried himself into a first-class case of combat fatigue.
"In April, 1945," writes Ted Bengermino, "I had worried until I had developed what doctors call a 'spasmodic transverse colon'-a condition that produced intense pain. If the war hadn't ended when it did, I am sure I would have had a complete physical breakdown.
"I was utterly exhausted. I was a Graves Registration, Noncommissioned Officer for the 94th Infantry Division. My work was to help set up and maintain records of all men killed in action, missing in action, and hospitalised. I also had to help disinter the bodies of both Allied and enemy soldiers who had been killed and hastily buried in shallow graves during the pitch of battle. I had to gather up the personal effects of these men and see that they were sent back to parents or closest relatives who would prize these personal effects so much. I was constantly worried for fear we might be making embarrassing and serious mistakes. I was worried about whether or not I would come through all this. I was worried about whether I would live to hold my only child in my arms-a son of sixteen months, whom I had never seen. I was so worried and exhausted that I lost thirty-four pounds. I was so frantic that I was almost out of my mind. I looked at my hands. They were hardly more than skin and bones. I was terrified at the thought of going home a physical wreck. I broke down and sobbed like a child. I was so shaken that tears welled up every time I was alone. There was one period soon after the Battle of the Bulge started that I wept so often that I almost gave up hope of ever being a normal human being again.
"I ended up in an Army dispensary. An Army doctor gave me some advice which has completely changed my life. After giving me a thorough physical examination, he informed me that my troubles were mental. 'Ted', he said, '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, but 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.'
"I have practised that philosophy ever since that memorable day that an Army doctor gave it to me. 'One grain of sand at a time. ... One task at a time.' That advice saved me physically and mentally during the war; and it has also helped me in my present position in business. I am a Stock Control Clerk for the Commercial Credit Company in Baltimore. I found the same problems arising in business that had arisen during the war: a score of things had to be done at once-and there was little time to do them. We were low in stocks. We had new forms to handle, new stock arrangements, changes of address, opening and closing offices, and so on. Instead of getting taut and nervous, I remembered what the doctor had told me. 'One grain of sand at a time. One task at a time.' By repeating those words to myself over and over, I accomplished my tasks in a more efficient manner and I did my work without the confused and jumbled feeling that had almost wrecked me on the battlefield."
One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: "Have no anxiety about the morrow"; or the words of Sir William Osier: "Live in day-tight compartments."
You and I are standing this very second at the meeting-place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured for ever, 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."
Yes, that is all that life requires of us; but Mrs. E. K. Shields, 815, Court Street, Saginaw, Michigan, was driven to despair- even to the brink of suicide-before she learned to live just till bedtime. "In 1937, I lost my husband," Mrs. Shields said as she told me her story. "I was very depressed-and almost penniless. I wrote my former employer, Mr. Leon Roach, of the Roach-Fowler Company of Kansas City, and got my old job back. I had formerly made my living selling books to rural and town school boards. I had sold my car two years previously when my husband became ill; but I managed to scrape together enough money to put a down payment on a used car and started out to sell books again.
"I had thought that getting back on the road would help relieve my depression; but driving alone and eating alone was almost more than I could take. Some of the territory was not very productive, and I found it hard to make those car payments, small as they were.
"In the spring of 1938, I was working out from Versailles, Missouri. The schools were poor, the roads bad; I was so lonely and discouraged that at one time I even considered suicide. It seemed that success was impossible. I had nothing to live for. I dreaded getting up each morning and facing life. I was afraid of everything: afraid I could not meet the car payments; afraid I could not pay my room rent; afraid I would not have enough to eat. I was afraid my health was failing and I had no money for a doctor. All that kept me from suicide were the thoughts that my sister would be deeply grieved, and that I did not have enough money to pay my funeral expenses.
"Then one day I read an article that lifted me out of my despondence and gave me the courage to go on living. I shall never cease to be grateful for one inspiring sentence in that article. It said: '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.'
"I have succeeded in overcoming my fear of loneliness, my fear of want. I am happy and fairly successful now and have a lot of enthusiasm and love for life. I know now that I shall never again be afraid, regardless of what life hands me. I know now that I don't have to fear the future. I know now that I can live one day at a time-and that 'Every day is a new life to a wise man.'"
Who do you suppose wrote this verse:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call to-day his own:
He who, secure within, can say:
"To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv'd to-day."
Those words sound modern, don't they? Yet they were written thirty years before Christ was born, by the Roman poet Horace.
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Why are we such fools-such tragic fools?
"How strange it is, our little procession of life I" 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."
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. His nerves couldn't take it. "I couldn't sleep or eat," he told me. "I became strangely ill. Worry and nothing but worry," he said, "brought on this illness. One day as I was walking down the street, I fainted and fell on the sidewalk. I was no longer able to walk. I was put to bed and my body broke out in boils. These boils turned inward until just lying in bed was agony. I grew weaker every day. Finally my doctor told me that I had only two more weeks to live. I was shocked. I drew up my will, and then lay back in bed to await my end. No use now to struggle or worry. I gave up, relaxed, and went to sleep. I hadn't slept two hours in succession for weeks; but now with my earthly problems drawing to an end, I slept like a baby. My exhausting weariness began to disappear. My appetite returned. I gained weight.
