Dale Carnegie presents brilliant ideas to manage our emotions. There’s no need to live with worry and anxiety that keep you from enjoying a full, active, and happy life! More than six million people have learned how to eliminate debilitating fear and worry from their lives and to embrace a worry-free future. In this classic work, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”, Carnegie offers a set of practical formulas that you can put to work today.
LESSON 1: The Law Of Averages.
The first one : Alice is flying to Florida tomorrow to see her daughter. The night before the flight she is freaking out, she asks her husband what if the plane gets hijacked and what if the engines gets fail and we crash. Many travelers are instilled with fear when they read news headlines like flight MH-370 has disappeared and Air Asia flight 8501 that killed 162. Well according to economists.com the chance of dying in a plane crash is as little as 1 in 5.4 million. To put that into perspective you are more likely to be struck by lightning. Another example Carnegie suggests that it is just as fatal to live from the age 50 to 55 during peacetime is as it was to fight in the Battle of Gettysburg although these statistics are a little outdated, the point remains whether you’re scared of getting eaten by a shark or your house burning down or dying in your sleep. By the law of averages there is an incredibly low chance of these events ever happening during your lifetime.
LESSON 2: Don’t Expect Gratitude.
The second one: Marcus Aurelius one of the wisest “Roman empires I” ever lived wrote in his diary that “I am going to meet people today who talk too much, people who are egotistical selfish and ungrateful but I won’t be surprised or disturbed for I couldn’t imagine a world without such people.” If you gave one of your relatives a million dollars would you expect them to be grateful this is exactly what Andrew Carnegie did and thought that if he came back from the grave he’d be surprised to know that his relative had been cursing him why because Andrew had left 365 million dollars to public charities and had cut him off with one measly million as they put it. Dale tells of another story of a mother in New York who was always complaining because she is lonely. Neither of of her relatives wants to go see her it is because if you visit her, for hours she’ll tell you what she did for her nieces. How she nursed them through measles mumps and the whooping cough, everything she had done for them. But the nieces rarely visited her only on occasions out of the spirit of duty. They dread going to see her, they know that they will be treated to an endless lecture of bitter complaints and self-pitying sighs. Their mother wants love and attention which she calls gratitude but she’ll never get it because she demands it at the point. Dale was trying to make a point here is that it’s human nature for people to forget gratitude. So expecting people to appreciate you 100% of the time will lead you to disappointment and resentment. He does say that gratitude can be taught to people when they’re children. However not everyone has been taught to appreciate others so to sum up if you give for the inner joy of giving and expect no gratitude in return you’ll live a healthier and happier life.
LESSON 3: Don’t Get Even With Your Enemies.
The third one: Shakespeare said “heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do send yourself”. What this means is that when we hate our enemies we are giving them power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health and our happiness. Our hate is not hurting them at all but it’s only hurting ourselves. Dale tells the story of a 68 year old man living in Washington who owned a cafe. He hated the chef he employed. The old man killed himself by flying into a rage because his chef insisted on drinking coffee out of his mug. The old man was so full of hatred and resentment that he grabbed a gun and started to chase a chef and fell dead from heart failure. Along with many other examples, Dale goes on to say that the chief personality characteristic of people with high blood pressure is resentment. I feel like this is an extreme example so let’s take a look at a common scenario that is faced by many people today let’s say you’re angry at your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. You constantly complain and resent each other every day you think about all the bad things they have done to you, why you hate them and what you can do to make them feel like crap. Not everyone is resentful of their ex but if you are them is just not worth it. You end up having sleepless nights drained of energy and feeling unhappy. You could spend that time and energy on your family friends or whatever it is that you enjoy doing. Whether that’s growing your business or playing golf or reading a good book. This advice applies to almost any situation where you express hate and resentment towards someone.
LESSON 4: Unjust Criticisms Are Complements In Disguise.
The fourth one: Admiral Peary was the first man who shocked the world when he reached the North Pole with dog sleds on April the 6th 1909. He almost died from cold and starvation. His superior naval officers in Washington were jealous because of all the publicity and praise he was getting so they criticized him for collecting money for scientific expeditions and then wastefully lying and loafing around in the Arctic. Their determination to stop Peary from succeeding was so violent that only an order from the president allowed him to continue his career in the Arctic. Peary received were compliments in disguise his officers got a feeling of importance by criticizing him because he was more successful than they were. Let’s take a look at it in your day-to-day life, if you’re successful at sport and receive an award for it and then people try to bring you down by saying things like you’re an ass you don’t deserve it. Well maybe you’ve been promoted in your job recently and some of your co-workers criticized you by saying you’re a piece of crap. Everyone knows I deserve that promotion, these empty criticisms are a reflection of themselves that they are criticizing you because you have achieved something great that they these are religious compliments in disguise you.
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”
——-By Dale Carnegie.
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