The following contains excepts from the book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie).
At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we hope to help students learn how to manage fear and overcome their anxieties, so that they can become the successful creators and performers they to which they aspire.
This continuation of Dale Carnegie’s famous book highlights things we hope to share with our students.
Would You Take a Million Dollars For What You Have?
I had the blues because I had no shoes,
Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.
About ninety per cent of the things in our lives are right and about ten per cent are wrong. If we want to be happy, all we have to do is to concentrate on the ninety per cent that are right and ignore the ten per cent that are wrong. If we want to be worried and bitter and have stomach ulcers, all we have to do is to concentrate on the ten per cent that are wrong and ignore the ninety per cent that are glorious.
Schopenhauer said: “We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.” Yes, the tendency to “seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack” is the greatest tragedy on earth. It has probably caused more misery than all the wars and diseases in history.
“The habit of looking on the best side of every event,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson, “is worth more than a thousand pounds a year.”
Logan Pearsall Smith packed a lot of wisdom into a few words when he said: “There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.”
We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas that it’s not what you don’t have in life that makes the difference, but rather, what you do with what you have that will put you over the top.
Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You
You are something new in this world. Be glad of it. Make the most of what nature gave you. In the last analysis, all art is autobiographical. You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are.
You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must cultivate your own little garden. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
As Emerson said in his essay on “Self-Reliance”: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we view each student as a unique individual, with many exciting possible artistic directions they can take.
If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade
The late William Bolitho, author of Twelve Against the Gods, put it like this: “The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool.”
The more I have studied the careers of men of achievement the more deeply I have been convinced that a surprisingly large number of them succeeded because they started out with handicaps that spurred them on to great endeavour and great rewards. As William James said: “Our infirmities help us unexpectedly.”
Yes, it is highly probable that Milton wrote better poetry because he was blind and that Beethoven composed better music because he was deaf. Helen Keller’s brilliant career was inspired and made possible because of her blindness and deafness. If Tchaikovsky had not been frustrated-and driven almost to suicide by his tragic marriage-if his own life had not been pathetic, he probably would never have been able to compose his immortal “Symphonic Pathetique”. If Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had not led tortured lives, they would probably never have been able to write their immortal novels.
Suppose we are so discouraged that we feel there is no hope of our ever being able to turn our lemons into lemonade-then here are two reasons why we ought to try, anyway-two reasons why we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Reason one: We may succeed.
Reason two: Even if we don’t succeed, the mere attempt to turn our minus into a plus will cause us to look forward instead of backward; it will replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts; it will release creative energy and spur us to get so busy that we won’t have either the time or the inclination to mourn over what is past and for ever gone.
Once when Ole Bull, the world-famous violinist, was giving a concert in Paris, the A string on his violin suddenly snapped. But Ole Bull simply finished the melody on three strings. “That is life,” says Harry Emerson Fosdick, “to have your A string snap and finish on three strings.”
How to Cure Depression in Fourteen Days
This statement was made by Alfred Adler. He used to say to his melancholia patients: “You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription. Try to think every day how you can please someone.”
So if you want to banish worry and cultivate peace and happiness, here is: Forget yourself by becoming interested in others. Do every day a good deed that will put a smile of joy on someone’s face.
It is our goal at our music school in Odessa, Texas to help students find a way to contribute to their families, their immediate community, and to their culture at large in ways that better the lives they touch with their art and music.
How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry
During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all her troubles
to God in prayer.
When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said: “Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.”
Dr. Carl Jung said: “During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life -that is to say, over thirty-five – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
William James said approximately the same thing: “Faith is one of the forces by which men live,” he declared, “and the total absence of it means collapse.”
1. Prayer helps us to put into words exactly what is troubling us.
2. Prayer gives us a sense of sharing our burdens, of not being alone.
3. Prayer puts into force an active principle of doing.
Do This- and Criticism Can’t Hurt You
I once asked Eleanor Roosevelt how she handled unjust criticism. She probably has more ardent friends and more violent enemies than any other woman who ever lived in the White House. She told me that as a young girl she was almost morbidly shy, afraid of what people might say. She was so afraid of criticism that one day she asked her aunt, Theodore Roosevelt’s sister for advice. She said: “Auntie Bye, I want to do so-and-so. But I’m afraid of being criticized.” Teddy Roosevelt’s sister looked her in the eye and said: “Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.”
In music and the arts, everyone has an opinion (and many times, a strongly held opinion). Criticism abounds. At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we help students to see that criticism is simply another person’s desire to participate in the artistic process. Many times, there can be a kernel of truth that can help, but most usually, it is their desire to exert their own presence in community.
How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life
Fatigue often produces worry, or, at least, it makes you susceptible to worry. Any medical student will tell you that fatigue lowers physical resistance to the common cold and hundreds of other diseases and any psychiatrist will tell you that fatigue also lowers your resistance to the emotions of fear and worry. So preventing fatigue tends to prevent worry.
So, to prevent fatigue and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.
The United States Army has discovered by repeated tests that even young men-men toughened by years of Army training can march better, and hold up longer, if they throw down their packs and rest ten minutes out of every hour.
In his excellent book, Why Be Tired, Daniel W. Josselyn observes: “Rest is not a matter of doing absolutely nothing. Rest is repair.” There is so much repair power in a short period of rest that even a five-minute nap will help to forestall fatigue!
I recently interviewed Gene Autry in his dressing-room at Madison Square Garden, where he was the star attraction at the world’s championship rodeo. I noticed an army cot in his dressing-room. “I lie down there every afternoon,” Gene Autry said, “and get an hour’s nap between performances. When I am making pictures in Hollywood,” he continued, “I often relax in a big easy chair and get two or three ten-minute naps a day. They buck me up tremendously.” Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever he wanted to.
We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to value rest. Always working and never taking a break can be destructive, and having a positive outlook on a balanced life is always healthy.