The following contains excepts from the book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie).
At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we recognize that there are many aspects of being a musician and artist that can produce pressure, whether it is deadlines to meet or performances to give. We help students to overcome their fears of stepping forward into the kind of creative life that they are capable of, learning how to manage fear and overcome their anxieties.
This is yet another ‘home-run’ book by Carnegie. Dense with information, research, and testimonials, this book, has become a classic for good reason.
Carnegie begins by sharing his own testimony of how he got started:
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”.
I started teaching in Y.M.C.A. night schools, where I had to show concrete results and show them quickly.
I felt at the time that I was teaching under a handicap, but I realize now that I was getting priceless training. I had to motivate my students. I had to help them solve their problems.
As the years went by, I realized 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!
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 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.
Following are tools Carnegie discovered as to how to beat worry:
Live in ‘Day –tight’ Compartments
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 organization 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We endeavor to teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how to focus on today’s results. Just a little bit of progress today toward a long-range goal is the very definition of success.
A Magic Formula for Solving Worry Situations
Step I. I analyzed the situation fearlessly and honestly and figured out what was the worst that could possibly happen as a result of this failure.
Step II. After figuring out what was the worst that could possibly happen, I reconciled myself to accepting it, if necessary.
Step III. From that time on, I calmly devoted my time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst which I had already accepted mentally.
When we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all those vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.
1. Ask yourself,’ ‘What is the worst that can possibly happen?”
2. Prepare to accept it if you have to.
3. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.
At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we give students solutions that they can apply to what may seem to them as insurmountable problems, so that they can achieve their musical goals and artistic desires.
What Worry May Do to You
The great Nobel prizewinner in medicine, Dr. Alexis Carrel, said: “Business men who do not know how to fight worry die young.” And so do housewives and horse doctors and bricklayers.
Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they only got rid of their fears and worries. Don’t think for a moment that I mean that their ills are imaginary,” he said. “Their ills are as real as a throbbing toothache and sometimes a hundred times more serious. I refer to such illnesses as nervous indigestion, some stomach ulcers, heart disturbances, insomnia, some headaches, and some types of paralysis. “Fear causes worry. Worry makes you tense and nervous and affects the nerves of your stomach and actually changes the gastric juices of your stomach from normal to abnormal and often leads to stomach ulcers.” (Dr. O. F. Goberone)
The famous Mayo brothers declared that more than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous troubles.
Their “nervous troubles” are caused not by a physical deterioration of the nerves, but by emotions of futility, frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, defeat, despair. Plato said that “the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!”
Worry can put you into a wheel chair with rheumatism and arthritis. Dr. Russell L. Cecil, of the Cornell University Medical School, is a world-recognized authority on arthritis; and he has listed four of the commonest conditions that bring on arthritis:
1. Marital shipwreck.
2. Financial disaster and grief.
3. Loneliness and worry.
4. Long-cherished resentments.
Worry can even cause tooth decay. Dr. William I.L. McGonigle said in an address before the American Dental Association that “unpleasant emotions such as those caused by worry, fear, nagging…may upset the body’s calcium balance and cause tooth decay”.
Relaxation and Recreation
The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy
religion, sleep, music, and laughter.
Have faith in God-learn to sleep well-
Love good music-see the funny side of life-
And health and happiness will be yours.
Dr. Alexis Carrel again. He said: “Those who keep the peace of their inner selves in the midst of the tumult of the modern city are immune from nervous diseases.”
At our music school in Odessa, Texas, we believe music is much more than sound, rather, it is relationships. It is music, in that sense, that will heal our souls, our families and our communities.
As Thoreau said in his immortal book, Walden: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. … If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
How to Analyze and Solve Worry Problems
The three steps are:
1. Get the facts.
2. Analyse the facts.
3. Arrive at a decision-and then act on that decision.
Dean Hawkes if this meant he had licked worry entirely. “Yes,” he said, “I think I can honestly say that my life is now almost totally devoid of worry. I have found,” he went on, “that if a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.”
We have to keep our emotions out of our thinking;
“Experience has proved to me, time after time, the enormous value of arriving at a decision. It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop going round and round in maddening circles, that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living hells. I find that fifty per cent of my worries vanishes once I arrive at a clear, definite decision; and another forty per cent usually vanishes once I start to carry out that decision. So I banish about ninety per cent of my worries by taking these four steps:
● 1. Writing down precisely what I am worrying about.
● 2. Writing down what I can do about it.
● 3. Deciding what to do.
● 4. Starting immediately to carry out that decision.
(Galen Litchfield)
William James said this: “When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.”
When we give students in our music school concrete solutions and time-tested disciplines, they can rest assured that they will make progress toward their goals and their dreams. Yet, even beyond that, we help students be their best selves, as they develop in their personal character and self-discipline – traits that are required to successfully master their craft.
How to Eliminate 50% of Your Business Worries
General Manager of Simon and Shuster, Leon Shimkin’s business experience:
I immediately stopped the procedure I had been using in my conferences for fifteen years-a procedure that began with my troubled associates reciting all the details of what had gone wrong, and ending up by asking: ‘What shall we do?’ Second, I made a new rule-a rule that everyone who wishes to present a problem to me must first prepare and submit a memorandum answering these four questions:
Question 1: What is the problem?
Question 2: What is the cause of the problem?
Question 3: What are all possible solutions of the problem?
Question 4: What solution do you suggest?
How to Crowd Worry Out of Your Mind
No time for worry! That is exactly what Winston Churchill said when he was working eighteen hours a day at the height of the war. When he was asked if he worried about his tremendous responsibilities, he said: “I’m too busy. I have no time for worry.”
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.
George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.”
One of the most profound effects of pursuing mastery in art and music is that it causes one’s attention to be focused entirely on this activity. Those who give themselves to this life-pursuit will not only enjoy the beauty of music, but also the discipline of focused thought.