Wednesday Wisdom

Welcome to another installment of Wisdom Wednesdays here on my blog! Every Wednesday I share with you wisdom that I learnt from reading books throughout the week!

Check out last week's Wednesday Wisdom here!

This weeks' book is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

What I learned from reading this book:

Part 2 – Basic Techniques in Analysing Worry

4 How to Analyse and Solve Worry Problems

Step 1: Get the facts

Unless we have the facts we cant possibly even attempt to solve our problem intelligently. Without the facts, all we can do is stew around in confusion. ‘If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial usually evaporate in the light of knowledge’. Carnegie talks about when getting the facts he pretends that he is collecting the information for some other person, allowing him to take this impartial view on the evidence.

Step 2: Analyse the facts

He tries to get all of the arguments against himself, the facts that he doesn’t like to face. Puts this against his side of the arguments, allowing him to get a more rounded perspective. Merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: ‘a problem will stated is a problem half solved’.

Step 3: Arrive at a decision – and then act on that decision

Deciding what you can do about a situation and then acting on that deicion. Taking action about our worry can help overcome it. ‘I find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry. There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful. There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back.’

5 How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Your Business Worries

In Short, this is to carry out the technique from chapter 4.

Part 3 – How to Break the Worry Habit Before it Breaks You

6 How to Crowd Worry Out of Your Mind

Carnegie realised that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking. ‘I am so busy now that 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 that? 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. ‘Occupational therapy’ is the term now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine. It is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it five hundred years before Christ was born! Any psychiatrist will tell you that work – keeping busy – is one of the best anaesthetics ever know for sick nerves. The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive. Your blood will start circulating and your mind will start ticking – and soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy.

7 Don’t let the Beetles Get You Down

Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our lofe to worth-wile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.

8 A Law That will outlaw many of your worries

As the years went by, I gradually discovered that ninety-nine percent of the things I worried about never happened. My fear of being buried alive was even more absurd: I don’t imagine that – even back in the days before embalming was the rule – the one person in ten million was buried alive; yet I once cried for fear of it. What are you really worrying about? Lets examine the law of averages and see whether or not it is likely to happen. By the law of averages, it wont happen. This completely destroyed 99% of my worries and has made the last 20 years much more peaceful. It has been said that nearly all of our worries and unhappiness come from our imagination and not from reality.

9 co-operate with the inevitable

‘acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune’. Circumstances alone do not make us unhappy or happy, it is the way we react to those circumstances that determine our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom to heaven is within you. Acceptance teaches us that nothing in life could be beyond our strength to endure it. When we stop fighting the inevitable, we release energy that allows to create a richer life. At first, tire manufacturers tried to make a tire that would resist the shocks of the road. It was soon cut to ribbons. Then they made a tire that would absorb the shocks of the road. The tire could ‘take it’. You and I will last longer, and enjoy smoother riding, if we learn to absorb the shocks and jolts along the rocky road of life.

Dr Reinhold Niebuhr – Serenity Prayer

'God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference'

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