Big Ideas from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“Big Ideas” are simply the gems I’ve pulled out of my favorite books/seminars/life lessons. These ones I pulled from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

PhilosophersNotes on How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie

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• Dale Carnegie: What Worry May Do To You
• Dale Carnegie: Live in “Day-tight Compartments”
• Dale Carnegie: Be Willing to Have It So
• Dale Carnegie: Decide and Rock It!
• Dale Carnegie: Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk
• Dale Carnegie: Rest *BEFORE* You Get Tired
• Dale Carnegie: The Answer to Fatigue?
• Dale Carnegie: Other People (Aren’t) Thinking About You
• Dale Carnegie: Get Busy!!!

Quotes from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Emerson instructed us to "Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of truimpth out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul."

• Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they got rid of their fears and worries.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

• 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, from now 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.”

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• Professor William James, the father of applied psychology, has been dead since 1910. But if he were alive today, and could hear this formula for facing the worst, he would heartily approve of it. How do I know that? Because he told his own students: “Be willing to have it so... Be willing to have it so,” he said, because “...acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• 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 around 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 90 per cent of my worries by taking these four steps: Writing down precisely what I am worried about. Writing down what I can do about it. Deciding what to do. Starting immediately to carry out that decision.”

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• Some readers are going to snort at the idea of making so much over a hackneyed proverb like “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” I know it is trite, commonplace, a platitude. I know you have heard it a thousand times. But I also know that these hackneyed proverbs contain the very essence of the distilled wisdom of all ages. They have come out of the fiery experience of the human race and have been handed down through countless generations. If you were to read everything that has ever been written about worry by the great scholars of all time, you would never read anything more basic or more profound than such hackneyed proverbs as “Don’t cross your bridges until you come to them” and “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” If we only applied those two proverbs--instead of snorting at them--we wouldn’t need this book at all. In fact, if we applied most of the old proverbs, we would lead almost perfect lives. However, knowledge isn’t power until it is applied; and the purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something about applying it.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• knowledge isn’t power until it is applied

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• So, to prevent fatigue and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car. It exerts enough energy every twenty-four hours to shovel twenty tons of coal onto a platform three feet high. It does this incredible amount of work for fifty, seventy, or maybe ninety years. How can it stand it? Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, explained it. He said “Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time. As a matter of fact, there is a definite rest period after each contraction. When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• What is the answer to this fatigue? Relax! Relax! Relax! Learn to relax while you are doing your work!

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves—before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until ten minutes past midnight. They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

• 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.” So don’t bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking--and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It’s the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth--and one of the best.

  ~ Dale Carnegie quotes

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