The advice that Dale Carnegie has dispersed in his acclaimed book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, are the ones that we have heard before and are well aware off. However, it’s the his style of narrating his expereince which adds to the effect that the book has on its readers. Its his laid back, tell-it-like-it-is style, which makes this book an interesting as well as a must read.
He pairs his teachings with compelling stories about people who’ve taken the worrying to an extreme and who’ve totally turned their lives around by ditching their angst.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living helped me realize that most of my worries are self created! It has made me more self aware of the fact that we are as we think, and that when we start worrying, common sense is often lost!
Here are few of the reflective questions which helped me ponder over the right things and brought my focus back on track. Ask yourself these 5 questions:
- Do I tend to put off living in the present in order to worry about the future, or to yearn for some ‘magical rose garden over the horizon’?
- Do I sometimes embitter the present by regretting things that happened in the past—that are over and done with?
- Do I get up in the morning determined to ‘Seize the day’—to get the utmost out of these twenty-four hours?
- Can I get more out of life by ‘living in day-tight compartments’?
- When will I make a promise to myself about getting started with it? Next week? … Tomorrow? … Today?
I will let you dwell more about it and leave this quote from the book which I find more profound every time I revisit it :
“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” – Dale Carnegie from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
