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introduction
In the early days, Dale Carnegie (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) made a living by teaching classes for adults at night schools in New York. He realizes that anxiety is one of these adults’ biggest problems. He wrote his book by reading what philosophers of all ages have said about anxiety. He also read hundreds of biographies, from Confucius to Churchill. According to him, we will not find anything new in his book, but we will find much that is not generally applied in our daily life.
Contents
Carnegie wrote his book into eight parts. Let’s go through them all and for the purposes of this article, I’m going to share one story taken from each part.
Part 1: Key facts you should know about anxiety
For this story, it was given the subtitle as “Living in a Cramped Cabin Today”. Just live each day until bedtime.
It was about a Michigan housewife who lost her husband to illness. She was very depressed and almost broke. Then she wrote to her former employer and got her job back by selling world books to the country and municipal school boards. I thought getting back on the road would help her relieve her depression. But driving alone and eating alone was almost too much for her to handle. I discovered that the schools were bad and the roads bad. Success seemed impossible.
Then one day I read an article that lifted her spirit and gave her the courage to go on living. There was an inspiring sentence that read: “Every day is a new life for a wise man.” She wrote it down and stuck it on the windshield of her car where she could see it every minute while driving. Since then, she said to herself, “Today is a new life.”
She successfully overcomes her fear of loneliness and her fear of want. She was fairly happy and successful at the time and had a lot of zest and love for life. She knew then that she could live one day at a time.
Part Two: Basic Methods in Anxiety Analysis
This was about an insurance guy. When he first started selling insurance, he was filled with boundless enthusiasm and love for his work. Then something happened. He became so frustrated that he despised his work and considered giving it up. Then one Saturday morning, he sat down and tried to get to the root of his fears. He began asking himself the following questions:
What is the problem?
He wasn’t getting high enough returns for the huge amount of phone calls he made.
What is the cause of the problem?
He did very well selling a prospect, until it was time to close a sale. Then the customer says, “Okay, I’ll think about it, mister. Come and see me again.” The time lost on these follow up calls made him depressed.
What are all possible solutions?
He checked his record for the past twelve months and studied the numbers carefully. He made an amazing discovery! Find out that 70% of his sales are closed at the first interview! Another 23% of his sales were closed at the second interview. Another 7% were closed on the third, fourth, fifth, and so on interviews. He came to the conclusion that he was wasting half his entire working day on a part of his business that accounted for only seven percent of his sales!
What is the best solution?
He quickly decided that he would immediately cut all visits after the second interview, and spent the extra time building new prospects.
Part 3: How to kick the anxiety habit before it breaks you
This part of the book asked us to use the law of averages to criminalize our fears.
Over one summer, a couple went on a camping trip in the Touquin Valley in the Canadian Rockies, about seven thousand feet above sea level. One night, a storm threatens to tear their tent to pieces. The outer tent shook and shuddered and shrieked and shrieked in the wind. The wife was terrified, every minute expecting to see their tent torn apart and soaring into the sky.
Yet her husband kept saying, “Listen, my dear, we are traveling with the Brewsters’ guides. They know what they’re doing. They’ve been pitching tents in these mountains for sixty years. This tent has been here for several seasons. It hasn’t blown yet, and by the law of averages, It won’t go off tonight; and even he is, we can take shelter in another tent. So relax…” did the wife; And she slept peacefully in the balance of the night.
We should ask ourselves: “What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that a particular event about which we are concerned will occur?”
Part Four: Ways to cultivate an attitude of mind that will bring you peace and happiness
We need to understand this important rule: Instead of worrying about ingratitude, let’s expect it.
A Texas businessman was bitter that his thirty-four employees didn’t say “thank you” to him after they received a $300 bonus each for Christmas.
According to Carnegie, instead of wallowing in resentment and self-pity, this man would probably ask himself why he didn’t get any recognition. Perhaps he underpaid and overworked his staff. They may have considered the birthday treat not a gift, but something they got. Perhaps he was so critical and unapproachable that no one would dare or care to thank him. They probably felt he gave the bonus away because most of the profits were for taxes, anyway.
On the other hand, the staff may have been selfish, mean, and ill-mannered. This may or may not be the case. According to Carnegie, this man made the human and painful mistake of expecting gratitude. He just didn’t know human nature.
Part 5: The perfect way to beat anxiety
Carnegie writes in his book that one day when his father returned from Maryville, where the banker had threatened to foreclose the mortgage, he stopped his horses on a bridge crossing a river, got off the wagon, and stood for a long time looking down. water, arguing with himself whether he should jump in and end it all.
Years later, Carnegie Sr. told him that the only reason he didn’t jump was because of his mother’s deep, unwavering, and joyful belief that if we love God and keep His commandments, everything will turn out alright. The mother was right. Everything came out fine in the end. Father lived more than forty-two happy years, and died in 1941 at the age of eighty-nine.
Part Six: How to Avoid Criticism Anxiety
A patriotic sensation was created in educational circles by an event that occurred in 1929. Educated men and women from all the Americas rushed to Chicago to witness the affair. A few years ago, a young man named Robert Hutchins worked his way through Yale University, working as a waiter, lumberjack, teacher, and clothesline salesman. Now, just eight years later, he’s inaugurated as president of America’s fourth richest university, the University of Chicago. He was only thirty years old. amazing! The criticism on “Wonder Boy” came out like a rockslide. Even newspapers participated in the attack.
On the day he was inaugurated, a friend of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ father said, “I was stunned this morning to read an incriminating editorial in the newspaper against your son.”
“Yes, it was severe,” replied the elder Hutchins, “but we have to remember that no one ever kicks a dead dog.”
Yes, and the more important the dog is, the more satisfied people will be with him or her kicking.
Carnegie added that when you get kicked or criticized, remember that it is often done because it gives the kicker a sense of importance. It often means that you are accomplishing something and deserve attention. Many people feel the brutal satisfaction of condemning those who are better educated than they are or more successful.
Part 7: 6 ways to prevent fatigue and anxiety and keep your energy and spirit high
Dale Carnegie listed the following six methods in his book:
Rest before you get tired. Learn to relax in your work. Learn to relax at home. apply good work habits (clear your desk of all papers except those relating to the immediate problem at hand; do things in order of importance; when faced with a problem, solve it then and there if you have the facts to make the decision; learn to organize, deputize, and supervise); To prevent anxiety and fatigue, put enthusiasm into your work; And remember, no one was killed for lack of sleep. Worrying about insomnia is causing the damage — not the insomnia itself. If you can’t sleep, get up and work or read until you feel sleepy.
Part 8: How did you conquer anxiety?
In the last part of the book, Carnegie wrote 31 true stories. For this review, I will choose one story called “I Lived in God’s Paradise.” It was about an Englishman from a wealthy family in Britain. After leaving the British Army in the early 20th century, he went to northwest Africa and lived with the Arabs in the desert, God’s paradise.
He lived there for seven years, learned to speak the language of the Bedouins, dressed them, ate their food, and adopted their way of life, which had changed little over the past several centuries. He also made a detailed study of religion and Islam, and he later wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, entitled “The Messenger.”
Note that Bedouins take life very calmly and never rush or get into unnecessary moods when things go wrong. They know it’s in order. No one but God can change anything. However, this does not mean that in the face of disaster they sit back and do nothing. This is explained below.
One day, there was a fierce and scorching windstorm of the Khamaseen winds in the desert. Howled and screamed for three days and nights. It was so powerful and ferocious that it blew sand from the Sahara hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean Sea and sprinkled it over the Rhone Valley in France. But the Arabs did not complain. They shrugged and said: Written! Which means “I have written”.
But as soon as the storm was over, they sprang into action, slaughtering all the lambs because they knew they were going to die anyway. After the lambs were slaughtered, the flocks were driven south to the water. All of this was done quietly, without worrying, grumbling, or mourning their losses. “It wasn’t too bad,” said the clan elder. “We might have lost everything. But, thank God, we have forty percent of our sheep left to make a fresh start.”
Several years after he left the desert – he still clung to that happy resignation to determinism he learned from the Arabs. This philosophy did more to calm his nerves than a thousand tranquilizers could.
Conclusion
In our daily life, in the fight against anxiety, I believe in the principle of “don’t worry about what other people think, say and do”.
