Customer Reviews

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

5 star:		(151)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dale Carnegie wrote some great books back in the 30's and 40's, and this book is one of them- Carnegie fans won't be disappointed.

The writing style is classic Carnegie. To put it simply, the guy just writes like he talks. This makes for a very friendly and easy to understand book, rather like a good friend giving you a piece of advice.

And a lot of advice he gives. The book is divided up into ten sections, each one tackling some aspect of worrying. I could give you a rundown of the topics, but you don't really need me to repeat the table on contents to decide if you want to read the book. Rather, let me just say that book covers just about every major "worry issue" that might be causing a troubled mind, such as your work, your finances, other people's criticisms- and them some.

While there are no earth-shattering, never-before-seen tips in the book, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to recommend it to anyone who is looking to ease their mind a bit. That's because it does a GREAT job of conveying simple wisdom that really make you think good and hard about why you're worrying and if those things are really worth worrying about at all.

In short, its a bestseller because it makes a lot of sense and its advice can do a lot to re-frame your thinking about things. And if you can re-frame your thinking, well, you've about found the best "Compound-W" for worry warts. Readers who enjoyed this book might also enjoy "Finding Happiness in a Frustrating World".

...why doesn't everyone following them? Because that's the biggest knock I've heard regarding this book. Some people are reading each chapter and coming away saying "well that's obvious." Folks, there isn't anything groundbreaking about this book. There isn't some type of genius method of instantly transforming your life around. It was written decades ago but the solid principles still apply today. For example, if you want to add years to your life, take a nap for an hour each day. Carnegie is then going to tell you exactly who did this and how it helped them transform their life. Read this book once, then twice, then a third time and start living these principles. They are simple but effective and they will, as the title implies, help you start living your life.

If "How to Win Friends..." was about interpersonal skills, this book is about intrapersonal skills. People have criticized Dale for stating the obvious, but hey, as my mother says, "common sense isn't common." Most of these ideas run counter to human nature's way of responding to conflict and criticism (defensiveness, blame, guilt, self-righteousness, etc). Instead, we are invited to replace these typical responses with non-threatening admissions of having been in the wrong if indeed we were in the wrong or water-off-a-duck's back/unshaken poise if the criticism was unjust, unwarranted, and unreasonable. To be honest, I often haven't thought about things the way Dale states them much less practiced his principles with consistency. Self-improvement in terms of handling my feelings is still a long-term goal of mine. I've made good progress, but I have a ways to go.

I think this book is very good, but I think "How to Win Friends & Influence People" is the better of the two books. Also, Dale can come off as preachy at times. I think he was a wonderful, considerate person with the best of intentions, so I hesitate reproaching this "guru" of emotional intelligence.

I did enjoy listening to stories about personal transformation. People who had hit rock bottom were able to rebound from their falls. John D. Rockefeller turned his life around, much in the style of "Silas Marner," and no longer fretted about losing money. Thanks to his Rockefeller Foundation, countless good causes have had ample funding. I also like the story Dale shares about J. C. Penney. Penney felt that even his intimate loved ones believed the worst about him after he was implicated with the stock market crash of 1929. He became so worried that his health deteriorated. Then one day he stumbled into a chapel as the choir was singing, "God will take care of you." He recognized the truth of those words and within 20 minutes, snapped out of his despair.

Dale really revered Abraham Lincoln, and so do I, based on Dale's account of him. Abraham Lincoln would select men who disliked him if he thought those men were the best qualified for a given position. Someone asked Lincoln why he would consort with men who freely criticize him. Lincoln responded, "You have more of a feeling of personal resentment than I have. Perhaps I have too little of it. But I never thought it paid." He also said, "A man doesn't have the time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him." Wow! Those are the words of an enlightened and secure human being.

I think that my problem has been that I took too personally the criticism of others (both just and unjust). I'm not a vindictive person; however, I hate feeling threatened, and my self-esteem--while it has improved, it is still vulnerable. It was the feeling of self-doubt that I hated--not really the person attacking me. I made the mistake of interchanging a person for his or her mistakes at my expense. If you no longer feel threatened by criticism and believe in yourself and your potential no matter what, then I think forgiveness is easy and natural. Dale warned that we pay too dearly for grudges with our lost peace of mind.

I like how this book among others can give us the tools to completely overhaul our unhelpful (or rather hurtful) ways of thinking about things. "How to Stop Worrying..." revisits platitudes and shows how they are less trite sayings than distilled truths. Turn lemons into lemonade. Count your blessings. Don't cry over spilled milk. He also talked about putting a "stop-loss order" on resentments, having our thoughts work for instead of against us, and how knowledge isn't power until it is applied. Forgive and forget our enemies. No person can humiliate or disturb us; a person really humiliates him/herself when s/he attempts to humiliate others. Or Eleanor Roosevelt's insight that no one can make us feel inferior without our permission. "If possible, no animosity should be felt for anyone." Edith Cabbal: "I realize now that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone." "Everynight I forgive everything & everybody." "Forget yourself by becoming interested in others." "Serving others is a sure way to forget our own troubles." "We hurt ourselves with thoughts of revenge." "Sympathy and compassion are the best antidotes to enmity."

The helpful quotes go on and on, and any of the above could become a person's mantra, depending on what issues s/he is working on. Ben Franklin had the great idea of working on one of his eight severest character flaws every week. He would alternate what vice he was trying to eliminate or at least, ameliorate. He would self-reflect upon his improvement or lack thereof. I've decided to imitate good old Ben and try this for myself.

I am grateful for Dale Carnegie and other helpful emotional intelligence gurus (Wayne Dyer, Deepak Choprah, and David Burns come to mind) for spelling out tools for emotional health and personal transformation. We all have great potential. As Dale said, we all live well within our means in terms of intellectual and emotional intelligence. Financially, it's great advice to live within our means, but we pay dearly to do so intellectually or emotionally.

Tossed to me at a time in my life when I was drowning in my worries. Oh, my worries were real enough, I had good cause to worry! Everyone said so. My husband died suddenly, then my teenage daughter got into drugs, dropped out of school and ran away! I worried so much my hair fell out!! And this went on for several YEARS! In this book I met other people who had good cause to worry, too. Those who shared their life experiences with Dale Carnegie, and gave him their best coping techniques so that he could compile them in a single text. They talked about how they dealt with the fear of war, or illness, or poverty, or lonliness and the worst one of all: despair. I read it over and over. I clung to the stories of people rising above their circumstances and making it through hard times. This book is FILLED with things you can do IMMEDIATELY to improve your life, practical concepts that REALLY WORK. Even though I am in a happier place in life at this time, I thank God for this book and the calm it brought me during my toughest years.

This book contains not only the steps for a worry-free living : when applying its techniques and principles in your day-to-day, you start to notice that you are a new person, with much more capacity, and the results of your acting became surprisingly better. It's probable that if you learn and apply correctly what Dale Carnegie wrote many years ago, you will solve very old problems, those very complex problems that you had already given up(ex. relationships with people in family and work, general organization of your life, bad memory, backwardness, etc.). You will be able to do what you believed was an unchangable weakness of yourself, and this will increase your self-confidence.You may ask how can a book be so miraculous. The answer is : this book is based in the toughts of the most wise men of all times, including Jesus Crist, Willian James, Benjamin Franklin, Thoma Edison, and many others, together with the real experiences that Dale Carnegie made in his "lab of how to stop worrying". Thus, in spite of not solving all the problems of our lives, this book certainly contains precepts that every person should know, and is an obligatory reading for those who are not completely happy with their lives.

The most interesting thing about this incredible book isn't the time-tested, practical advice (although there is much of that), nor the potentially life-changing observations on "how to live" (although they also abound). No, the most important lesson of HOW TO STOP WORRYING comes from an unintended source...and tells us a lot about how the world has changed.

This book was published nearly half a century ago, and was based on observations from the first half of the twentieth century. Does that make it a hopeless anachronism? Just the opposite...it shows us how far we've fallen in one very important respect: Our willingness to take responsibility for outr actions. Consider this: Every single bit of advice in this book is based on the premise that you, the reader, are responsible for your own destiny, and must personally take action in your own life...not wait for the government or a pill or someone else to take care of it for you. Not once is anyone in this book characterized as a "victim" (although many come under great misfortune). If this book were to be written today, the fault for it's subject's problems would lie entirely with external forces, as would all of the remedies.

I find it interesting that the overall term used to describe the problem this book attempts to solve ("worry"), is one that we never hear these days. In today's world, we say that someone is "stressed" to describe the same symptoms. Why? Because "worry" is something one does to one's self, and "stress" comes from the outside. We no longer want to acknowledge responsibility for anything.

I'll be the first to admit that we know much more today about the cause of mental and physical problems than we did when this book was written. But any open-minderd reader of this volume will have to admit that, in many respects, we've gone backward. This was self-help for what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation", and I recommend it highly.

This is not my favorite Dale Carnegie book, but all the same, it contains age old wisdom from one of my favorite authors. I recently read another great book called, Stress - Proof You: How To Deal With Stress and Be Stress Free For Life. It should be made into a part two of Dale Carnegie's book because it contains many innovative stress reduction techniques yet still has the same tone of wisdom that Carnegie's books always have. I highly recommend both with 5 stars!

It seems like such a silly thing to have to read a book on how to stop worrying, but trust me; you'll never learn as much any other way. Once again, Dale Carnegie proves to be the expert on self-motivation. Certainly this book won't cure you, but it will give you advice and insight on the better life you should be leading. A remarkably easy read. I do have one problem with Carnegie's book; he seems to focus a lot on religion, and to anyone who isn't "hip" with religion will find it distasteful. Also, I actually enjoyed his other book, How to Win Friends, more, but How to Stop Worrying is a nice addition into the self-help fanatic's library. If anything, it will slap you in the face and remind you that life is too important to waste time worrying about superficial matters. Some of us need that slap in the face.

Not long ago, when I was newly divorced mom with two teenagers, and plenty of reasons to worry, I found this little book. That year, I'd made a New Year's resolution to stop worrying. Living one day at a time sounded like a great idea. But I did not know how. How to stop worrying?

The book had actually been lying on a bookshelf in my home for a very long time. My copy was so old that the pages were yellow, and crumbling I had picked it up once, glanced through it and laid it down, thinking that my problems were just too overwhelming to listen to yet another positive-thinking guru.

This time, as I read and re-read the book, I came to love the people in it, who told their stories in such heart-felt, simple words. Because, you see, the book was written in a laboratory of human experience. For five years, as a teacher of adult education classes at the YMCA, Dale Carnegie taught a class in how to stop worrying. Each week his students, who came from all walks of life, tried his ideas out, and returned to class with honest feedback on what actually worked for them. Carnegie eventually put their stories together, including what they learned as a group. That's how the book took shape.

The stories, all true, are drawn from days when people had good reason to worry. This was the generation which lived through the Great Depression, and then World War II. Everything is covered here - war, loneliness, financial problems (even bankruptcy-one man had gone through bankruptcy three different times, due to the Great Depression), death, worry over children, health problems, fear of the future.

A number of them had come close to ending their lives due to overwhelming personal problems. Everything is described honestly, in this little book. Yet all of them learned to stop worrying. And they tell how they did it.

Some used prayer as a comfort. The book was written during the days when people weren't ashamed to admit that they found comfort in religious belief. But that isn't the main emphasis of the book. It's filled with practical, down-to-earth approaches for living day to day, happily. The answers are those found in the laboratory of real human experience - not theory, but what works.

If you're like me, prone to waking at night, anxious with what Carnegie calls the "wibber-gibbers," it's the ideal bedside companion, and a true comfort throughout life's up and downs.

Recently, during a lawsuit which caused me a significant amount of anxiety, I tore this little paperback into sections, and carried a section into court with me, to read during odd moments as I waited for the outcome of my case. This book, and the love and support of my family, carried me through.

I have to confess, I'm a chronic worrier. I was even back in high school when I found this book from my sister's Dale Carnegie course and began reading it. While it's been nearly 20 years since I read this book, I've been carrying its principles ever since. The best part of this book and Carnegie's other landmark, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," is it's all common sense. Sometimes, it's so easy to see the obvious until it's pointed out to you and illustrated with very easy to understand anecdotes. The book teaches you to live in day-tight compartments, to accept the worst-case scenario so you can be prepared to handle the consequences, to weigh the odds (Carnegie tells, for example, the story of how as a little boy he started crying because he thought he was going to be buried alive), etc. You won't find a lot of psycho-babble here, just real life experiences from real people to deal with an all too real problem.