How To Stop Worrying And Start Living – Book Highlights & Review

How to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie is filled with tools and techniques to deal with worries and live freely. The wisdom comes from the author’s years of experience working with people and learning firsthand about their troubles. 

The book shares insights from various people who have experienced issues and their strategies to deal with their worries. In this post, I share the highlights from the book that resonated the most with me. It will help you get the gist of the book and decide if it deserves a spot on your shelf. 

According to Dale, if we want to avoid worrying, we should shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Instead, we should learn to live in day-tight compartments. 

The best way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.

William Osier

Highlights From The Book

Techniques In Analyzing Worry

In How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, the author talks about how half of our worries are because people are trying to make decisions before having enough knowledge to make them. The book shares three steps of problem analyses to deal with our worries:

1. Get the facts
2. Analyze the facts
3. Arrive at a decision and then act on that decision. 

The author further breaks this down into four simple things for us to do to eliminate our worries:

1. Write down what worries you.
2. Write down what you can do about it.
3. Decide what to do.
4. Start immediately to carry out that decision. 

Strategies For Dealing With Worries

We each have a habit of worrying. Worrying about things that have happened, things that are happening, and the things that may happen!

1. To break the habit of constant worrying, Dale Carnegie shares a set of strategies that are helpful to follow:

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not

Bernard Shaw

2. According to the author, we are great at weathering storms, but we let ourselves get eaten away by all the little things in life.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you, Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember, life is too short to be little.

Dale Carnegie

3. To stop worrying about things in the future, the author talks about asking ourselves, “What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur?”

4. To break the habit of worrying, the author asks us to cooperate with the inevitable. 

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Epictetus

5. In talking about us worrying about the past, Carnegie talks about not sawing the sawdust. It’s already sawed. When you start worrying about the things that are over and done with, you are merely trying to saw the sawdust. 

Cultivating An Attitude Of Peace And Happiness

To develop an attitude of peace and happiness and avoid worrying, the author shares a set of rules that are beneficial for us to follow:

1. Dale Carnegie shares that the most important lesson he learned in his life is the importance of what we think. Our thoughts make us what we are, he says. To develop a mental attitude that will bring peace and happiness, Think and act cheerfully, and you will feel cheerful. 
2. To cultivate peace, the author talks about never trying to get even with our enemies. If we do, we hurt ourselves far more than we hurt them, he says. 
3. Gratitude, per Dale, is key to cultivating happiness. But it’s natural for people to forget to be grateful. So, to avoid worrying about ingratitude, he says let’s expect it. Let us remember, he says, that the only way to find happiness is not to expect gratitude but to give for the joy of giving; Let’s remember that gratitude is a cultivated trait.
4. To stop worrying, count your blessings and not your troubles, shares the author. He asks us to focus on ninety percent of what’s right in our lives and ignore the ten percent that is wrong.
5. To be happy, the author shares, Let’s not imitate others. Let’s find ourselves and be ourselves. Dale writes that the average man uses only 10% of his mental abilities. He possesses many powers which he habitually fails to use.

You and I have such abilities, so let’s not waste a second worrying because we are not like other people. You are something new in this world. Never before, since the beginning of time, has there ever been anybody exactly likely you; and never again throughout all the ages to come will there ever be anybody exactly like you again.

Dale Carnegie

Is The book An Easy Read?

Although packed with great insights proven true for many people, how to stop worrying and start living was a slightly difficult read. There were too many references and real-life examples, which could have been trimmed down. 

The book also has a religious edge, with occasional religious references. If this isn’t your thing, you will still get a lot out of the book. 

Does The Book Deserve A Spot On Your Shelf?

How To Stop Worrying And Start Living has over 95K ratings on Goodreads.com and has sold millions of copies worldwide. One thing to note about thing book, though, is that it is over 70 years old. There are parts of the book that can seem dated to today’s audience.

A whole chapter is dedicated to ‘housewives’ and how they can eliminate worry. With hardly any female expert references in the book, you will notice that the book belongs to another time.

Given the thorough research nature of the book, Dale Carnegie would have written it to be more inclusive if it was from the 21st century. 

How To Stop Worrying And Start Living is a great book to borrow from the library and take notes on. I do not, however, feel it deserves a spot on your bookshelf. This book isn’t one I would return to again and again, like the Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg or Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty.