How To Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie is a self-help classic which addresses one of the leading causes of physical illness, worry, by showing you simple and actionable techniques to eliminate it from your life. The book is packed with stories that reveal helpful lessons and practical frameworks to help you start living more fully and without the harmful effects of worry.
The key message in this book is that worrying can be detrimental to your physical and mental health, therefore you should find ways to deal with your worries. Carnegie provides a 3-step approach to deal with worry, the stop-loss for stress and why criticism can be beneficial. He also explains how to analyze and solve worry problems, how to crowd worry out of your mind, and how to use busyness to break the worry habit.
What I Liked
Ohhh wow, the tone of this book is hilariously vintage. It’s peak 1930s Optimistic Positive Thinking American Business Man -speak. It’s the pragmatic, friends with everyone, super generous, kind rich Uncle at the Rotary Club giving advice book. Some of the book is quite dated, but the actual advice is surprisingly solid (even before modern psychology proved the adages right). And the quaint stories from the 1930s make the advice all the more memorable. I think it’s worth the read, even if to understand the benchmark for the self-help genre.
What I Did Not Like
I mean – it’s from the 1930s. The examples are going to be about shoes shiners, typists, and steel workers. Also, all the examples are targeted to the worries of white male breadwinners with the occasional benevolent sexism mixed in…so yeah, it could be improved.
