Sleep Story: How To Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 10 & 11

Enjoy this sleep story to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber while hearing motivational suggestions authored by Dale Carnegie. His book, "How To Stop Worrying and Start Living" is a classic written in 1948 and offers a plan to help us make the most of our lives, be productive, and thrive in the present moment. Ch 10 describes the"stop-loss" idea and how to set limits on worry. Ch 11 brings new light to the old adage, "Don't cry over spilt milk".

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hillary LaFawn.

I am so grateful that you have joined me today to explore Chapter 10 and 11 of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

Enjoy this sleep story to help relax your mind and body for a great night's sleep.

Before we begin,

Settle yourself in your bed and find your most comfortable position.

Take a few deep,

Long breaths and feel the gentle,

Soothing support of your pillows,

Sheets and blankets.

Let them cradle your body as you relax and settle in.

Chapter 10 Put a Stop Loss Order on Your Worries Would you like to know how to make money in Wall Street?

Well,

So would a million other people.

And if I knew the answer,

This book would sell for $10,

000 a copy.

However there's one good idea that some successful operators use.

This story was told to me by Charles Roberts,

An investment counselor.

I originally came up to New York from Texas with $20,

000,

Which my friends had given me to invest in the stock market,

Charles Roberts told me.

I thought,

He continued,

That I knew the ropes in the stock market,

But I lost every cent.

True,

I made a lot of profit on some deals,

But I ended up by losing everything.

I did not mind so much losing my own money,

Mr.

Roberts explained,

But I felt terrible about having lost my friends' money,

Even though they could well afford it.

I dreaded facing them again after our venture had turned out so unfortunately.

But to my astonishment,

They not only were good sports about it,

But proved to be incurable optimists.

I knew I'd been trading on a hit or miss basis,

And depending largely on luck and other people's opinions,

I had been playing the stock market by ear.

I began to think over my mystique and determined that before I went back into the market again,

I would try to find what it was all about.

So I sought out and became acquainted with one of the most successful speculators who ever lived,

Burton S.

Castles.

I believed I could learn a great deal from him because he had long enjoyed the reputation of being successful year after year,

And I knew that such a career was not the result of mere chance or luck.

He asked me a few questions about how I had traded before and then told me what I believe is the most important principle in trading.

He said,

I put a stop-loss order on every market commitment I make.

If I buy a stock at,

Say,

$50 a share,

I immediately place a stop-loss order on it at $45.

That means that when and if the stock should decline as much as five points below its cost,

It would be sold automatically,

Thereby limiting the loss to five points.

If your commitments are intelligently made in the first place,

The old master continued,

Your profits will average 10,

25,

Or even 50 points.

Consequently,

By limiting your losses to five points,

You can be wrong more than half of the time and still make plenty of money.

I adopted that principle immediately and have used it ever since.

It has saved my clients and me many thousands of dollars.

After a while,

I realized that the stop-loss principle could be used in other ways besides in the stock market.

I began to place stop-loss orders on other worries besides financial ones.

I began to stop-loss order on any and every kind of annoyance and resentment that came to me.

It has worked like magic.

For example,

I often have a luncheon date with a friend who is rarely on time.

In the old days,

He used to keep me stewing around for half my lunch hour before he showed up.

Finally,

I told him about my stop-loss orders on my worries.

I said,

Bill,

My stop-loss order on waiting for you is exactly 10 minutes.

If you arrive more than 10 minutes late,

Our luncheon engagement will be sold down the river and I will be gone.

How I wish I had the sense years ago to put stop-loss orders on my impatience,

On my temper,

On my desire for self-justification,

On my regrets,

And on all my mental and emotional strains.

Why didn't I have the hoarse sense to size up each situation that threatened to destroy my peace of mind and to say to myself,

See here,

Dale Carnegie.

This situation is worth just so much fussing about and no more.

Why didn't I?

However,

I must give myself credit for a little sense on one occasion at least,

And it was a serious occasion.

A crisis in my life.

A crisis when I stood watching my dreams and my plans for the future and the work of years vanish in a thin air.

It happened like this.

In my early 30s,

I decided to spend my life writing novels.

I was going to be a second Frank Norris or Jack London or Thomas Hardy.

I was so in earnest and I spent two years in Europe where I would live cheaply with dollars during the period of wild printing press money that followed the First World War.

I spent two years there writing my magnum opus.

I called it the blizzard.

The title was a natural for the reception it got among publishers was as cold as any blizzard that ever howled across the plains of the Dakotas.

When my literary agent told me it was worthless that I had no gift,

No talent for fiction,

My heart almost stopped.

I left his office in a daze.

I couldn't have been more stunned if he had hit me across the head with a club.

I was stupefied.

I realized that I was standing at the crossroads of life and had to make a tremendous decision.

What should I do?

Which way should I turn?

Weeks passed before I came out of the daze.

At that time,

I had never heard of the phrase,

Put a stop loss order on your worries.

But as I look back now,

I can see that I did just that.

I wrote off my two years of sweating over that novel for just what they were worth.

A noble experiment and went forward from there.

I returned to my work of organizing and teaching adult education classes and wrote biographies in my spare time.

Biographies and nonfiction books such as the one you're reading now.

Am I glad now that I made that decision?

Glad.

Every time I think about it now,

I feel like dancing in the street for sheer joy.

I can honestly say that I have never spent a day or an hour since lamenting the fact that I am not another Thomas Hardy.

One night a century ago when a screech owl was screeching in the woods along the shores of Walden Pond,

Henry David Thoreau dipped his goose quill into his homemade ink and wrote in his diary,

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life,

Which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.

To put it another way,

We are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence.

Yet that is precisely what Gilbert and Sullivan did.

They knew how to create gay words and gay music,

But they knew distressingly little about how to create gaiety in their own lives.

They created some of the loveliest light operas that ever delighted the world.

Patience,

Pinafore,

The Mikado,

But they couldn't control their tempers.

They embittered their years over nothing more than the price of a carpet.

Sullivan ordered a new carpet for the theater they had bought.

When Gilbert saw the bill,

He hit the roof.

They battled it out in court and never spoke to one another again as long as they lived.

When Sullivan wrote the music for a new production,

He mailed it to Gilbert.

And when Gilbert wrote the words,

He mailed them back to Sullivan.

Once they had to take a curtain call together,

But they stood on opposite sides of the stage and bowed in different directions.

So they wouldn't see one another.

They hadn't the sense to put a stop-loss order on their resentments,

As Lincoln did.

Once during the Civil War,

When some of Lincoln's friends were denouncing his bitter enemies,

Lincoln said,

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.

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.

I wish an old aunt of mine,

Aunt Edith,

Had had Lincoln's forgiving spirit.

She and Uncle Frank lived on a mortgaged farm that was infested with cockleburrs and cursed with poor soil and ditches.

They had tough going.

They had to squeeze every nickel.

But Aunt Edith loved to buy a few curtains and other small items to brighten up their bare home.

She bought these small luxuries on credit at Dan Eversole's Dry Goods store in Maryville,

Missouri.

Uncle Frank worried about their debts.

He had a farmer's horror of running up bills,

So he secretly told Dan Eversole to stop letting his wife buy on credit.

When she heard that,

She hit the roof,

And she was still hitting the roof about it almost fifty years after it happened.

I have heard her tell the story not once,

But many times.

The last time I ever saw her,

She was in her late seventies.

I said to her,

Aunt Edith,

Uncle Frank did wrong to humiliate you,

But don't you honestly feel that your complaining about it almost half a century after it happened is infinitely worse than what he did?

I might as well have said it to the moon.

Aunt Edith paid dearly for the grudges and bitter memories that she nourished.

She paid for them with her own peace of mind.

When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old,

He made a mistake that he remembered for seventy years.

When he was a lad of seven,

He fell in love with a whistle.

It was so exciting,

And he was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop,

Piled all his coppers on the counter,

And demanded the whistle,

Even without asking the price.

I then came home.

He wrote to a friend seventy years later,

And was whistling all over the house,

Much pleased with my whistle.

But when his older brother and sister found out what he paid for his whistle,

That he paid more than he should have,

They gave him a hoarse laugh,

And as he said,

I cried with vexation.

Years later,

When Franklin was a world-famous figure and ambassador to France,

He still remembered the fact that he had paid too much for the whistle,

And that caused him more chagrin than the whistle gave him pleasure.

But the lesson it taught Franklin was cheap in the end.

As I grew up,

He said,

And came into the world and observed the actions of men,

I thought I met with many,

Very many,

Who gave too much for the whistle.

In short,

I conceived that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things,

And by their giving too much for their whistles.

Gilbert and Sullivan paid too much for their whistles,

So did Aunt Edith,

So did Dale Carnegie on many occasions,

And so did the immortal Leo Tolstoy,

Author of two of the world's greatest novels,

War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

Leo Tolstoy was,

During the last twenty years of his life,

Probably the most venerated man in the whole world.

For twenty years before he died,

From 1890 to 1910,

An unending stream of admirers made pilgrimages to his home in order to catch a glimpse of his face,

To hear the sound of his voice,

Or even touch the hem of his garment.

Every sentence he uttered was taken down in a notebook,

Almost as if he were a divine revelation.

But when it came to living,

To ordinary living,

Well,

Tolstoy had even less sense at seventy than Franklin had at seven.

He had no sense at all.

Here's what I mean.

Tolstoy married a girl he loved very dearly.

In fact,

They were so happy together that they used to get on their knees and pray to God to let them continue their lives in just sheer heavenly ecstasy.

But the girl Tolstoy married was jealous by nature.

She used to dress herself up as a peasant and spy on his movements,

Even out in the woods.

They had fearful rows.

She became so jealous,

Even of her own children,

That she grabbed a gun and shot a hole in her daughter's photograph.

She even rolled on the floor with an opium bottle held to her lips and threatened to commit suicide,

When the children huddled in the corner of the room and screamed with terror.

And what did Tolstoy do?

Well,

I don't blame the man for up and smashing the furniture.

He had good provocation,

But he did far worse than that.

He kept a private diary.

Yes,

A diary in which he placed all the blame on his wife.

That was his whistle.

He was determined to make sure that coming generations would exonerate him and put the blame on his wife.

And what did his wife do in answer to this?

Why,

She tore out the pages of his diary and burned them,

Of course.

She started a diary of her own in which she was made him the villain.

She even wrote a novel entitled Who's Fault,

In which she depicted her husband as a household fiend and herself as a martyr.

All to what end?

What did these two people turn the only home they had into what Tolstoy himself called a lunatic asylum?

Obviously,

There were several reasons.

One of those reasons was their burning desire to impress you and me.

Yes,

We are the posterity whose opinions they were worried about.

Should we give a hoot in Hades about which one was to blame?

No.

We are too concerned with our own problems to waste a minute thinking about the Tolstoys.

What a price these two wretched people paid for their whistle.

Fifty years of living in a veritable hell just because neither of them had the sense to say stop.

Because neither of them had enough judgment of values to say,

Let's put a stop-loss order on this thing instantly.

We are squandering our lives.

Let's say enough now.

Yes,

I honestly believe that this is one of the greatest secrets to true peace of mind,

A decent sense of values,

And I believe we could annihilate 50% of all of our worries at once if we would develop a sort of private gold standard,

A gold standard of what things are worth to us in terms of our life.

So,

To break the worry habit before it breaks you,

Here is rule number five.

Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living,

Let's stop and ask ourselves these three questions.

Number one,

How much does this thing I'm worried about really matter to me?

Number two,

At what point shall I set a stop-loss order on this worry and forget it?

And number three,

Exactly how much shall I pay for this whistle?

Have I already paid more than it's worth?

Chapter 11,

Don't try to saw sawdust.

As I write this sentence,

I can look out of my window and see some dinosaur tracks in my garden,

Dinosaur tracks embedded in shale and stone.

I purchased those dinosaur tracks from the Peabody Museum of Yale University,

And I have a letter from the curator of the Peabody Museum saying that these tracks were made 100 million years ago.

Even a Mongolian idiot wouldn't dream of trying to go back 100 million years to change those tracks.

Yet that would not be any more foolish than worrying because we can't go back and change what happened 180 seconds ago.

And a lot of us are doing just that.

To be sure,

We may do something to modify the effects of what happened 180 seconds ago,

But we can't possibly change the event that occurred then.

There's only one way on God's green footstool that the past can be constructive,

And that is by calmly analyzing our past mistakes and profiting by them and forgetting them.

I know that is true,

But have I always had the courage and sense to do it?

To answer that question,

Let me tell you about a fantastic experience I had years ago.

I let more than $300,

000 slip through my fingers without making a penny's profit.

It happened like this.

I launched a large-scale enterprise in adult education,

Opened branches in various cities,

And spent money lavishly in overhead and advertising.

I was so busy with teaching that I had neither the time nor the desire to look after finances.

I was too naive to realize that I needed an astute business manager to watch expenses.

Finally,

After about a year,

I discovered a sobering and shocking truth.

I discovered that in spite of our enormous intake,

We had not netted any profit whatever.

After discovering that,

I should have done two things.

First,

I should have had the sense to do what George Washington Carver did when he lost $40,

000 in a bank crash,

The savings of a lifetime.

When someone asked him if he knew he was bankrupt,

He replied,

Yes,

I heard,

And went on with his teaching.

He wiped the loss out of his mind so completely that he never mentioned it again.

Here's the second thing I should have done.

I should have analyzed my mistakes and learned a lasting lesson.

But frankly,

I didn't do either one of those things.

Instead,

I went into a tailspin of worry.

For months,

I was in a daze.

I lost sleep and I lost weight.

Instead of learning a lesson from this enormous mistake,

I went right ahead and did the same thing again on a smaller scale.

It is embarrassing for me to admit all this stupidity,

But I discovered long ago that it is easier to teach 20,

What were good to be done,

Than to be one of the 20 to follow mine own teaching.

How I wish that I had had the privilege of attending the George Washington High School here in New York and studying under Dr.

Paul Brandwein,

The same teacher who taught Alan Saunders of New York.

Mr.

Saunders told me that the teacher of his hygiene class,

Dr.

Paul Brandwein,

Taught him one of the most valuable lessons he ever learned.

I was only in my teens,

Said Alan Saunders as he told me the story,

But I was a worrier even then.

I used to stew and fret about the mistakes I had made.

I turned in an examination paper.

I used to lie awake chewing my fingernails for fear I hadn't passed.

I'd always lived over the things I had done,

And I was wishing I'd done them differently,

Thinking over the things I had said and wishing I'd said them better.

Then one morning our class filed into the science laboratory and there was the teacher,

Dr.

Paul Brandwein.

With the bottle of milk prominently displayed on the edge of the desk,

We all sat down,

Staring at the milk and wondering what it had to do with the hygiene course he was teaching.

Then all of the sudden,

Dr.

Paul Brandwein stood up,

Swept the bottle of milk with a crash into the sink,

And shouted,

Don't cry over spilt milk.

He then made us all come to the sink and look at the wreckage.

Take a good look,

He told us,

Because I want you to remember this lesson the rest of your lives.

That milk is gone.

You can see it's down the drain,

And all the fussing and hair pulling in the world won't bring back a drop of it.

With a little thought and prevention,

That milk might have been saved,

But it's too late now.

All we can do is write it off,

Forget it,

And go on to the next thing.

That one little demonstration,

Alan Saunders told me,

Stuck with me long after I'd forgotten my solid geometry and Latin.

In fact,

It taught me more about practical living than anything else in my four years of high school.

It taught me to keep from spilling milk if I could,

But to forget it completely once it was spilled and had gone down the drain.

Some readers are going to snort at the idea of making so much over a hackneyed proverb like Don't cry over spilt milk.

I know it is trite,

Commonplace,

And a platitude.

I know you've heard it a thousand times,

But I also know that these hackneyed proverbs contain the very essence of the distilled wisdom of all ages.

They have come out of the fiery experience of the human race and have been handed down through countless generations.

If you were to read everything that has ever been written about worrying by the great scholars of all time,

You would never read anything more basic or more profound than such a hackneyed proverb as Don't cross your bridges until you come to them and Don't cry over spilt milk.

If we only applied those two proverbs instead of snorting at them,

We wouldn't need this book at all.

In fact,

If we applied most of the old proverbs,

We would lead almost perfect lives.

However,

Knowledge isn't power unless it's applied.

And the purpose of this book is not to tell you something new.

The purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something applying and how to apply it.

I've always admired a man like the late Fred Fuller Shred.

He had a gift for stating an old truth in a new and picturesque way.

While editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin and addressing a college graduating class,

He asked,

How many of you have ever sawed wood?

Let's see your hands.

Most of them had.

Then he inquired,

How many of you have ever sawed sawdust?

No hands went up.

Of course you can't saw sawdust,

Mr.

Shred explained.

It's already sawed.

And it's the same with the past.

When you start worrying about things that are over and done with,

You're merely trying to saw sawdust.

When Connie Mack,

The grand old man of baseball,

Was 81 years old,

I asked him if he had ever worried over games that were lost.

Oh yes,

I used to,

Connie Mack told me.

But I got over that foolishness long ago.

I found out it didn't get me anywhere at all.

You can't grind any grain with water that has already gone down the creek.

No,

You can't grind any grain.

And you can't saw any logs with water that has already gone through the creek.

But you can saw wrinkles in your face and ulcers in your stomach.

I had dinner with Jack Dempsey one Thanksgiving,

And he told me over the turkey and cranberry sauce about the fight in which he lost the heavyweight championship to Tunny.

Naturally,

It was a blow to his ego.

In the midst of that fight,

He told me,

I suddenly realized I'd become an old man.

At the end of my 10th round,

I was still on my feet,

But that was about all.

My face was puffed and cut,

And my eyes were nearly closed.

I saw the referee raise Gene Tunny's hand in token of victory.

I was no longer champion of the world.

I started back in the rain,

Back through the crown of my dressing room.

As I passed,

Some people tried to grab my hand.

Others had tears in their eyes.

A year later,

I found Tunny again,

But it was no use.

It was over.

I was through forever.

It was hard to keep from worrying about it all.

But I said to myself,

I'm not going to live in the past or cry over spilled milk.

I'm going to take this blow on the chin and not let it floor me.

And that is precisely what Jack Dempsey did.

How?

By saying to himself over and over,

I won't worry about the past.

No,

That would merely have forced him to think of the past and all his worries.

He did it by accepting and writing off his defeat,

And then concentrating on plans for the future.

He did it by running the Jack Dempsey restaurant on Broadway and the Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street.

He did it by promoting prize fights and giving boxing exhibitions.

He did it by getting so busy on something constructive that he had neither the time nor the temptation to worry about the past.

I've had a better time during the last 10 years,

Jack Dempsey said,

Than when I was the champion.

Mr.

Dempsey told me that he'd not read many books,

But without knowing it,

He was following Shakespeare's advice.

Wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss,

But cheerily seek how to redress their harms.

As I read history and biography and observed people under trying circumstances,

I'm constantly astonished and inspired by some people's ability to write off their worries and tragedies and go on living fairly happy lives.

I once paid a visit to Sing Sing,

And the thing that astonished me most was the prisoners that appeared to be about as happy as the average person on the outside.

I commented on it to Louis E.

Laws,

Then warden of Sing Sing,

And he told me that when criminals first arrive at Sing Sing,

They're likely to be resentful and bitter.

But after a few months,

The majority of the more intelligent ones write off their misfortunes and settle down and accept prison life calmly and make the best of it.

Warden Laws told me about one Sing Sing prisoner,

A gardener,

Who sang as he cultivated the vegetables and flowers inside the prison walls.

That Sing Sing prisoner who sang as he cultivated the flowers showed a lot more sense than what most of us do.

He knew that the moving finger writes and having writ moves on,

Nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

So why waste the tears?

Of course,

We have been guilty of blunders and absurdities,

And so what?

Who hasn't?

Even Napoleon lost one third of all of his important battles he fought.

Perhaps our battling average is no worse than Napoleon's.

Who knows?

And anyhow,

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again.

So let's remember rule number six.

Don't try to saw sawdust.

And this ends part three.

Part three in a nutshell.

How to break the worry habit before it breaks you.

Rule number one,

Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy.

Plenty of action is one of the best therapies ever devised for curing whipper gibbers.

Rule number two,

Don't fuss about trifles.

Don't permit little things,

The mere termites of life,

To ruin your happiness.

Rule number three,

Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries.

Ask yourself,

What are the odds against this thing's happening at all?

Rule number four,

Cooperate with the inevitable.

If you know a circumstance is beyond your power to change or revise it,

Say to yourself,

It is so.

It cannot be otherwise.

Rule number five,

Put a stop loss order on your worries.

Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth and refuse to give it anymore.

Rule number six,

Let the past bury its dead.

Don't saw sawdust.

Thank you so much for allowing me the precious gift of your time.

Until next time.