million other people-and if I knew the answer, this book would sell for a fabulous price.
However, there's one good idea that some successful operators use. This story was told
to me by Charles Roberts, an investment counselor with offices at 17 East 42nd Street,
New York.
"I originally came up to New York from Texas with twenty thousand dollars 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 had been trading on a hit-or-miss basis and depending largely on luck and other
people's opinions. As H. I. Phillips said, I had been 'playing the stock market by ear'.
"I began to think over my mistakes and I determined that before I went back into the
market again, I would try to find out 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, fifty dollars a share, I
immediately place a stop-loss order on it at forty-five.' 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 ten, twenty-five, or even fifty 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 realised that the stop-loss principle could be used in other ways besides
in the stock market. I began to place a 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 ten minutes. If you arrive more than ten minutes
late, our luncheon engagement will be sold down the river-and I'll be gone.' "
Man alive! How I wish I had 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 horse sense to size up each
situation that threatened to destroy my peace of mind and 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, too-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 into thin air. It happened like
this. In my early thirties, I had 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 that 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 realised 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 organising and teaching adult-education classes, and wrote biographies in my spare
time -biographies and non-fiction books such as the one you are 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
shore of Walden Pond, Henry 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 theatre 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 it 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 cockleburs and cursed with poor
soil and ditches. They had tough going-had to squeeze every nickel. But Aunt Edith
loved to buy a few curtains and other items to brighten up their bare home. She bought
these small luxuries on credit at Dan Eversole's drygoods 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
had 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 grudge 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. He was so
excited about it that he went into the toyshop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and
demanded the whistle without even asking its price. "I then came home," he wrote to a
friend seventy years later, "and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with
my whistle." But when his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more
for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse 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 that the fact that he had paid too much for his whistle had 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 conceive that a great part of the
miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the 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 whistle. 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 it 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 1 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 such 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, while the children huddled in a 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 furniturehe
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 pages out
of his diary and burned them, of course. She started a diary of her own, in which she
made him the villain. She even wrote a novel, entitled Whose Fault? in which she
depicted her husband as a household fiend and herself as a martyr.
All to what end? Why 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 opinion they were worried about! Do 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 Tolstoy's. 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 fifty per cent of all 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 lives.
So, to break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 5:
Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living, let's
stop and ask ourselves these three Questions:
1. How much does this thing I am worrying about really matter to me?
2. At what point shall I set a "stop-loss" order on this worry -and forget it?
3. Exactly how much shall I pay for this whistle? Have I already paid more than it is
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 those tracks were made 180 million years ago. Even
a Mongolian idiot wouldn't dream of trying to go back 180 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 is only one way on God's green footstool that the past can be constructive; and
that is by calmly analysing 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
three hundred thousand dollars 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 realise 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, the Negro scientist, did when he lost forty thousand
dollars 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 is the second thing I should have done: I should have analysed my mistakes and
learned a lasting lesson.
But frankly, I didn't do either one of these 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 twenty what were good to be done than to be one of twenty 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 Mr. Brandwine-the same teacher who taught Allen
Saunders, of 939 Woodycrest Avenue, Bronx, New York!
Mr. Saunders told me that the teacher of his hygiene class, Mr. Brandwine, taught him
one of the most valuable lessons he had ever learned. "I was only in my teens," said
Allen 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. If I turned in an examination paper, I used to
lie awake and chew my fingernails for fear I hadn't passed. I was always living over the
things I had done, and 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, Mr. Brandwine, with a 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 a sudden, Mr. Brandwine 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," Allen 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 have 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
worry by the great scholars of all time, you would never read anything more basic or
more profound than such hackneyed proverbs 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 until it is
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 about applying it.
I have always admired a man like the late Fred Fuller Shedd, who had a gift for stating
an old truth in a new and picturesque way. He was editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin;
and, while 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. Shedd exclaimed. "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 eighty-one 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 years
ago. I found out it didn't get me anywhere at all. You can't grind any grain," he said,
"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 down the creek. But you can saw wrinkles in your face and ulcers in your stomach.
I had dinner with Jack Dempsey last Thanksgiving; and he told me over the turkey and
cranberry sauce about the fight in which he lost the heavyweight championship to
Tunney Naturally, it was a blow to his ego. "In the midst of that fight," he told me, "I
suddenly realised I had become an old man. ... At the end of the tenth 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 Tunney's hand in token of victory. ... I
was no longer champion of the world. I started back in the rain-back through the crowd
to my dressing-room. As I passed, some people tried to grab my hand. Others had tears
in their eyes.
"A year later, I fought Tunney again. But it was no use. I was through for ever. 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 spilt milk. I am 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 his past
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 have had a better time
during the last ten years," Jack Dempsey said, "than I had when I was champion."
As I read history and biography and observe people under trying circumstances, I am
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 that the
prisoners there appeared to be about as happy as the average person on the outside. I
commented on it to Lewis E. Lawes-then warden of Sing Sing-and he told me that when
criminals first arrive at Sing Sing, they are 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 Lawes 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 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 the important battles he
fought. Perhaps our batting 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 7:
Don't try to saw sawdust.
~~~~
Part Three In A Nutshell -How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You
RULE 1: Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy. Plenty of action is one of the
best therapies ever devised for curing "wibber gibbers".
RULE 2: Don't fuss about trifles. Don't permit little things-the mere termites of life-to
ruin your happiness.
RULE 3: Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries. Ask yourself: "What are the
odds against this thing's happening at all?"
RULE 4: Co-operate with the inevitable. If you know a circumstance is beyond your
power to change or revise, say to yourself "It is so; it cannot be otherwise."
RULE 5: Put a "stop-loss" order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing
may be worth-and refuse to give it any more.
RULE 6: Let the past bury its dead. Don't saw sawdust.
Part Four -Seven Ways To Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace And
