Part Ten–“How I Conquered Worry”

32 True Stories

Six Major Troubles Hit Me All At Once
C.I. Blackwood
Proprietor, Blackwood-Davis Business College Oklahoma

In the summer of 1943, it seemed to me that half the worries of the world had come to rest on my shoulders.
For more than forty years, I had lived a normal, carefree life with only the usual troubles which come to a husband, father, and business man. I could usually meet these troubles easily, but suddenly—wham! wham!! wham!!! wham! !!! WHAM! !!!! WHAM!!!!!! Six major troubles hit me all at once. I pitched and tossed and turned in bed all night long, half dreading to see the day come, because I faced these six major worries.
1. My business college was trembling on the verge of financial disaster because all the boys were going to war; and most of the girls were making more money working in war plants without training than my graduates could make in business offices with training.
2. My older son was in service, and I had the heart-numbing worry common to all parents whose sons were away at war.
3. Oklahoma City had already started proceedings to appropriate a large tract of land for an airport, and my home- formerly my father’s home was located in the centre of this tract. I knew that I would be paid only one tenth of its value, and, what was even worse, I would lose my home; and because of the housing shortage, I worried about whether I could possibly find another home to shelter my family of six. I feared we might have to live in a tent. I even worried about whether we would be able to buy a tent.
4. The water well on my property went dry because a drainage canal had been dug near my home. To dig a new well would be throwing five hundred dollars away because the land was probably being appropriated. I had to carry water to my livestock in buckets every morning for two months, and I feared I would have to continue it during the rest of the war.
5. I lived ten miles away from my business school and I had a class B petrol card: that meant I couldn’t buy any new tyres, so I worried about how I could ever get to work when the superannuated tyres on my old Ford gave up the ghost.
6. My oldest daughter had graduated from high school a year ahead of schedule. She had her heart set on going to college, and I just didn’t have the money to send her. I knew her heart would be broken. One afternoon while sitting in my office, worrying about my worries, I decided to write them all down, for it seemed no one ever had more to worry about than I had. I didn’t mind wrestling with worries that gave me a fighting chance to solve them, but these worries all seemed to be utterly beyond my control. I could do nothing to solve them. So I filed away this typewritten list of my troubles, and, as the months passed, I forgot that I had ever written it. Eighteen months later, while transferring my files, I happened to come across this list of my six major problems that had once threatened to wreck my health. I read them with a great deal of interest—and profit. I now saw that not one of them had come to pass. Here is what had happened to them:
1. I saw that all my worries about having to close my business college had been useless because the government had started paying business schools for training veterans and my school was soon filled to capacity.
2. I saw that all my worries about my son in service had been useless: he was coming through the war without a scratch.
3. I saw that all my worries about my land being appropriated for use as an airport had been useless because oil had been struck within a mile of my farm and the cost for procuring the land for an airport had become prohibitive.
4. I saw that all my worries about having no well to water my stock had been useless because, as soon as I knew my land would not be appropriated, I spent the money necessary to dig a new well to a deeper level and found an unfailing supply of water.
5. I saw that all my worries about my tyres giving out had been useless, because by recapping and careful driving, the tyres had managed somehow to survive.
6. I saw that all my worries about my daughter’s education had been useless, because just sixty days before the opening of college, I was offered—almost like a miracle—an auditing job which I could do outside of school hours, and this job made it possible for me to send her to college on schedule.
I had often heard people say that ninety-nine per cent of the things we worry and stew and fret about never happen, but this old saying didn’t mean much to me until I ran across that list of worries I had typed out that dreary afternoon eighteen months previously.
I am thankful now that I had to wrestle in vain with those six terrible worries. That experience has taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. It has shown me the folly and tragedy of stewing about events that haven’t happened—events that are beyond our control and may never happen.
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Ask yourself: How do I KNOW this thing I am worrying about will really come to pass?

I Can Turn Myself in to a Shouting Optimist Within an Hour
Roger W. Babson
Famous Economist Babson Park, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts

When I find myself depressed over present conditions, I can, within one hour, banish worry and turn myself into a shouting optimist.
Here is how I do it. I enter my library, close my eyes, and walk to certain shelves containing only books on history. With my eyes still shut, I reach for a book, not knowing whether I am picking up Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico or Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars. With my eyes still closed, I open the book at random. I then open my eyes and read for an hour; and the more I read, the more sharply I realise that the world has always been in the throes of agony, that civilisation has always been tottering on the brink. The pages of history fairly shriek with tragic tales of war, famine, poverty, pestilence, and man’s inhumanity to man. After reading history for an hour, I realise that bad as conditions are now, they are infinitely better than they used to be. This enables me to see and face my present troubles in their proper perspective as well as to realise that the world as a whole is constantly growing better.
Here is a method that deserves a whole chapter. Read history! Try to get the viewpoint of ten thousand years—and see how trivial your troubles are, in terms of eternity.

How I Got Rid Of An Inferiority Complex
Elmer Thomas
United States Senator from Oklahoma

When I was fifteen I was constantly tormented by worries and fears and self-consciousness. I was extremely tall for my age and as thin as a fence rail. I stood six feet two inches and weighed only 118 pounds. In spite of my height, I was weak and could never compete with the other boys in baseball or running games. They poked fun at me and called me “hatch-face”. I was so worried and self-conscious that I dreaded to meet anyone, and I seldom did, for our farmhouse was off the public road and surrounded by thick virgin timber that had never been cut since the beginning of time. We lived half a mile from the highway; and a week would often go by without my seeing anyone except my mother, father, and brothers and sisters.
I would have been a failure in life if I had let those worries and fears whip me. Every day and every hour of the day, I brooded over my tall, gaunt, weak body. I could hardly think of anything else. My embarrassment, my fear, was so intense that it is almost impossible to describe it. My mother knew how I felt. She had been a school-teacher, so she said to me: “Son, you ought to get an education, you ought to make your living with your mind because your body will always be a handicap.”
Since my parents were unable to send me to college, I knew I would have to make my own way; so I hunted and trapped opossum, skunk, mink, and raccoon one winter; sold my hides for four dollars in the spring, and then bought two little pigs with my four dollars. I fed the pigs slop and later corn and sold them for forty dollars the next fall. With the proceeds from the sale of the two hogs I went away to the Central Normal College—located at Danville, Indiana. I paid a dollar and forty cents a week for my board and fifty cents a week for my room. I wore a brown shirt my mother had made me.
(Obviously, she used brown cloth because it wouldn’t show the dirt.) I wore a suit of clothes that had once belonged to my father. Dad’s clothes didn’t fit me and neither did his old congress gaiter shoes that I wore—shoes that had elastic bands in the sides that stretched when you put them on. But the stretch had long since gone out of the bands, and the tops were so loose that the shoes almost dropped off my feet as I walked. I was embarrassed to associate with the other students, so I sat in my room alone and studied. The deepest desire of my life was to be able to buy some store clothes that fit me, clothes that I was not ashamed of.
Shortly after that, four events happened that helped me to overcome my worries and my feeling of inferiority. One of these events gave me courage and hope and confidence and completely changed all the rest of my life. I’ll describe these events briefly:
First: After attending this normal school for only eight weeks, I took an examination and was given a third-grade certificate to teach in the country public schools. To be sure, this certificate was good for only six months, but it was fleeting evidence that somebody had faith in me—the first evidence of faith that I ever had from anyone except my mother.
Second: A country school board at a place called Happy Hollow hired me to teach at a salary of two dollars per day, or forty dollars per month. Here was even more evidence of somebody’s faith in me.
Third: As soon as I got my first cheque I bought some store clothes—clothes that I wasn’t ashamed to wear. If someone gave me a million dollars now, it wouldn’t thrill me half as much as that first suit of store clothes for which I paid only a few dollars.
Fourth: The real turning point in my life, the first great victory in my struggle against embarrassment and inferiority occurred at the Putnam County Fair held annually in Bain-bridge, Indiana. My mother had urged me to enter a public-speaking contest that was to be held at the fair. To me, the very idea seemed fantastic. I didn’t have the courage to talk even to one person—let alone a crowd. But my mother’s faith in me was almost pathetic. She dreamed great dreams for my future. She was living her own life over in her son. Her faith inspired me to enter the contest. I chose for my subject about the last thing in the world that I was qualified to talk on: “The Fine and Liberal Arts of America”. Frankly, when I began to prepare a speech I didn’t know what the liberal arts were, but it didn’t matter much because my audience didn’t know, either.
I memorised my flowery talk and rehearsed it to the trees and cows a hundred times. I was so eager to make a good showing for my mother’s sake that I must have spoken with emotion. At any rate, I was awarded the first prize. I was astounded at what happened. A cheer went up from the crowd. The very boys who had once ridiculed me and poked fun at me and called me hatchet-faced now slapped me on the back and said: “I knew you could do it, Elmer.”
My mother put her arms around me and sobbed.
As I look back in retrospect, I can see that winning that speaking contest was the turning point of my life. The local newspapers ran an article about me on the front page and prophesied great things for my future. Winning that contest put me on the map locally and gave me prestige, and, what is far more important, it multiplied my confidence a hundredfold. I now realise that if I had not won that contest, I probably would never have become a member of the United States Senate, for it lifted my sights, widened my horizons, and made me realise that I had latent abilities that I never dreamed I possessed. Most important, however, was the fact that the first prize in the oratorical contest was a year’s scholarship in the Central Normal College.
I hungered now for more education. So, during the next few years—from 1896 to 1900—I divided my time between teaching and studying. In order to pay my expenses at De Pauw University, I waited on tables, looked after furnaces, mowed lawns, kept books, worked in the wheat and cornfields during the summer, and hauled gravel on a public road-construction job.
In 1896, when I was only nineteen, I made twenty-eight speeches, urging people to vote for William Jennings Bryan for President. The excitement of speaking for Bryan aroused a desire in me to enter politics myself. So when I entered De Pauw University, I studied law and public speaking. In 1899 I represented the university in a debate with Butler College, held in Indianapolis, on the subject “Resolved that United States Senators should be elected by popular vote.” I won other speaking contests and became editor-in-chief of the class of 1900 College Annual, The Mirage, and the university paper, The Palladium.
After receiving my A.B. degree at De Pauw, I took Horace Greeley’s advice—only I didn’t go west, I went south-west. I went down to a new country: Oklahoma. When the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indian reservation was opened, I home-steaded a claim and opened a law office in Lawton, Oklahoma. I served in the Oklahoma State Senate for thirteen years, in the lower House of Congress for four years, and at fifty years of age, I achieved my lifelong ambition: I was elected to the United States Senate from Oklahoma. I have served in that capacity since March 4, 1927. Since Oklahoma and Indian Territories became the state of Oklahoma on November 16, 1907, I have been continuously honoured by the Democrats of my adopted state by nominations—first for State Senate, then for Congress, and later for the United States Senate.
I have told this story, not to brag about my own fleeting accomplishments, which can’t possibly interest anyone else. I have told it wholly with the hope that it may give renewed courage and confidence to some poor boy who is now suffering from the worries and shyness and feeling of inferiority that devastated my life when I was wearing my father’s cast-off clothes and gaiter shoes that almost dropped off my feet as I walked.
(Editor’s note: It is interesting to know that Elmer Thomas, who was so ashamed of his ill-fitting clothes as a youth, was later voted the best-dressed man in the United States Senate.)

I Lived In The Garden Of Allah
R.V.C. Bodley
Founder of the Bodleian Library

IN 1918, I turned my back on the world I had known and went to north-west Africa and lived with the Arabs in the Sahara, the Garden of Allah. I lived there seven years. I learned to speak the language of the nomads. I wore their clothes, I ate their food, and adopted their mode of life, which has changed very little during the last twenty centuries. I became an owner of sheep and slept on the ground in the Arabs’ tents. I also made a detailed study of their religion. In fact, I later wrote a book about Mohammed, entitled The Messenger.
Those seven years which I spent with these wandering shepherds were the most peaceful and contented years of my life.
I had already had a rich and varied experience: I was born of English parents in Paris; and lived in France for nine years. Later I was educated at Eton and at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Then I spent six years as a British army officer in India, where I played polo, and hunted, and explored in the Himalayas as well as doing some soldiering. I fought through the First World War and, at its close, I was sent to the Paris Conference as an assistant military attaché. I was shocked and disappointed at what I saw there. During the four years of slaughter on the Western Front, I had believed we were fighting to save civilisation. But at the Paris Peace Conference, I saw selfish politicians laying the groundwork for the Second World War—each country grabbing all it could for itself, creating national antagonisms, and reviving the intrigues of secret diplomacy.
I was sick of war, sick of the army, sick of society. For the first time in my career, I spent sleepless nights, worrying about what I should do with my life. Lloyd George urged me to go in for politics. I was considering taking his advice when a strange thing happened, a strange thing that shaped and determined my life for the next seven years. It all came from a conversation that lasted less than two hundred seconds—a conversation with “Ted” Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, the most colourful and romantic figure produced by the First World War. He had lived in the desert with the Arabs and he advised me to do the same thing. At first, it sounded fantastic.
However, I was determined to leave the army, and I had to do something. Civilian employers did not want to hire men like me—ex-officers of the regular army—especially when the labour market was jammed with millions of unemployed. So I did as Lawrence suggested: I went to live with the Arabs. I am glad I did so. They taught me how to conquer worry. Like all faithful Moslems, they are fatalists. They believe that every word Mohammed wrote in the Koran is the divine revelation of Allah. So when the Koran says: “God created you and all your actions,” they accept it literally. That is why they take life so calmly and never hurry or get into unnecessary tempers when things go wrong. They know that what is ordained is ordained; and no one but God can alter anything. However, that doesn’t mean that in the face of disaster, they sit down and do nothing. To illustrate, let me tell you of a fierce, burning windstorm of the sirocco which I experienced when I was living in the Sahara. It howled and screamed for three days and nights. It was so strong, so fierce, that it blew sand from the Sahara hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean and sprinkled it over the Rhone Valley in France. The wind was so hot I felt as if the hair was being scorched off my head. My throat was parched. My eyes burned. My teeth were full of grit. I felt as if I were standing in front of a furnace in a glass factory. I was driven as near crazy as a man can be and retain his sanity. But the Arabs didn’t complain.
They shrugged their shoulders and said: “Mektoub!” … “It is written.”
But immediately after the storm was over, they sprang into action: they slaughtered all the lambs because they knew they would die anyway; and by slaughtering them at once, they hoped to save the mother sheep. After the lambs were slaughtered, the flocks were driven southward to water. This was all done calmly, without worry or complaining or mourning over their losses. The tribal chief said: “It is not too bad. We might have lost everything. But praise God, we have forty per cent of our sheep left to make a new start.”
I remember another occasion, when we were motoring across the desert and a tyre blew out. The chauffeur had forgotten to mend the spare tyre. So there we were with only three tyres. I fussed and fumed and got excited and asked the Arabs what we were going to do. They reminded me that getting excited wouldn’t help, that it only made one hotter. The blown-out tyre, they said, was the will of Allah and nothing could be done about it. So we started on, crawling along on the rim of a wheel. Presently the car spluttered and stopped. We were out of petrol 1 The chief merely remarked: “Mektoub!” and, there again, instead of shouting at the driver because he had not taken on enough petrol, everyone remained calm and we walked to our destination, singing as we went.
The seven years I spent with the Arabs convinced me that the neurotics, the insane, the drunks of America and Europe are the product of the hurried and harassed lives we live in our so-called civilisation.
As long as I lived in the Sahara, I had no worries. I found there, in the Garden of Allah, the serene contentment and physical well-being that so many of us are seeking with tenseness and despair.
Many people scoff at fatalism. Maybe they are right. Who knows? But all of us must be able to see how our fates are often determined for us. For example, if I had not spoken to Lawrence of Arabia at three minutes past noon on a hot August day in 1919, all the years that have elapsed since then would have been completely different. Looking back over my life, I can see how it has been shaped and moulded time and again by events far beyond my control. The Arabs call it mektoub, kismet—the will of Allah. Call it anything you wish. It does strange things to you. I only know that today—seventeen years after leaving the Sahara—I still maintain that happy resignation to the inevitable which I learned from the Arabs. That philosophy has done more to settle my nerves than a thousand sedatives could have achieved.
You and I are not Mohammedans: we don’t want to be fatalists. But when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives—and we cannot prevent them—let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.
Five Methods I Use To Banish Worry
Professor William Lyon Phelps
1. When I was twenty-four years old, my eyes suddenly gave out. After reading three or four minutes, my eyes felt as if they were full of needles; and even when I was not reading, they were so sensitive that I could not face a window. I consulted the best occultists in New Haven and New York. Nothing seemed to help me. After four o’clock in the afternoon, I simply sat in a chair in the darkest corner of the room, waiting for bedtime. I was terrified. I feared that I would have to give up my career as a teacher and go out West and get a job as a lumberjack. Then a strange thing happened which shows the miraculous effects of the mind over physical ailments. When my eyes were at their worst that unhappy winter, I accepted an invitation to address a group of undergraduates.
The hall was illuminated by huge rings of gas jets suspended from the ceiling. The lights pained my eyes so intensely that, while sitting on the platform, I was compelled to look at the floor. Yet during my thirty-minute speech, I felt absolutely no pain, and I could look directly at these lights without any blinking whatever. Then when the assembly was over, my eyes pained me again. I thought then that if I could keep my mind strongly concentrated on something, not for thirty minutes, but for a week, I might be cured. For clearly it was a case of mental excitement triumphing over a bodily illness.
I had a similar experience later while crossing the ocean. I had an attack of lumbago so severe that I could not walk. I suffered extreme pain when I tried to stand up straight. While in that condition, I was invited to give a lecture on shipboard. As soon as I began to speak, every trace of pain and stiffness left my body; I stood up straight, moved about with perfect flexibility, and spoke for an hour. When the lecture was over, I walked away to my stateroom with ease. For a moment, I thought I was cured. But the cure was only temporary. The lumbago resumed its attack.
These experiences demonstrated to me the vital importance of one’s mental attitude. They taught me the importance of enjoying life while you may. So I live every day now as if it were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going to see. I am excited about the daily adventure of living, and nobody in a state of excitement will be unduly troubled with worries. I love my daily work as a teacher. I wrote a book entitled The Excitement of Teaching. Teaching has always been more than an art or an occupation to me. It is a passion. I love to teach as a painter loves to paint or a singer loves to sing. Before I get out of bed in the morning, I think with ardent delight of my first group of students. I have always felt that one of the chief reasons for success in life is enthusiasm.
2. I have found that I can crowd worry out of mind by reading an absorbing book. When I was fifty-nine, I had a prolonged nervous breakdown. During that period I began reading David Alec Wilson’s monumental Life of Carlyle. It had a good deal to do with my convalescence because I became so absorbed in reading it that I forgot my despondency.
3. At another time when I was terribly depressed, I forced myself to become physically active almost every hour of the day. I played five or six sets of violent games of tennis every morning, then took a bath, had lunch, and played eighteen holes of golf every afternoon. On Friday night I danced until one o’clock in the morning. I am a great believer in working up a tremendous sweat. I found that depression and worry oozed out of my system with the sweat.
4. I learned long ago to avoid the folly of hurry, rush, and working under tension. I have always tried to apply the philosophy of Wilbur Cross. When he was Governor of Connecticut, he said to me: “Sometimes when I have too many things to do all at once, I sit down and relax and smoke my pipe for an hour and do nothing.”
5. I have also learned that patience and time have a way of resolving our troubles. When I am worried about something, I try to see my troubles in their proper perspective. I say to myself: “Two months from now I shall not be worrying about this bad break, so why worry about it now? Why not assume now the same attitude that I will have two months from now?”
To sum up, here are the five ways in which Professor Phelps banished worry:
1. Live with gusto and enthusiasm: “I live every day as if it were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going to see.”
2. Read an interesting book: “When I had a prolonged nervous breakdown … I began reading … the Life of Carlyle … and became so absorbed in reading it that I forgot my despondency.”
3. Play games: “When I was terribly depressed, I forced myself to become physically active almost every hour of the day.”
4. Relax while you work: “I long ago learned to avoid the folly of hurry, rush, and working under tension.”
5. “I try to see my troubles in their proper perspective. I say to myself: ‘Two months from now I shall not be worrying about this bad break, so why worry about it now? Why not assume now the same attitude that I will have two months from now?”

I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today
Dorothy Dix

I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: “I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.”
I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength. As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions—a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time.
Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all I have gone through. For I have lived. They only existed. I have drank the cup of life down to its very dregs. They have only sipped the bubbles on top of it. I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.
I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me. Little annoyances no longer have the power to affect me. After you have seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the doilies under the finger bowls, or the cook spills the soup. I have learned not to expect too much of people, and so I can still get happiness out of the friend who isn’t quite true to me or the acquaintance who gossips. Above all, I have acquired a sense of humour, because there were so many things over which I had either to cry or laugh. And when a woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever hurt her much again. I do not regret the hardships I have known, because through them I have touched life at every point I have lived. And it was worth the price I had to pay.

I Did Mot Expect To Live To See The Dawn
J.C. Penney

[In April 14, 1902, a young man with five hundred dollars in cash and a million dollars in determination opened a dry–goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming—a little mining town of a thousand people, situated on the old covered-wagon trail laid out by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. That young man and his wife lived in a half-storey attic above the store, using a large empty dry-goods box for a table and smaller boxes for chairs. The young wife wrapped her baby in a blanket and let it sleep under a counter while she stood beside it, helping her husband wait on customers. Today the largest chain of dry-goods stores in the world bears that man’s name: the J.C. Penney stores—over sixteen hundred of them covering every state in the Union. I recently had dinner with Mr. Penney, and he told me about the most dramatic moment of his life.]
Years ago, I passed through a most trying experience. I was worried and desperate. My worries were not connected in any way whatever with the J. C. Penney Company. That business was solid and thriving; but I personally had made some unwise commitments prior to the crash of 1929. Like many other men, I was blamed for conditions for which I was in no way responsible. I was so harassed with worries that I couldn’t sleep, and developed an extremely painful ailment known as shingles—a red rash and skin eruptions. I consulted a physician—a man with whom I had gone to high school as a boy in Hamilton, Missouri: Dr. Elmer Eggleston, a staff physician at the Kellogg Sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Dr. Eggleston put me to bed and warned me that I was a very ill man. A rigid treatment was prescribed. But nothing helped. I got weaker day by day. I was broken nervously and physically, filled with despair, unable to see even a ray of hope. I had nothing to live for. I felt I hadn’t a friend left in the world, that even my family had turned against me. One night, Dr, Eggleston gave me a sedative, but the effect soon wore off and I awoke with an overwhelming conviction that this was my last night of life. Getting out of bed, I wrote farewell letters to my wife and to my son, saying that I did not expect to live to see the dawn.
When I awoke the next morning, I was surprised to find that I was still alive. Going downstairs, I heard singing in a little chapel where devotional exercises were held each morning. I can still remember the hymn they were singing: “God will take care of you.” Going into the chapel, I listened with a weary heart to the singing, the reading of the Scripture lesson, and the prayer. Suddenly something happened. I can’t explain it. I can only call it a miracle. I felt as if I had been instantly lifted out of the darkness of a dungeon into warm, brilliant sunlight. I felt as if I had been transported from hell to paradise. I felt the power of God as I had never felt it before. I realised then that I alone was responsible for all my troubles. I knew that God with His love was there to help me. From that day to this, my life has been free from worry. I am seventy-one years old, and the most dramatic and glorious twenty minutes of my life were those I spent in that chapel that morning: “God will take care of you.”
J.C. Penney learned to overcome worry almost instantaneously, because he discovered the one perfect cure.

I Go To The Gym To Punch The Bag Or Take A Hike Outdoors
Colonel Eddie Eagan
Attorney, Rhodes Scholar Chairman, Athletic Commission

When I find myself worrying and mentally going round in endless circles like a camel turning a water wheel in Egypt, a good physical work-out helps me to chase those “blues” away. It may be running or a long hike in the country, or it may be a half-hour of bag punching or squash tennis at the gymnasium. Whichever it is, physical exercise clears my mental outlook. On a week-end I do a lot of physical sport, such as a run around the golf course, a game of paddle tennis, or a ski week-end in the Adirondacks. By my becoming physically tired, my mind gets a rest from legal problems, so that when I return to them, my mind has a new zest and power.
Quite often in New York, where I work, there is a chance for me to spend an hour at the Yale Club gym. No man can worry while he is playing squash tennis or skiing. He is too busy to worry. The large mental mountains of trouble become minute molehills that new thoughts and acts quickly smooth down.
I find the best antidote for worry is exercise. Use your muscles more and your brain less when you are worried, and you will be surprised at the result. It works that way with me—worry goes when exercise begins.

I Was “The Worrying Wreck From Virginia Tech.”
Jim Birdsall
Plant Superintendent C.F. Muller Company 180
Baldwin Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey

Seventeen years ago, when I was in military college at Blacks-burg, Virginia, I was known as “the worrying wreck from Virginia Tech”. I worried so violently that I often became ill. In fact, I was ill so often that I had a regular bed reserved for me at the college infirmary at all times. When the nurse saw me coming, she would run and give me a hypo. I worried about everything. Sometimes I even forgot what I was worrying about. I worried for fear I would be busted out of college because of my low grades. I had failed to pass my examinations in physics and other subjects, too. I knew I had to maintain an average grade of 75-84. I worried about my health, about my excruciating attacks of acute indigestion, about my insomnia. I worried about financial matters. I felt badly because I couldn’t buy my girl candy or take her to dances as often as I wanted to. I worried for fear she would marry one of the other cadets. I was in a lather day and night over a dozen intangible problems. In desperation, I poured out my troubles to Professor Duke Baird, professor of business administration at V.P.I.
The fifteen minutes that I spent with Professor Baird did more for my health and happiness than all the rest of the four years I spent in college. “Jim,” he said, “you ought to sit down and face the facts. If you devoted half as much time and energy to solving your problems as you do to worrying about them, you wouldn’t have any worries. Worrying is just a vicious habit you have learned.” He gave me three rules to break the worry habit:
Rule 1. Find out precisely what is the problem you are worrying about.
Rule 2. Find out the cause of the problem.
Rule 3. Do something constructive at once about solving the problem.
After that interview, I did a bit of constructive planning. Instead of worrying because I had failed to pass physics, I now asked myself why I had failed. I knew it wasn’t because I was dumb, for I was editor-in-chief of The Virginia Tech Engineer.
I figured that I had failed physics because I had no interest in the subject. I had not applied myself because I couldn’t see how it would help me in my work as an industrial engineer. But now I changed my attitude. I said to myself: “If the college authorities demand that I pass my physics examination before I obtain a degree, who am I to question their wisdom?”
So I enrolled for physics again. This time I passed because instead of wasting my time in resentment and worrying about how hard it was, I studied diligently.
I solved my financial worries by taking on some additional jobs, such as selling punch at the college dances, and by borrowing money from my father, which I paid back soon after graduation.
I solved my love worries by proposing to the girl that I feared might marry another cadet. She is now Mrs. Jim Birdsall.
As I look back at it now, I can see that my problem was one of confusion, a disinclination to find the causes of my worry and face them realistically.
Jim Birdsall learned to stop worrying because he ANALYSED his troubles. In fact, he used the very principles described in the chapter How to Analyse and Solve Worry Problems.

I Have Lived By This Sentence
Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo
President, New Brunswick Theological Seminary

Years ago, in a day of uncertainty and disillusionment, when my whole life seemed to be overwhelmed by forces beyond my control, one morning quite casually I opened my New Testament and my eyes fell upon this sentence: “He that sent me is with me—the Father hath not left me alone.” My life has never been the same since that hour. Everything for me has been for ever different after that. I suppose that not a day has passed that I have not repeated it to myself. Many have come to me for counseling during these years, and I have always sent them away with this sustaining sentence. Ever since that hour when my eyes fell upon it, I have lived by this sentence. I have walked with it and I have found in it my peace and strength. To me it is the very essence of religion. It lies at the rock bottom of everything that makes life worth living. It is the Golden Text of my life.

I Hit Bottom And Survived
Ted Ericksen
16,237 South Cornuta Avenue, Bellflower, California

I used to be a terrible “worry wart”. But no more. In the summer of 1942, I had an experience that banished worry from my life—for all time; I hope. That experience made every other trouble seem small by comparison.
For years I had wanted to spend a summer on a commercial fishing craft in Alaska, so in 1942 I signed on a thirty-two-foot salmon seining vessel out of Kodiak, Alaska. On a craft of this size, there is a crew of only three: the skipper who does the supervising, a No. 2 man who assists the skipper, and a general work horse, who is usually a Scandinavian. I am a Scandinavian.
Since salmon seining has to be done with the tides, I often worked twenty hours out of twenty-four. I kept up that schedule for a week at a time. I did everything that nobody else wanted to do. I washed the craft. I put away the gear. I cooked on a little wood—burning stove in a small cabin where the heat and fumes of the motor almost made me ill. I washed the dishes. I repaired the boat. I pitched the salmon from our boat into a tender that took the fish to a cannery. My feet were always wet in rubber boots. My boots were often filled with water. But all that was play compared to my main job, which was pulling what is called the “cork line”. I did all this for weeks. I ached all over for months.
When I finally did have a chance to rest, I slept on a damp lumpy mattress piled on top of the provisions locker. I would put one of the lumps in the mattress under the part of my back that hurt most-and sleep as if I had been dragged. I was drugged by complete exhaustion.
I am glad now that I had to endure all that aching and exhaustion because it has helped me stop worrying. Whenever I am confronted by a problem now–instead of worrying about it, I say to myself: “Ericksen, could this possibly be as bad as pulling the cork line?” And Ericksen invariably answers: “No, nothing could be that bad!” So I cheer up and tackle it with courage. I believe it is a good thing to have to endure an agonising experience occasionally. It is good to know that we have hit bottom and survived. That makes all our daily problems seem easy by comparison.

I Used To Be One Of The World’s Biggest Jackasses
Percy H. Whiting
Managing Director, Dale Carnegie and Company, New York

I have died more times from more different diseases than any other man, living, dead, or half dead.
I was no ordinary hypochondriac. My father owned a drug-store, and I was practically brought up in it. I talked to doctors and nurses every day, so I knew the names and symptoms of more and worse diseases than the average layman. I was no ordinary hypo—I had symptoms! I could worry for an hour or two over a disease and then have practically all the symptoms of a man who was suffering from it. I recall once that, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the town in which I lived, we had a rather severe diphtheria epidemic. In my father’s drug-store, I had been selling medicines day after day to people who came from infected homes. Then the evil that I feared came upon me: I had diphtheria myself. I was positive I had it. I went to bed and worried myself into the standard symptoms. I sent for a doctor. He looked me over and said: “Yes, Percy, you’ve got it.” That relieved my mind. I was never afraid of any disease when I had it—so I turned over and went to sleep. The next morning I was in perfect health.
For years I distinguished myself and got a lot of attention and sympathy by specialising in unusual and fantastic disease—I died several times of both lockjaw and hydrophobia. Later on, I settled down to having the run-of-mill ailments—specialising on cancer and tuberculosis.
I can laugh about it now, but it was tragic then. I honestly and literally feared for years that I was walking on the edge of the grave. When it came time to buy a suit of clothes in the spring, I would ask myself: “Should I waste this money when I know I can’t possibly live to wear this suit out?”
However, I am happy to report progress: in the past ten years, I haven’t died even once.
How did I stop dying? By kidding myself out of my ridiculous imaginings. Every time I felt the dreadful symptoms coming on, I laughed at myself and said: “See here, Whiting, you have been dying from one fatal disease after another now for twenty years, yet you are in first-class health today. An insurance company recently accepted you for more insurance. Isn’t it about time, Whiting, that you stood aside and had a good laugh at the worrying jackass you are?”
I soon found that I couldn’t worry about myself and laugh at myself at one and the same time. So I’ve been laughing at myself ever since.
The point of this is: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Try “just laughing” at some of your sillier worries, and see if you can’t laugh them out of existence.

I Have Always Tried To Keep My Line Of Supplies ‘Open’
Gene Autry
The world’s most famous and beloved singing cowboy

I figure that most worries are about family troubles and money. I was fortunate in marrying a small-town Oklahoma girl who had the same background I had and enjoyed the same things. We both try to follow the golden rule, so we have kept our family troubles to a minimum.
I have kept my financial worries to a minimum also by doing two things. First, I have always followed a rule of absolute one hundred per cent integrity in everything. When I borrowed money, I paid back every penny. Few things cause more worry than dishonesty.
Second, when I started a new venture, I always kept on ace in the hole. Military experts say that the first principle of war is to keep your line of supplies open. I figure that it principle to personal battles as well. As a lad down in Texas and Oklahoma, I saw some real poverty during the droughts. We were so poor that my father used to drive across the country to drive horse wagons to make a living. I wanted something more reliable than that. So I got a job working for a railway-station agent and learned telegraphy in my spare time. Later, I got a job working as relief operator for the Frisco Railway. That job paid $150 per month. Later, when I started out to better myself, I always figured that railroad job meant economic safety. So I always kept the road open back to that job. It was my line of supplies, and I never cut myself off from it until I was firmly established in a new and better position.
In 1928, when I was working as a relief operator for the Frisco Railway in Chelsea, .Oklahoma, a stranger drifted in one evening to send a telegram. He heard me playing the guitar and singing cowboy songs and told me I was good—told me that I ought to go to New York and get a job on the stage or radio. Naturally, I was flattered; and when I saw the name he signed to his telegram, I was almost breathless: Will Rogers.
Instead of rushing off to New York at once, I thought the matter over carefully for nine months and conclude that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going to New York and giving the old town a whirl. I had a railroad pass: I could travel free. I could sleep sitting up in my seat, and I could carry some sandwiches and fruit for my meals.
When I reached New York, I slept in a furnished room for five dollars a week, ate at the Automat, and tramped the streets for ten weeks—and got nowhere. I would have been worried sick if I hadn’t had a job to go back to. I had already worked for the railway five years. That meant I had seniority rights; but in order to protect those rights, I couldn’t lay off longer than ninety days. By this time, I had already been in New York seventy days, so I rushed back to Oklahoma on my pass and began working again to protect my line of supply. I worked for a few months, saved money, and returned to New York for another try. This time I got a break. One day, while waiting for an interview in a recording-studio office, I played my guitar and sang a song to the girl receptionist: “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time”. While I was singing that song, the man who wrote it—Nat Schildkraut—drifted into the office. Naturally, he was pleased to hear anyone singing his song. So he gave me a note of introduction and sent me down to the Victor Recording Company. I made a record. I was no good—too stiff and self-conscious. So I took the advice of the Victor Recording man: I went back to Tulsa, worked for the railway by day, and at night I sang cowboy songs on a sustaining radio programme. I liked that arrangement. It meant that I was keeping my line of supplies open—so I had no worries. I sang for nine months on radio station KVOO in Tulsa. During that time, Jimmy Long and I wrote a song entitled “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine”. It caught on. Arthur Sattherly, head of the American Recording Company, asked me to make a recording. It clicked. I made a number of other recordings for fifty dollars each, and finally got a job singing cowboy songs over radio station WLS in Chicago. Salary: forty dollars a week. After singing there four years, my salary was raised to ninety dollars a week, and I picked up another three hundred dollars doing personal appearances every night in theatres.
Then in 1934, I got a break that opened up enormous possibilities. The League of Decency was formed to clean up the movies. So Hollywood producers decided to put on cowboy pictures; but they wanted a new kind of cowboy—one who could sing. The man who owned the American Recording Company was also part owner of Republic Pictures. “If you want a singing cowboy,” he said to his associates, “I have got one making records for us.” That is how I broke into the movies. I started making singing-cowboy pictures for one hundred dollars a week. I had serious doubts about whether I would succeed in pictures, but I didn’t worry. I knew I could always go back to my old job.
My success in pictures exceeded my wildest expectations. I now get a salary of one hundred thousand a year plus one half of all the profits on my pictures. However, I realise that this arrangement won’t go on for ever. But I am not worried. I know that no matter what happens—even if I lose every dollar I have—I can always go back to Oklahoma and get a job working for the Frisco Railway. I have protected my line of supplies.

I Heard A Voice In India
E. Stanley Jones
One of America’s most dynamic speakers and the most famous missionary of his generation.

I have devoted forty years of my life to missionary work in India. At first, I found it difficult to endure the terrible heat plus the nervous strain of the great task that stretched before me. At the end of eight years, I was suffering so severely from brain fatigue and nervous exhaustion that I collapsed, not once but several times. I was ordered to take a year’s furlough in America. On the boat returning to America, I collapsed again while speaking at a Sunday-morning service on the ship, and the ship’s doctor put me to bed for the remainder of the trip.
After a year’s rest in America, I started back to India, but stopped on the way to hold evangelistic meetings among the university students in Manila. In the midst of the strain of these meetings, I collapsed several times. Physicians warned me that if I returned to India, I would die. In spite of their warnings, I continued on to India, but I went with a deepening cloud upon me. When I arrived in Bombay, I was so broken that I went straight to the hills and rested for several months. Then I returned to the plains to continue my work. It was no use. I collapsed and was forced to return to the hills for another long rest. Again I descended to the plains, and again I was shocked and crushed to discover that I couldn’t take it. I was exhausted mentally, nervously, and physically. I was completely at the end of my resources. I feared that I would be a physical wreck for the balance of my life.
If I didn’t get help from somewhere, I realised that I would have to give up my missionary career, go back to America, and work on a farm to try to regain my health. It was one of my darkest hours. At that time I was holding a series of meetings in Lucknow. While praying one night, an event happened that completely transformed my life. While in prayer—and I was not particularly thinking about myself at the time—a voice seemed to say: “Are you yourself ready for this work to which I have called you?”
I replied: “No, Lord, I am done for. I have reached the end of my resources.”
The Voice replied “If you will turn that over to Me and not worry about it, I will take care of it.”
I quickly answered: “Lord, I close the bargain right here.”
A great peace settled into my heart and pervaded my whole being. I knew it was done! Life—abundant life—had taken possession of me. I was so lifted up that I scarcely touched the road as I quietly walked home that night. Every inch was holy ground. For days after that I hardly knew I had a body. I went through the days, working all day and far into the night, and came down to bedtime wondering why in the world I should ever go to bed at all, for there was not the slightest trace of tiredness of any kind. I seemed possessed by life and peace and rest—by Christ Himself.
The question came as to whether I should tell this. I shrank from it, but I felt I should—and did. After that it was sink or swim before everybody. More than a score of the most strenuous years of my life have gone by since then, but the old trouble has never returned. I have never had such health. But it was more than a physical touch. I seemed to have tapped new life for body, mind, and spirit. After that experience, life for me functioned on a permanently higher level. And I had done nothing but take it! During the many years that have gone by since then, I have travelled all over the world, frequently lecturing three times a day, and have found time and strength to write The Christ of the Indian Road and eleven other books. Yet in the midst of all this, I have never missed, or even been late to, an appointment. The worries that once beset me have long since vanished, and now, in my sixty-third year, I am overflowing with abounding vitality and the joy of serving and living for others.
I suppose that the physical and mental transformation that I have experienced could be picked to pieces psychologically and explained. It does not matter. Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.
This one thing I know: my life was completely transformed and uplifted that night in Lucknow, thirty-one years ago, when at the depth of my weakness and depression, a voice said to me: “If you will turn that over to Me and not worry about it, I will take care of it,” and I replied: “Lord, I close the bargain right here.”

When The Sheriff Came In My Front Door
Homer Croy
Novelist, 150 Pinehurst Avenue, New York

The bitterest moment of my life occurred one day in 1933 when the sheriff came in the front door and I went out the back. I had lost my home at 10 Standish Road, Forest Hills, Long Island, where my children were born and where I and my family had lived for eighteen years. I had never dreamed that this could happen to me. Twelve years before, I thought I was sitting on top of the world. I had sold the motion-picture rights to my novel West of the Water Tower for a top Hollywood price. I lived abroad with my family for two years. We summered in Switzerland and wintered on the French Riviera—just like the idle rich.
I spent six months in Paris and wrote a novel entitled They Had to See Paris. Will Rogers appeared in the screen version. It was his first talking picture. I had tempting offers to remain in Hollywood and write several of Will Rogers’ pictures. But I didn’t. I returned to New York. And my troubles began! It slowly dawned on me that I had great dormant abilities that I had never developed. I began to fancy myself a shrewd business man. Somebody told me that John Jacob Astor had made millions investing in vacant land in New York. Who was Astor? Just an immigrant peddler with an accent. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? … I was going to be rich! I began to read the yachting magazines.
I had the courage of ignorance. I didn’t know any more about buying and selling real estate than an Eskimo knows about oil furnaces. How was I to get the money to launch myself on my spectacular financial career? That was simple. I mortgaged my home, and bought some of the finest building lots in Forest Hills. I was going to hold this land until it reached a fabulous price, then sell it and live in luxury—I who had never sold a piece of real estate as big as a doll’s handkerchief. I pitied the plodders who slaved in offices for a mere salary. I told myself that God had not seen fit to touch every man with the divine fire of financial genius.
Suddenly, the great depression swept down upon me like a Kansas cyclone and shook me as a tornado would shake a hen coop.
I had to pour $220 a month into that monster-mouthed piece of Good Earth. Oh, how fast those months came! In addition, I had to keep up the payments on our now-mortgaged house and find enough food. I was worried. I tried to write humour for the magazines. My attempts at humour sounded like the lamentations of Jeremiah! I was unable to sell anything. The novel I wrote failed. I ran out of money. I had nothing on which I could borrow money except my typewriter and the gold fillings in my teeth. The milk company stopped delivering milk. The gas company turned off the gas. We had to buy one of those little outdoor camp stoves you see advertised; it had a cylinder of gasoline; you pump it up by hand and it shoots out a flame with a hissing like an angry goose.
We ran out of coal; the company sued us. Our only heat was the fireplace. I would go out at night and pick up boards and left-overs from the new homes that the rich people were building … I who had started out to be one of these rich people. I was so worried I couldn’t sleep. I often got up in the middle of the night and walked for hours to exhaust myself so I could fall asleep.
I lost not only the vacant land I had bought, but all my heart’s blood that I had poured into it.
The bank closed the mortgage on my home and put me and my family out on the street. In some way, we managed to get hold of a few dollars and rent a small apartment. We moved in the last day of 1933. I sat down on a packing case and looked around. An old saying of my mother’s came back: “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” But this wasn’t milk. This was my heart’s blood!
After I had sat there a while I said to myself: “Well, I’ve hit bottom and I’ve stood it. There’s no place to go now but up.”
I began to think of the fine things that the mortgage had not taken from me. I still had my health and my friends. I would start again. I would not grieve about the past. I would repeat to myself every day the words I had often heard my mother say about spilt milk.
I put into my work the energy that I had been putting into worrying. Little by little, my situation began to improve. I am almost thankful now that I had to go through all that misery; it gave me strength, fortitude, and confidence. I know now what it means to hit bottom. I know it doesn’t kill you. I know we can stand more than we think we can. When little worries and anxieties and uncertainties try to disturb me now, I banish them by reminding myself of the time I sat on the packing case and said: “I’ve hit bottom and I’ve stood it. There is no place to go now but up.”
What’s the principle here? Don’t try to saw sawdust. Accept the inevitable! If you can’t go lower, yon can try going up.

The Toughest Opponent I Ever Fought Was Worry
By Jack Dempsey

During my career in the ring, I found that ‘Old Man Worry’ was an almost tougher opponent than the heavyweight boxers I fought. I realised that I had to learn to stop worrying, or worry would sap my vitality and undermine my success. So, little by little, I worked out a system for myself. Here are some of the things I did:
1. To keep up my courage in the ring, I would give myself a pep talk during the fight. For example, while I was fighting Firpo, I kept saying over and over: “Nothing is going to stop me. He is not going to hurt me. I won’t feel his blows. I can’t get hurt. I am going to keep going, no matter what happens.” Making positive statements like that to myself, and thinking positive thoughts, helped me a lot. It even kept my mind so occupied that I didn’t feel the blows. During my career, I have had my lips smashed, my eyes cut, my ribs cracked—and Firpo knocked me clear through the ropes, and I landed on a reporter’s typewriter and wrecked it. But I never felt even one of Firpo’s blows. There was only one blow that I ever really felt. That was the night Lester Johnson broke three of my ribs. The punch never hurt me; but it affected my breathing. I can honestly say I never felt any other blow I ever got in the ring.
2. Another thing I did was to keep reminding myself of the futility of worry. Most of my worrying was done before the big bouts, while I was going through training. I would often lie awake at nights for hours, tossing and worrying, unable to sleep. I would worry for fear I might break my hand or sprain my ankle or get my eye cut badly in the first round so I couldn’t co–ordinate my punches. When I got myself into this state of nerves, I used to get out of bed, look into the mirror, and give myself a good talking to. I would say: “What a fool you are to be worrying about something than hasn’t happened and may never happen. Life is short. I have only a few years to live, so I must enjoy life.” I kept saying to myself: “Nothing is important but my health. Nothing is important but my health.” I kept reminding myself that losing sleep and worrying would destroy my health. I found that by saying these things to myself over and over, night after night, year after year, they finally got under my skin, and I could brush off my worries like so much water.
3. The third—and the best—thing I did was pray! While I was training for a bout, I always prayed several times a day. When I was in the ring, I always prayed just before the bell sounded for each round. That helped me fight with courage and confidence. I have never gone to bed in my life without saying a prayer; and I have never eaten a meal in my life without first thanking God for it … Have my prayers been answered? Thousands of times!

I Prayed To God To Keep Me Out Of An Orphan’s Home
Kathleen Halter
Housewife, 1074 Roth, University City 14, Missouri

As a child, my life was filled with horror. My mother had heart trouble. Day after day, I saw her faint and fall to the floor. We all feared she was going to die, and I believed that all little girls whose mothers died were sent to the Central Wesleyan Orphans’ Home, located in the little town of Warrenton, Missouri, where we lived. I dreaded the thought of going there, and when I was six years old I prayed constantly: “Dear God, please let my mummy live until I am old enough not to go to the orphans’ home.”
Twenty years later, my brother, Meiner, had a terrible injury and suffered intense pain until he died two years later. He couldn’t feed himself or turn over in bed. We had to give him morphine hypodermics every three hours, day and night. I did this for two years. I was teaching music at the time. When the neighbours heard my brother screaming with pain, they would telephone me at college and I would leave my music class and rush home to give my brother another injection of morphine. I remember that on winter nights I would keep a bottle of milk outside the window, where it would freeze and turn into a kind of ice-cream that I loved to eat. When the alarm went off, this ice cream outside the window gave me an additional incentive to get up.
In the midst of all these troubles, I did two things that kept me from indulging in self-pity and worrying and embittering my life with resentment. First, I kept myself busy teaching music from twelve to fourteen hours a day, so I had little time to think of my troubles; and when I was tempted to feel sorry for myself, I kept saying to myself over and over: “Now, listen, as long as you can walk and feed yourself and are free from intense pain, you ought to be the happiest person in the world. No matter what happens, never forget that as long as you live! Never! Never!”
I was determined to do everything in my power to cultivate an unconscious and continuous attitude of gratefulness for my many blessings. Every morning when I awoke, I would thank God that conditions were no worse than they were; and I resolved that in spite of my troubles I would be the happiest person in Warrenton, Missouri. Maybe I didn’t succeed in achieving that goal, but I did succeed in making myself the most grateful young woman in my town—and probably few of my associates worried less than I did.
This Missouri music teacher applied two principles described in this book: she kept too busy to worry, and she counted her blessings. The same technique may be helpful to you.

I Was Acting Like An Hysterical Woman
Cameron Shipp
Magazine Writer

I had been working very happily in the publicity department of the Warner Brothers studio in California for several years. I was a unit man and feature writer. I wrote stories for newspapers and magazines about Warner Brother stars.
Suddenly, I was promoted. I was made the assistant publicity director. As a matter of fact, there was a change of administrative policy, and I was given an impressive title: Administrative Assistant. This gave me an enormous office with a private refrigerator, two secretaries, and complete charge of a staff of seventy-five writers, exploiters, and radio men. I was enormously impressed. I went straight out and bought a new suit. I tried to speak with dignity. I set up filing systems, made decisions with authority, and ate quick lunches.
I was convinced that the whole public-relations policy of Warner Brothers had descended upon my shoulders. I perceived that the lives, both private and public, of such renowned persons as Bette Davis, Olivia De Havill and, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, and Alan Hale were entirely in my hands.
In less than a month I became aware that I had stomach ulcers. Probably cancer. My chief war activity at that time was chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild. I liked to do this work, liked to meet my friends at guild meetings. But these gatherings became matters of dread. After every meeting, I was violently ill. Often I had to stop my car on the way home, pulling myself together before I could drive on. There seemed to be so much to do, so little time in which to do it. It was all vital. And I was woefully inadequate. I am being perfectly truthful—this was the most painful illness of my entire life. There was always a tight fist in my vitals. I lost weight. I could not sleep. The pain was constant.
So I went to see a renowned expert in internal medicine. An advertising man recommended him. He said this physician had many clients who were advertising men.
This physician spoke only briefly, just enough for me to tell him where I hurt and what I did for a living. He seemed more interested in my job than in my ailments, but I was soon reassured: for two weeks, daily, he gave me every known test. I was probed, explored, X-rayed, and fluoroscoped.
Finally, I was instructed to call on him and hear the verdict.
“Mr. Shipp,” he said, leaning back and offering me a cigarette, “we have been through these exhaustive tests. They were absolutely necessary, although I knew of course after my first quick examination that you did not have stomach ulcers.
“But I knew, because you are the kind of man you are and because you do the kind of work you do, that you would not believe me unless I showed you. Let me show you.”
So he showed me the charts and the X-rays and explained them. He showed me I had no ulcers.
“Now,” said the doctor, “this costs you a good deal of money, but it is worth it to you. Here is the prescription: don’t worry.
“Now—they stopped me as I started to expostulate–” now, I realise that you can’t follow the prescription immediately, so I’ll give you a crutch. Here are some pills. They contain belladonna. Take as many as you like. When you use these up, come back and I’ll give you more. They won’t hurt you. But they will always relax you.
“But remember: you don’t need them. All you have to do is quit worrying.
“If you do start worrying again, you’ll have to come back here and I’ll charge you a heavy fee again. How about it?”
I wish I could report that the lesson took effect that day and that I quit worrying immediately. I didn’t. I took the pills for several weeks, whenever I felt a worry coming on. They worked. I felt better at once.
But I felt silly taking these pills. I am a big man physically. I am almost as tall as Abe Lincoln was and I weigh almost two hundred pounds. Yet here I was taking little white pills to relax myself. I was acting like an hysterical woman. When my friends asked me why I was taking pills, I was ashamed to tell the truth. Gradually I began to laugh at myself. I said: “See here, Cameron Shipp, you are acting like a fool. You are taking yourself and your little activities much, much too seriously. Bette Da vis and James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were world-famous before you started to handle their publicity; and if you dropped dead tonight, Warner Brothers and their stars would manage to get along without you. Look at Eisenhower, General Marshall, MacArthur, Jimmy Doolittle and Admiral King—they are running the war without taking pills. And yet you can’t serve as chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild without taking little white pills to keep your stomach from twisting and turning like a Kansas whirlwind.”
I began to take pride in getting along without the pills. A little while later, I threw the pills down the drain and got home each night in time to take a little nap before dinner and gradually began to lead a normal life. I have never been back to see that physician.
But I owe him much, much more than what seemed like a stiff fee at the time. He taught me to laugh at myself. But I think the really skilful thing he did was to refrain from laughing at me, and to refrain from telling me I had nothing to worry about. He took me seriously. He saved my face. He gave me an out in a small box. But he knew then, as well as I know now, that the cure wasn’t in those silly little pills—the cure was in a change in my mental attitude.

I Learned To Stop Worrying By Watching My Wife Wash Dishes
Reverend William Wood
204 Hurlbert Street, Charlevoix, Michigan

A few years ago, I was suffering intensely from pains in my stomach. I would awaken two or three times each night, unable to sleep because of these terrific pains. I had watched my father die from cancer of the stomach, and I feared that I too had a stomach cancer—or, at least, stomach ulcers. So I went to Byrne’s Clinic at Petosky, Michigan, for an examination. Dr. Lilga, a stomach specialist, examined me with a fluoroscope and took an X-ray of my stomach. He gave me medicine to make me sleep and assured me that I had no stomach ulcers or cancer. My stomach pains, he said, were caused by emotional strains. Since I am a minister, one of his first questions was: “Do you have an old crank on your church board?”
He told me what I already knew; I was trying to do too much. In addition to my preaching every Sunday and carrying the burdens of the various activities of the church, I was also chairman of the Red Cross, president of the Kiwanis. I also conducted two or three funerals each week and a number of other activities.
I was working under constant pressure. I could never relax. I was always tense, hurried, and high-strung. I got to the point where I worried about everything. I was living in a constant dither. I was in such pain that I gladly acted on Dr. Lilga’s advice. I took Monday off each week, and began eliminating various responsibilities and activities.
One day while cleaning out my desk, I got an idea that proved to be immensely helpful. I was looking over an accumulation of old notes on sermons and other memos on matters that were now past and gone. I crumpled them up one by one and tossed them into the wastebasket. Suddenly I stopped and said to myself: “Bill, why don’t you do the same thing with your worries that you are doing with these notes? Why don’t you crumple up your worries about yesterday’s problems and toss them into the wastebasket?” That one idea gave me immediate inspiration—gave me the feeling of a weight being lifted from my shoulders. From that day to this, I have made it a rule to throw into the wastebasket all the problems that I can no longer do anything about.
Then, one day while wiping the dishes as my wife washed them, I got another idea. My wife was singing as she washed the dishes, and I said to myself: “Look, Bill, how happy your wife is. We have been married eighteen years, and she has been washing dishes all that time. Suppose when we got married she had looked ahead and seen all the dishes she would have to wash during those eighteen years that stretched ahead. That pile of dirty dishes would be bigger than a barn. The very thought of it would have appalled any woman.”
Then I said to myself: “The reason my wife doesn’t mind washing the dishes is because she washes only one day’s dishes at a time.” I saw what my trouble was. I was trying to wash today’s dishes, yesterday’s dishes and dishes that weren’t even dirty yet.
I saw how foolishly I was acting. I was standing in the pulpit, Sunday mornings, telling other people how to live, yet, I myself was leading a tense, worried, hurried existence. I felt ashamed of myself. Worries don’t bother me any more now. No more stomach pains. No more insomnia. I now crumple up yesterday’s anxieties and toss them into the wastebasket, and I have ceased trying to wash tomorrow’s dirty dishes today.
Do you remember a statement quoted earlier in this book? “The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter.” … Why even try it?

I Found The Answer-keep Busy!
Del Hughes
Public Accountant, Bay City, Michigan

In 1943 I landed in a. veterans’ hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with three broken ribs and a punctured lung. This had happened during a practice Marine amphibious landing off the Hawaiian Islands. I was getting ready to jump off the barge, on to the beach, when a big breaker swept in, lifted the barge, and threw me off balance and smashed me on the sands. I fell with such force that one of my broken ribs punctured my right lung.
After spending three months in the hospital, I got the biggest shock of my life. The doctors told me that I showed absolutely no improvement. After some serious thinking, I figured that worry was preventing me from getting well. I had been used to a very active life, and during these three months I had been flat on my back twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but think. The more I thought, the more I worried: worried about whether I would ever be able to take my place in the world. I worried about whether I would remain a cripple the rest of my life, and about whether I would ever be able to get married and live a normal life.
I urged my doctor to move me up to the next ward, which was called the “Country Club” because the patients were allowed to do almost anything they cared to do.
In the ward, I became interested in contract bridge and spent six weeks learning the game, and reading Culbertson’s books on bridge. After six weeks, I was playing nearly every evening for the rest of my stay in the hospital. I also became interested in painting with oils, and I studied this art under an instructor every afternoon. Some of my paintings were so good that you could almost tell what they were! I also tried my hand at soap and wood carving, and read a number of books on the subject and found it fascinating. I kept myself so busy that I had no time to worry about my physical condition. I even found time to read books on psychology given to me by the Red Cross. At the end of three months, the entire medical staff came to me and congratulated me on “making an amazing improvement”. Those were the sweetest words I had ever heard since the days I was born. I wanted to shout with joy.
The point I am trying to make is this: when I had nothing to do but lie on the flat of my back and worry about my future, I made no improvement whatever. I was poisoning my body with worry. Even the broken ribs couldn’t heal. But as soon as I got my mind off myself by playing contract bridge, painting oil pictures, and carving wood, the doctors declared I made “an amazing improvement”.
I am now leading a normal healthy life, and my lungs are as good as yours.
Remember what George Bernard Shaw said? “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.” Keep active, keep busy!

Time Solves A Lot Of Things
Louis T. Montant, Jr.
Market Analyst 114 West 64th Street, New York

Worry caused me to lose ten years of my life. Those ten years should have been the most fruitful and richest years of any young man’s life—the years from eighteen to twenty-eight.
I realise now that losing those years was no one’s fault but my own. I worried about everything: my job, my health, my family, and my feeling of inferiority. I was so frightened that I used to cross the street to avoid meeting people I knew. When I met a friend on the street, I would often pretend not to notice him, because I was afraid of being snubbed.
I was so afraid of meeting strangers—so terrified in their presence—that in one space of two weeks I lost out on three different jobs simply because I didn’t have the courage to tell those three different prospective employers what I knew I could do.
Then one day eight years ago, I conquered worry in one afternoon—and have rarely worried since then. That afternoon I was in the office of a man who had had far more troubles than I had ever faced, yet he was one of the most cheerful men I had ever known. He had made a fortune in 1929, and lost every cent. He had made another fortune in 1933, and lost that; and another fortune in 1937, and lost that, too. He had gone through bankruptcy and had been hounded by enemies and creditors. Troubles that would have broken some men and driven them to suicide rolled off him like water off a duck’s back. As I sat in his office that day eight years ago, I envied him and wished that God had made me like him.
As we were talking, he tossed a letter to me that he had received that morning and said: “Read that.” It was an angry letter, raising several embarrassing questions. If I had received such a letter, it would have sent me into a tailspin. I said: “Bill, how are you going to answer it?”
“Well,” Bill said, “I’ll tell you a little secret. Next time you’ve really got something to worry about, take a pencil and a piece of paper, and sit down and write out in detail just what’s worrying you. Then put that piece of paper in the lower right-hand drawer of your desk. Wait a couple of weeks, and then look at it. If what you wrote down still worries you when you read it, put that piece of paper back in your lower right-hand drawer. Let it sit there for another two weeks. It will be safe there. Nothing will happen to it. But in the meantime, a lot may happen to the problem that is worrying you. I have found that, if only I have patience, the worry that is trying to harass me will often collapse like a pricked balloon.”
That bit of advice made a great impression on me. I have been using Bill’s advice for years now, and, as a result, I rarely worry about anything.
Times solves a lot of things. Time may also solve what you are worrying about today.

I Was Warned Not To Try To Speak Or To Move Even A Finger
Joseph L. Ryan
Supervisor, Royal Typewriter Co. Long Island, New York

Several years ago I was a witness in a lawsuit that caused me a great deal of mental strain and worry. After the case was over, and I was returning home in the train, I had a sudden and violent physical collapse. Heart trouble. I found it almost impossible to breathe. When I got home the doctor gave me an injection. I wasn’t in bed—I hadn’t been able to get any farther than the living-room settee. When I regained consciousness, I saw that the parish priest was already there to give me final absolution!
I saw the stunned grief on the faces of my family. I knew my number was up. Later, I found out that the doctor had prepared my wife for the fact that I would probably be dead in less than thirty minutes. My heart was so weak I was warned not to try to speak or to move even a finger.
I had never been a saint, but I had learned one thing–not to argue with God. So I closed my eyes and said: “Thy will be done. … If it has to come now, Thy will be done.”
As soon as I gave in to that thought, I seemed to relax all over. My terror disappeared, and I asked myself quickly what was the worst that could happen now. Well, the worst seemed to be a possible return of the spasms, with excruciating pains—then all would be over. I would go to meet my Maker and soon be at peace.
I lay on that settee and waited for an hour, but the pains didn’t return. Finally, I began to ask myself what I would do with my life if I didn’t die now. I determined that I would exert every effort to regain my health. I would stop abusing myself with tension and worry and rebuild my strength. That was four years ago. I have rebuilt my strength to such a degree that even my doctor is amazed at the improvement my cardiograms show. I no longer worry. I have a new zest for life. But I can honestly say that if I hadn’t faced the worst—my imminent death—and then tried to improve upon it, I don’t believe I would be here today. If I hadn’t accepted the worst, I believe I would have died from my own fear and panic.
Mr. Ryan is alive today because he made use of the principle described in the Magic
Formula-FACE THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN.

I Am A Great Dismisser
Ordway Tead
Chairman of the Board of Higher Education New York

WORRY is a habit—a habit that I broke long ago. I believe that my habit of refraining from worrying is due largely to three things.
First: I am too busy to indulge in self-destroying anxiety. I have three main activities—each one of which should be virtually a full-time job in itself. I lecture to large groups at Columbia University: I am also chairman of the Board of Higher Education of New York City. I also have charge of the Economic and Social Book Department of the publishing firm of Harper and Brothers. The insistent demands of these three tasks leave me no time to fret and stew and run around in circles.
Second: I am a great dismisser. When I turn from one task to another, I dismiss all thoughts of the problems I had been thinking about previously. I find it stimulating and refreshing to turn from one activity to another. It rests me. It clears my mind.
Third: I have had to school myself to dismiss all these problems from my mind when I close my office desk. They are always continuing. Each one always has a set of unsolved problems demanding my attention. If I carried these issues home with me each night, and worried about them, I would destroy my health; and, in addition, I would destroy all ability to cope with them.
Ordway Tead is a master of the Four Good Working Habits. Do you remember what they are? (See Ch. 26)

If I Had Not Stopped Worrying,
I Would Have Been In My Grave Long Ago
Connie Mack

I have been in professional baseball for over sixty-three years. When I first started, back in the eighties, I got no salary at all. We played on vacant lots, and stumbled over tin cans and discarded horse collars. When the game was over, we passed the hat. The pickings were pretty slim for me, especially since I was the main support of my widowed mother and my younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes the ball team would have to put on a strawberry supper or a clambake to keep going. I have had plenty of reason to worry. I am the only baseball manager who ever finished in last place for seven consecutive years. I am the only manager who ever lost eight hundred games in eight years. After a series of defeats, I used to worry until I could hardly eat or sleep. But I stopped worrying twenty-five years ago, and I honestly believe that if I hadn’t stopped worrying then, I would have been in my grave long ago.
As I looked back over my long life, I believe I was able to conquer worry by doing these things:
1. I saw how futile it was. I saw it was getting me nowhere and was threatening to wreck my career.
2. I saw it was going to ruin my health.
3. I kept myself so busy planning and working to win games in the future that I had no time to worry over games that were already lost.
4. I finally made it a rule never to call a player’s attention to his mistakes until twenty-four hours after the game. In my early days, I used to dress and undress with the players. If the team had lost, I found it impossible to refrain from criticising the players and from arguing with them bitterly over their defeats. I found this only increased my worries. Criticising a player in front of the others didn’t make him want to co-operate. It really made him bitter. So, since I couldn’t be sure of controlling myself and my tongue immediately after a defeat, I made it a rule never to see the players right after a defeat. I wouldn’t discuss the defeat with them until the next day. By that time, I had cooled off, the mistakes didn’t loom so large, and I could talk things over calmly and the men wouldn’t get angry and try to defend themselves.
5. I tried to inspire players by building them up with praise instead of tearing them down with faultfinding. I tried to have a good word for everybody.
6. I found that I worried more when I was tired; so I spend ten hours in bed every night, and I take a nap every afternoon. Even a five-minute nap helps a lot.
7. I believe I have avoided worries and lengthened my life by continuing to be active. I am eighty-five, but I am not going to retire until I begin telling the same stories over and over. When I start doing that, I’ll know then that I am growing old.
Connie Mack never read a book on HOW TO STOP WORRYING so he made out his own roles. Why don’t YOU make a list of the rules you have found helpful in the past- and write them out here?

One At A Time Gentleman, One At A Time
John Homer Miller
Author of Take a Look at Yourself

I Discovered years ago that I could not escape my worries by trying to ran away from them, but that I could banish them by changing my mental attitude toward them. I discovered that my worries were not outside but inside myself.
As the years have gone by, I have found that time automatically takes care of most of my worries. In fact, I frequently find it difficult to remember what I was worrying about a week ago. So I have a rule: never to fret over a problem until it is at least a week old. Of course, I can’t always put a problem completely out of mind for a week at a time, but I can refuse to allow it to dominate my mind until the allotted seven days have passed, either the problem has solved itself or I have so changed my mental attitude that it no longer has the power to trouble me greatly.
I have been greatly helped by reading the philosophy of Sir William Osier, a man who was not only a great physician, but a great artist in the greatest of all arts: the art of living. One of his statements has helped me immensely in banishing worries. Sir William said, at a dinner given in his honour: “More than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had to the power of settling down to the day’s work and trying to do it well to the best of my ability and letting the future take care of itself.”
In handling troubles, I have taken as my motto the words of an old parrot that my father used to tell me about. Father told me of a parrot that was kept in a cage hanging over the doorway in a hunting club in Pennsylvania. As the members of the club passed through the door, the parrot repeated over and over the only words he knew: “One at a time, gentlemen, one at a time.” Father taught me to handle my troubles that way: “One at a time, gentlemen, one at a time.” I have found that taking my troubles one at a time has helped me to maintain calm and composure amidst pressing duties and unending engagements. “One at a time, gentlemen, one at a time.” Here again, we have one of the basic principles in conquering worry:
LIVE IN DAY- TIGHT COMPARTMENTS.

I Now Look For The Green Light
Joseph M. Cotter
1534 Fargo Avenue, Chicago, Illinois

From the time I was a small boy, throughout the early stages of young manhood, and during my adult life, I was a professional worrier. My worries were many and varied. Some were real; most of them were imaginary. Upon rare occasions I would find myself without anything to worry about—then I would worry for fear I might be overlooking something.
Then, two years ago, I started out on a new way of living making a self-analysis of my faults—and a very few virtues—a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of myself. This brought out clearly what was causing all this worry.
The fact was that I could not live for today alone. I was fretful of yesterday’s mistakes and fearful of the future.
I was told over and over that “today was the tomorrow I had worried about yesterday”. But it wouldn’t work on me. I was advised to live on a twenty-four-hour programme. I was told that today was the only day over which I had any control and that I should make the most of my opportunities each day. I was told that if I did that, I would be so busy I would have no time to worry about any other day-past or future. That advise was logical, but somehow I found it hard to put these darned ideas to work for me.
Then like a shot from out of the dark, I found the answer— and where do you suppose I found it? On a North-western Railroad platform at seven P.M. on May 31, 1945. It was an important hour for me. That is why I remember it so clearly.
We were taking some friends to the train. They were leaving on The City of Los Angeles, a streamliner, to return from a vacation. War was still on—crowds were heavy that year. Instead of boarding the train with my wife, I wandered down the tracks towards the front of the train. I stood looking at the big shiny engine for a minute and saw (visual signalling). An amber light was showing. Immediately this light turned to a bright green. At that moment, the engineer started clanging a bell; I heard the familiar “All aboard!” and, in a matter of seconds, that huge streamliner began to move out of that station on its 2,300-mile trip.
My mind started spinning. Something was trying to make sense to me. I was experiencing a miracle.
Suddenly it dawned on me. The engineer had given me the answer I had been seeking. He was starting out on that long journey with only one green light to go by. If I had been in his place, I would want to see all the green lights for the entire journey. Impossible, of course, yet that was exactly what I was trying to do with my life—sitting in the station, going no place, because I was trying too hard to see what was ahead for me. My thoughts kept coming. That engineer didn’t worry about trouble that he might encounter miles ahead. There probably would be some delays, some slowdowns, but wasn’t that why they had signal systems ? Amber lights—reduce speed and take it easy. Red lights—real danger up ahead—stop. That was what made train travel safe. A good signal system.
I asked myself why I didn’t have a good signal system for my life. My answer was—I did have one. God had given it to me. He controls it, so it has to be foolproof. I started looking for a green light. Where could I find it? Well, if God created the green lights, why not ask Him? I did just that.
And now by praying each morning, I get my green light for that day. I also occasionally get amber lights that slow me down. Sometimes I get red lights that stop me before I crack up. No more worrying for me since that day two years ago when I made this discovery. During those two years, over seven hundred green lights have shown for me, and the trip through life is so much easier without the worry of what colour the next light will be. No matter what colour it may be, I will know what to do.

How John D. Rockefeller Lived on Borrowed
Time for Forty-five Tears

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had accumulated his first million at the age of thirty-three. At the age of forty-three, he had built up the largest monopoly the world has ever seen—the great Standard Oil Company.
But where was he at fifty-three? Worry had got him at fifty-three. Worry and high-tension living had already wrecked his health. At fifty-three he “looked like a mummy,” says John K. Winkler, one of his biographers.
At fifty-three, Rockefeller was attacked by mystifying digestive maladies that swept away his hair, even the eyelashes and all but a faint wisp of eyebrow. “So serious was his condition,” says Winkler, “that at one time John D. was compelled to exist on human milk.” According to the doctors, he had alopecia, a form of baldness that often starts with sheer nerves. He looked so startling, with his stark bald dome, that he had to wear a skullcap. Later, he had wigs made—$500 apiece—and for the rest of his life he wore these silver wigs.
Rockefeller had originally been blessed with an iron constitution. Reared on a farm, he had once had stalwart shoulders, an erect carriage, and a strong, brisk gait.
Yet at only fifty-three—when most men are at their prime—his shoulders drooped and he shambled when he walked. “When he looked in a glass,” says John T. Flynn, another of his biographers, “he saw an old man. The ceaseless work, the endless worry, the streams of abuse, the sleepless nights, and the lack of exercise and rest” had exacted their toll; they had brought him to his knees. He was now the richest man in the world; yet he had to live on a diet that a pauper would have scorned. His income at the time was a million dollars a week—but two dollars a week would probably have paid for all the food he could eat. His skin had lost its colour. And nothing but the best medical care kept him from dying at 53.
How did it happen? Worry. Shock. High-pressure and high-tension living. He “drove” himself literally to the edge of the grave. Even at the age of 23, Rockefeller was already pursuing his goal with such grim determination that, according to those who knew him, “nothing lightened his countenance save news of a good bargain.” When he made a big profit, he would do a little war dance if he lost money, he was ill!
He had no time for play, no time for recreation, no time for anything except making money and teaching Sunday school. When his partner, George Gardner, purchased a second-hand yacht, with three other men, for $2,000, John D. was aghast, refused to go out in it. Gardner found him working at the office one Saturday afternoon, and pleaded: “Come on, John, let’s go for a sail. It will do you good.
Forget about business. Have a little fun.” Rockefeller glared. “George Gardner,” he warned, “you are the most extravagant man I ever knew. You are injuring your credit at the banks—and my credit too.
First thing you know, you’ll be wrecking our business. No, I won’t go on your yacht—I don’t ever want to see it!” And he stayed plugging in the office all Saturday afternoon.
The same lack of humour, the same lack of perspective, characterised John D. all through his business career. Years later he said: “I never placed my head upon the pillow at night without reminding myself that my success might be only temporary.”
With millions at his command, he never put his head upon his pillow without worrying about losing his fortune. No wonder worry wrecked his health. He had no time for play or recreation, never went to the theatre, never played cards, never went to a party. As Mark Hanna said, the man was mad about money. “Sane in every other respect, but mad about money.” Rockefeller had once confessed to a neighbour in Cleveland, Ohio, that he “wanted to be loved”; yet he was so cold and suspicious that few people even liked him. Morgan once balked at having to do business with him at all. “I don’t like the man,” he snorted. “I don’t want to have any dealings with him.” Rockefeller’s own brother hated him so much that he removed his children’s bodies from the family plot. “No one of my blood,” he said, “ will ever rest in land controlled by John D.” Rockefeller’s employees and associates lived in holy fear of him, and here is the ironic part: he was afraid of them—afraid they would talk outside the office and “give secrets away”.
He had so little faith in human nature. In the oil fields of Pennsylvania, John D. Rockefeller was the most hated man on earth. He was hanged in effigy by the men he had crushed. Letter breathing fire and brimstone poured into his office—letters threatening his life. He hired bodyguard and tried to ignore this cyclone of hate. His health began to creak. He was puzzled and bewildered by this new enemy—illness. Finally, his doctors told him the shocking truth. He could take his choice: his money and his worries—or his life. They warned him he must either retire or die. He retired. But before he retired, worry, greed, fear had already wrecked his health.
When Ida Tarbell, America’s most celebrated female writer of biographies, saw him, she was shocked. She wrote: “An awful age was in his face. He was the oldest man I have ever seen.”
When the doctors undertook to save Rockefeller’s life, they gave him three rules—three rules which he observed, to the letter, for the rest of his life. Here they are:
1. Avoid worry. Never worry about anything, under any kind of circumstances.
2. Relax, and take plenty of mild exercise in the open air.
3. Watch your diet. Always stop eating while you’re still a little hungry.
John D. Rockefeller obeyed those rules; and they probably saved his life. He retired. He learned to play golf. He went in for gardening. He chatted with his neighbours. He played games. He sang songs.
But he did something else too. “During days of torture and nights of insomnia,” says Winkler, “John D. had time for reflection.” He began to think of other people. He stopped thinking, for once, of how much money he could get; and he began to wonder how much that money could buy in terms of human happiness. In short. Rockefeller now began to give his millions away! Some of the time it wasn’t easy. When he offered money to a church, pulpits all over the country thundered back with cries of “tainted money!” But he kept on giving. He learned of a starving little college on the shores of Lake Michigan that was being foreclosed because of its mortgage. He came to its rescue and poured millions of dollars into that college and built it into the now world-famous University of Chicago. He tried to help the Negroes. He gave money to Negro universities like Tuskegee College, where funds were needed to carry on the work of George Washington Carver. He helped to fight hookworm. When Dr. Charles W. Stiles, the hookworm authority, said: “Fifty cents’ worth of medicine will cure a man of this disease which ravages the South—but who will give the fifty cents?” Rockefeller gave it. He spent millions on hookworm, stamping out the greatest scourge that has ever handicapped the South. And then he went further. He established a great international foundation—the Rockefeller Foundation—which was to fight disease and ignorance all over the world.
I speak with feeling of this work, for there is a possibility that I may owe my life to the Rockefeller Foundation. How well I remember that when I was in China in 1932, cholera was raging all over the nation. The Chinese peasants were dying like flies; yet in the midst of all this horror, we were able to go to the Rockefeller Medical College in Peking and get a vaccination to protect us from the plague. Chinese and “foreigners” alike, we were able to do that. And that was when I got my first understanding of what Rockefeller’s millions were doing for the world.
Never before in history has there ever been anything even remotely like the Rockefeller Foundation. It is something unique. Rockefeller knew that all over the world there are many fine movements that men of vision start. Research is undertaken; colleges are founded; doctors struggle on to fight a disease—but only too often this high-minded work has to die for lack of funds. He decided to help these pioneers of humanity—not to “take them over”, but to give them some money and help them help themselves. Today you and I can thank John D. Rockefeller for the miracles of penicillin, and for dozens of other discoveries which his money helped to finance. You can thank him for the fact that your children no longer die from spinal meningitis, a disease that used to kill four out of five. And you can thank him for part of the inroads we have made on malaria and tuberculosis, on influenza and diphtheria, and many other diseases that still plague the world.
And what about Rockefeller? When he gave his money away, did he gain peace of mind? Yes, he was contented at last. “If the public thought of him after 1900 as brooding over the attacks on the Standard Oil,” said Allan Kevins, “the public was much mistaken.”
Rockefeller was happy. He had changed so completely that he didn’t worry at all. In fact, he refused even to lose one night’s sleep when he was forced to accept the greatest defeat of his career! That defeat came when the corporation he had built, the huge Standard Oil, was ordered to pay “the heaviest fine in history”. According to the United States Government, the Standard Oil was a monopoly, in direct violation of the antitrust laws. The battle raged for five years. The best legal brains in the land fought on interminably in what was, up to then, the longest court war in history. But Standard Oil lost.
When Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis handed down his decision, lawyers for the defence feared that old John D. would take it very hard. But they didn’t know how much he’d changed. That night one of the lawyers got John D. on the phone. He discussed the decision as gently as he could, and then said with concern: “I hope you won’t let this decision upset you, Mr. Rockefeller. I hope you’ll get your night’s sleep!”
And old John D.? Why, he crackled right back across the wire: “Don’t worry, Mr. Johnson, I intend to get a night’s sleep. And don’t let it bother you either. Good night!” That from the man who had once taken to his bed because he had lost $150! Yes, it took a long time for John D. to conquer worry. He was “dying” at fifty-three—but he lived to ninety-eight!

Reading A Book On Sex Prevented
My Marriage From Going On The Rocks
B.R.W.

I hate to make this story anonymous. But it is so intimate that I could not possibly use my name. However, Dale Carnegie will vouch for the truth of this story. I first told it to him twelve years ago.
After leaving college, I got a job with a large industrial organisation, and five years later, this company sent me across the Pacific to act as one of its representatives in the Far East. A week before leaving America, I married the sweetest and most lovable woman I have ever known. But our honeymoon was a tragic disappointment for both of us—especially for her. By the time we reached Hawaii she was so disappointed, so heartbroken, that she would have returned to the States, had she not been ashamed to face her old friends and admit failure in what can be—and should be—life’s most thrilling adventure.
We lived together two miserable years in the Orient. I was so unhappy that I had sometimes thought of suicide. Then one day I chanced upon a book that changed everything. I have always been a lover of books, and one night while visiting some American friends in the Far East, I was glancing over their well-stocked library when I suddenly saw a book entitled Ideal Marriage, by Dr. Van de Velde. The title sounded like a preachy, goody-goody document. But, out of idle curiosity, I opened it. I saw that it dealt almost entirely with the sexual side of marriage—and dealt with it frankly and without any touch of vulgarity.
If anyone had told me that I ought to read a book on sex, I would have been insulted. Read one? I felt I could write one. But my own marriage was such a bust that I condescended to look this book over, anyway. So I got up the courage to ask my host if I could borrow it. I can truthfully say that reading that book turned out to be one of the important events of my life. My wife also read it. That book turned a tragic marriage into a happy, blissful companionship. If I had a million dollars, I would buy the rights to publish that book and give free copies of it to the countless thousands of bridal couples.
If we want to know what is wrong with marriage, we ought to read a book entitled What is Wrong With Marriage? by Dr. G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth MacGowan. Dr. Hamilton spent four years investigating what is wrong with marriage before writing that book, and he says: “It would take a very reckless psychiatrist to say that most married friction doesn’t find its sources in sexual maladjustment. At any rate, the frictions which arise from other difficulties would be ignored in many, many cases if the sexual relation itself were satisfactory.”
I know that statement is true. I know from tragic experience.
The book that saved my marriage from shipwreck, Dr. Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage, can be found in most large public libraries, or bought at any bookshop. If you want to give a little gift to some bride and groom, don’t give them a carving set. Give them a copy of Ideal Marriage.

I Was Committing Slow Suicide Because
I Didn’t Know How To Relax
Paul Sampson
Direct-Mail Advertising, Wyandotte, Michigan

UP to six months ago, I was rushing through life in high gear. I was always tense, never relaxed. I arrived home from work every night worried and exhausted from nervous fatigue Why? Because no one ever said to me: “Paul, you are killing yourself. Why don’t you slow down? Why don’t you relax?” I would get up fast in the morning, eat fast, shave fast, dress fast, and drive to work as if I were afraid the steering wheel would fly out the window if I didn’t have a death grip on it.
I was in such a state that I went to see a famous nerve specialist in Detroit. He told me to relax. (By the way, he gave me the same principles for relaxation that are advocated in Chapter 24 of this book.) He told me to think of relaxing all the time—to think about it when I was working, driving, eating, and trying to go to sleep. He told me that I was committing slow suicide because I didn’t know how to relax.
Ever since then I have practised relaxation. When I go to bed at night, I don’t try to go to sleep until I’ve consciously relaxed my body and my breathing. And now I wake up in the morning rested—a big improvement, because I used to wake up in the morning tired and tense. I relax now when I eat and when I drive. To be sure, I am alert when driving, but I drive with my mind now instead of my nerves. The most important place I relax is at my work. Several times a day I stop everything and take inventory of myself to see if I am entirely relaxed. When the phone rings now, no longer do I grab it as though someone were trying to beat me to it; and when someone is talking to me, I’m as relaxed as a sleeping baby.
The result? Life is much more pleasant and enjoyable; and I’m completely free of nervous fatigue and nervous worry.

A Real Miracle Happened To Me
Mrs. John Burger
3,940 Colorado Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Worry had completely defeated me. My mind was so confused and troubled that I could see no joy in living. My nerves were so strained that I could neither sleep at night nor relax by day. My three young children were widely separated, living with relatives. My husband, having recently returned from the armed service, was in another city trying to establish a law practice. I felt all the insecurities and uncertainties of the postwar readjustment period.
I was threatening my husband’s career, my children’s natural endowment of a happy, normal home life, and I was also threatening my own life. My husband could find no housing, and the only solution was to build. Everything depended on my getting well. The more I realised this and the harder I would try, the greater would be my fear of failure. Then I developed a fear of planning for any responsibility. I felt that I could no longer trust myself. I felt I was a complete failure.
When all was darkest and there seemed to be no help, my mother did something for me that I shall never forget or cease being grateful for. She shocked me into fighting back. She upbraided me for giving in and for losing control of my nerves and my mind. She challenged me to get up out of bed and fight for all I had. She said I was giving in to the situation, fearing it instead of facing it, running away from life instead of living it.
So I did start fighting from that day on. That very weekend I told my parents they could go home, because I was going to take over; and I did what seemed impossible at the time. I was left alone to care for my two younger children. I slept well, I began to eat better, and my spirits began to improve. A week later when they returned to visit me again, they found me singing at my ironing. I had a sense of well-being because I had begun to fight a battle and I was winning. I shall never forget this lesson. … If a situation seems insurmountable, face it! Start fighting! Don’t give in!
From that time on I forced myself to work, and lost myself in my work. Finally I gathered my children together and joined my husband in our new home. I resolved that I would become well enough to give my lovely family a strong, happy mother. I became engrossed with plans for our home, plans for my children, plans for my husband, plans for everything—except for me. I became too busy to think of myself. And it was then that the real miracle happened.
I grew stronger and stronger and could wake up with the joy of well-being, the joy of planning for the new day ahead, the joy of living. And although days of depression did creep in occasionally after that, especially when I was tired, I would tell myself not to think or try to reason with myself on those days—and gradually they became fewer and fewer and finally disappeared.
Now, a year later, I have a very happy, successful husband, a beautiful home that I can work in sixteen hours a day, and three healthy, happy children—and for myself, peace of mind!

Setbacks
Ferenc Molnar
Noted Hungarian Playwright “Work is the best narcotic!”

Exactly fifty years ago my father gave me the words I have lived by ever since. He was a physician. I had just started to study law at the Budapest University. I failed one examination. I thought I could not survive the shame so I sought escape in the consolation of failure’s closest friend, alcohol, always at hand: apricot brandy to be exact.
My father called on me unexpectedly. Like a good doctor, he discovered both the trouble and the bottle, in a second. I confessed why I had to escape reality.
The dear old man then and there improvised a prescription. He explained to me that there can be no real escape in alcohol or sleeping pills—or in any drug. For any sorrow there is only one medicine, better and more reliable than all the drugs in the world: work!
How right my father was! Getting used to work might be hard. Sooner or later you succeed. It has, of course, the quality of all the narcotics. It becomes habit-forming. And once the habit is formed, sooner or later, it becomes impossible to break one’s self of it. I have never been able to break myself of the habit for fifty years.

I Was So Worried I Didn’t Eat
A Bite Of Solid Food For Eighteen Days
Kathryne Holcombe Farmer
Sheriff’s Office, Mobile, Alabama

Three months ago, I was so worried that I didn’t sleep for four days and nights; and I did not eat a bite of solid food for eighteen days. Even the smell of food made me violently sick. I cannot find words to describe the mental anguish I endured. I wonder whether hell has any worse tortures than what I went through. I felt as if I would go insane or die. I knew that I couldn’t possibly continue living as I was.
The turning point of my life was the day I was given an advance copy of this book. During the last three months, I have practically lived with this book, studying every page, desperately trying to find a new way of life. The change that has occurred in my mental outlook and emotional stability is almost unbelievable. I am now able to endure the battles of each passing day. I now realise that in the past, I was being driven half mad not by today’s problems but by the bitterness and anxiety over something that had happened yesterday or that I feared might happen tomorrow.
But now, when I find myself starting to worry about anything, I immediately stop and start to apply some of the principles I learned from studying this book. If I am tempted to tense up over something that must be done today, I get busy and do it immediately and get it off my mind.
When I am faced with the kind of problems that used to drive me half crazy, I now calmly set about trying to apply the three steps outlined in Chapter 2, Part One. First, I ask myself what is the worst that can possibly happen. Second, I try to accept it mentally. Third, I concentrate on the problem and see how I can improve the worst which I am already willing to accept—if I have to.
When I find myself worrying about a thing I cannot change—and do not want to accept—I stop myself short and repeat this little prayer:
“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”
Since reading this book, I am really experiencing a new and glorious way of life. I am no longer destroying my health and happiness by anxiety. I can sleep nine hours a night now. I enjoy my food. A veil has been lifted from me. A door has been opened. I can now see and enjoy the beauty of the world which surrounds me. I thank God for life now and for the privilege of living in such a wonderful world.
May I suggest that you also read this book over: keep it by your bed: underscore the parts that apply to your problems. Study it; use it. For this is not a “reading book” in the ordinary sense; it is written as a “guidebook”—to a new way of life!

The End