Month: October 2019

It’s insane how old books can still be valuable and that applies to this book as well. Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 and is famous for his self-improvement courses and books. I was quite surprised to read that self-improvement was already at such a level during the time. 

After reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale, I had high hopes for this one. Both books are great and aimed at completely different topics, depending on what kind of help you need. If you worry about worrying too much, read this book.

Don’t cry over spilt milk

Excessive worrying can have bad consequences. Worrying can break you, drastically impact your lifespan, cause cavities, cause stomach aches and other health-related problems. Dale greatly describes the outcomes of worrying throughout the book. They are great reminders that cause more motivation to continue reading. There is a broad variety of tips in this book about conquering worry. All tips are explained with stories of people, which is why the book is so fun to read. If the book only handled straight facts, it would’ve been shorter and lifeless.

We can think too much about past events that negatively impacted us. Or about our future and how we might be afraid. But why not live in the moment? As Dale put it: ‘Don’t try to saw sawdust’ or ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk’. You can continuously look at your past but you won’t get any better from that. Unless you subjectively look at your mistakes and improve upon them. Once you’ve done that, there is no reason to keep playing past scenarios in your head. 

Other tips include trying to be as nice as possible and help out family and friends. This way you move the attention from yourself to the people around you and you forget to worry. Or you can keep yourself very busy with hobbies, work or other passion projects. You will not have the time to worry if you are too busy to even worry. 

The last tips seemed to be more about avoiding worry than conquering worry. Which is good because eventually, you may fully forget worry. But I think you should look at the root of your worries as well. What is the reason you’re scared of the future? Why do you go crazy over your looks or over how you spend your time? These questions are hard to answer and when you know the root, you can truly improve. 

At the end of the book, stories are given of people who conquered worry, which was a nice addition to the book. Although the book is quite old, the tips are still relevant to this day. This is probably the best book about conquering worry out there, so why not try it out?

Although I’ve read this book a couple of months ago, there are still valuable and helpful things that I wanted to share from this book. While doing another book haul, I stumbled upon this book by Robert Maurer which caught my attention. 

The title is one of those titles that we might get offended by. “Yeah buddy, how in the world can one small step change my life. Robert, get out of here”. But I remembered reading about Kaizen, which is a method of continuously improving all functions and processes in business in small steps. So using this method on your personal life sounded interesting to me. 

Slow change is better than no change.

Ever wondered why so many new years wishes go down the drain? We start off strong in January with a full plan, February gets a bit tough and in March it’s over with our new healthy habits. Of course, these “new year new me” challenges are well-meant but they don’t last. 

In the book, Robert discusses how the brain reacts to big changes. Small changes are more pleasing to the brain and gives time for the brain to get used to the new habit. Big changes will scare the brain and your decision making brain will try to flee from the situation. 

There are a lot of examples of people who had certain disorders, which could be bypassed by doing the smallest exercises. One woman tried all sorts of fitness programs to lose weight and nothing worked, so Robert came up with the idea to let her do some high knees when there was an advertisement on television.

Her reaction was, of course, great. She didn’t get scared because it was that small and she got hope again.  After trying the exercises for a while, the exercises stuck to her and she began doing other exercises. As you can see, the little exercise caused a chain reaction. 

You can apply this to other goals as well. Quitting smoking, writing a novel or meeting the love of your life. I’m currently using this method with writing. Every day I’ll write for 20 minutes. This is very do-able, and most of the time I write more than 20 minutes because I get in a flow state. 

There are more examples and useful tips in the book and it is definitely worth reading them. The book is pretty short and kept fairly short which I liked.

If you’re currently going through something you would like to change, or a goal you would like to pursue, then I recommend this book to you. Try it with small steps instead of big ones.