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¶ Patient X was so worried that he decided on suicide. Chortled his wise doctor: "You might at least do it in a heroic fashion. Run around the block until you drop dead!" Patient X ran round & round like mad, but "each time felt better." Now he has "joined an athletic club."
¶ Mr. Snyder of Maywood, Ill. fell ill. His wife had only 10¢ worth of ingredients and a kitchen stove to fall back on. Unworried, "she took the white of an egg and sugar and made some candy," which she sold. "During the first week, she not only made a profit of $4.15, but. . . put a new zest into living."
¶ Stenographer Dorothy Vanderpool of Tulsa "had one of the dullest jobs imaginable: filling out printed forms for oil leases." Resisting "the fatigue that is spawned by boredom," she started "a daily contest with herself. She counted the number of forms she filled out each morning, and then tried to excel that record in the afternoon." Now she is married to wealthy Dale Carnegie (one child).
Be Glad You're Suicidal. How to Stop Worrying is crammed with anti-worry rules which Author Carnegie advises the businessman to follow rigorously ("Offer your wife a quarter every time she catches you violating one"). There are physical rules (e.g., "Lie flat on the floor whenever you feel tired ... Sit upright like [an] Egyptian statue . . . slowly tense the toes ... let your head roll around heavily, as though it were a football"). There are also home-&-office rules (e.g., "After carefully weighing all the facts, come to a decision").
But the bulk of Author Carnegie's rules concern mental detachment and emotional tranquility. They include: frequent prayer ("some of the most famous 'hemen' in the world pray every day"); making a profit out of handicaps ("If Tchaikovsky had not been . . . driven almost to suicide ... he probably would never have been able to compose his immortal Symphonic Pathétique"); remaining blandly indifferent even when "ridiculed, doubled-crossed , knifed in the back, and sold down the river by ... our most intimate friends" ("that's precisely what happened to Jesus"). The whole is rounded off with snappy personal histories by such noted non-worriers as Jack Dempsey, Gene Autry and Senator Elmer Thomas.
Exhibit A. There is no doubt that his own rules have raised Dale Carnegie to his present eminence. Born (Nov. 24, 1888) on a poor Missouri farm, he was bred in "struggle and heartache . . . debts and humiliation." Young Dale dreamed of "becoming a foreign missionary." But soon, losing all faith in life and in God, he dreamed of becoming an actor. When this dream, too, faded, he decided to become a "second . . . Thomas Hardy" and spent two years in Europe writing a novel called The Blizzard.