How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job

Dale Carnegie

• Publisher: Samaira Book Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789387550155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Persönlicher Erfolg

How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job will help you create a new approach to life and people and discover talents you never knew you had. This bestseller shows you how to make every day more exciting and rewarding—how you can get more done, and have more fun doing it. A life-changing book that has helped many people around the world, is your key to achieving success in your professional and personal life.

 

 

 

PART ONE

SEVEN WAYS TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS

Dale Carnegie wrote his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living to show that life is very much what we make it. If we first learn to accept ourselves, seeing the good as clearly as the not-so-good, and then get busy doing the things necessary to reach our goals, we will be less likely to have either the need or the inclination to lose time and energy worrying.

 

Chapter 1

Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember, There is No One Else on Earth Like You

I have a letter from Mrs. Edith Allred, of Mount Airy, North Carolina: “As a child, I was extremely sensitive and shy,” she says in her letter. “I was overweight and my cheeks made me look even fatter than I was. I had an old-fashioned mother who thought it was foolish to make clothes look pretty. She always said: ‘Wide will wear while narrow will tear’; and she dressed me accordingly. I never went to parties; never had any fun; and when I went to school, I never joined the other children in outside activities, or even athletics. I was morbidly shy. I felt I was ‘different’ from everybody else, and entirely undesirable.

“When I grew up, I married a man who was several years my senior. But I didn’t change. My in-laws were a poised and self-confident family. They were everything I should have been but simply was not. I tried my best to be like them, but I couldn’t. Every attempt they made to draw me out of myself only drove me further into my shell. I became nervous and irritable. I avoided all friends. I got so bad I even dreaded the sound of the doorbell ringing! I was a failure. I knew it; and I was afraid my husband would find it out. So, whenever we were in public, I tried to be gay, and overacted my part. I knew I overacted; and I would be miserable for days afterwards. At last I became so unhappy that I could see no point in prolonging my existence. I began to think of suicide.”

What happened to change this unhappy woman’s life? Just a chance remark!

“A chance remark,” Mrs. Allred continued, “transformed my whole life. My mother-in-law was talking one day of how she brought her children up, and she said, ‘No matter what happened, I always insisted on their being themselves.’ … ‘On their being themselves.’ … That remark is what did it! In a flash, I realized I had brought all this misery on myself by trying to fit myself into a pattern to which I did not conform.

“I changed overnight! I started being myself. I tried to make a study of my own personality. Tried to find out what I was. I studied my strong points. I learned all I could about colors and styles, and dressed in a way that I felt was becoming to me. I reached out to make friends. I joined an organization—a small one at first—and was petrified with fright when they put me on a program. But each time I spoke, I gained a little courage. It took a long while—but today I have more happiness than I ever dreamed possible. In rearing my own children, I have always taught them the lesson I had to learn from such bitter experience: No matter what happens, always be yourself!”

This problem of being unwilling to be yourself is “as old as history,” says Dr. James Gordon Gilkey, “and as universal as human life.” This problem of being unwilling to be yourself is the hidden spring behind many neuroses and psychoses and complexes. Angelo Patri has written thirteen books and thousands of syndicated newspaper articles on the subject of child training, and he says: “Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.”

This craving to be something you are not is especially rampant in Hollywood. Sam Wood, one of Hollywood’s best-known directors, said the greatest headache he has with aspiring young actors is exactly this problem: to make them be themselves. They all want to be second-rate Lana Turners or third-rate Clark Gables. “The public has already had that flavor,” Sam Wood keeps telling them; “now it wants something else.”

Before he started directing such pictures as Goodbye, Mr. Chips and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Sam Wood spent years in the real-estate business, developing sales personalities. He declares that the same principles apply in the business world as in the world of moving pictures. You won’t get anywhere playing the ape. You can’t be a parrot. “Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, “that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.”

I asked Paul Boynton, then employment director for a major oil company, what is the biggest mistake people make in applying for jobs. He ought to know: he has interviewed more than sixty thousand job seekers; and he has written a book entitled 6 Ways to Get a Job. He replied: “The biggest mistake people make in applying for jobs is in not being themselves. Instead of taking their hair down and being completely frank, they often try to give you the answers they think you want.” But it doesn’t work, because nobody wants a phony. Nobody ever wants a counterfeit coin.

A certain daughter of a streetcar conductor had to learn that lesson the hard way. She longed to be a singer. But her face was her misfortune. She had a large mouth and protruding buck teeth. When she first sang in public—in a New Jersey night club—she tried to pull down her upper lip to cover her teeth. She tried to act “glamorous.” The results? She made herself ridiculous. She was headed for failure.

However, there was a man in this night club who heard the girl sing and thought she had talent. “See here,” he said bluntly, “I’ve been watching your performance and I know what it is you’re trying to hide. You’re ashamed of your teeth!” The girl was embarrassed, but the man continued, “What of it? Is there any particular crime in having buck teeth? Don’t try to hide them! Open your mouth, and the audience will love you when they see you’re not ashamed. Besides,” he said shrewdly, “those teeth you’re trying to hide may make your fortune!”

Cass Daley took his advice and forgot about her teeth. From that time on, she thought only about her audience. She opened her mouth wide and sang with such gusto and enjoyment that she became a top star in movies and radio. Other comedians tried to copy her!

The renowned William James was speaking of people who had never found themselves when he declared that the average person develops only ten percent of his or her latent mental abilities. “Compared to what we ought to be,” he wrote, “we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, human individuals thus far live within their limits. They possess powers of various sorts which they habitually fail to use.”

You and I have such abilities, so let’s not waste a second worrying because we are not like other people. You are something new in this world. Never before, since the beginning of time, has there ever been anybody exactly like you; and never again throughout all the ages to come will there ever be anybody exactly like you again. The science of genetics informs us that you are what you are largely as a result of twenty-three chromosomes contributed by your father and twenty-three chromosomes contributed by your mother. These forty-six chromosomes comprise everything that determines what you inherit. In each chromosome there may be, says Amram Scheinfeld, “anywhere from scores to hundreds of genes—with a single gene, in some cases, able to change the whole life of an individual.” Truly, we are “fearfully and wonderfully” made.

Even after your mother and father met and mated, there was only one chance in 300,000 billion that the person who is specifically you would be born! In other words, if you had 300,000 billion brothers and sisters, they might all have been different from you. Is a...