Dad’s Carnegie
In 2009 I suffered from depression for months. Some events triggered it, so it wasn’t clinical, but rather an on-set. My parents whom I lived with didn’t know what it was; I was avoiding people, feeling full all the time at the dining table, just being in shambles from morning till after sunset. I am a woman embedded with her bed for the days, but it gets lighter at night. Not a single medical prevention was offered. The internet wasn’t as massive as it is nowadays, the effort to cope relied mostly on work, books, and watching YouTube, especially U2’s clip I’ll go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight–on repeat a million times.
One day my father entered the room to see me, his only, miserable daughter, and brought a torn-up mass-market paperback book, his favorite, Dale Carnegie’s. I have no recollection of how it started, but I managed to flip its pages and proceed to read it.
I’ve made no pity judgments over the book. It is not because I realised that it came from a sincere place. A thought of my father trying to help his child. But simply there isn’t a single cynic opinion crossed my mind of how corny and hard-sale the title was: How to stop worrying & start living. The title just spoke for itself. If it were to get lost on another shelf of a bookstore, it would find its way in seconds to the ‘self-help’ aisle.
Funny, how in the simplest words humans found grounds within. Our minds suddenly came nearer to our own presence. With the book, a mindful thought able to release fears from the burden of towering expectations.
The Trivial Mindfulness of Dale Carnegie
How could a trivial book find its way to relate more, than the sophisticated ones? I was fallen asleep peacefully that night after reading a few pages from my father’s Carnegie. When I read the first chapter, Living In The Daytime Compartment, there were 21 words that we needed to hear as hope that can get us through each day, the words are: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”.
I read it and my heart feels lighter. As naive as it might appear to be, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure those words out. But no one had ever said it, because it feels like a cynical anecdote. Of course, that’s why depression took away your arrogance, your flair and made its way lower than just humbling experience. You needed to hear words–that often considered corny– at a certain level of agony.
People have the capability making fun of self-help books because they were the people who were “doing okay”, rising up in their life, mentally strong, or just normally happy. They weren’t in a position of being dragged at the bottom of an abyss, experiencing hollow emptiness. A person in such condition as I was at that time, crouching to rise back up. One of them was because of a trivial self-help book from Dale Carnegie that exudes mindfulness.
Source of Picture : Cody Board, Unsplash.Com
Dissecting How to Start Living and Stop Worrying
It sounded like the bare minimum of writing skills. It seems like it has no depth, and might even present silly, rubishy stories without clear references. But we, the depressed had hit rock bottom, we did not need more depth from anything. We needed simple words that hugged and understood us like a five-year-old. We have less capacity to find allegory, aphorism, or anything that distorts the clarity to ignite our perseverance. The book was written from the basement of miserable, torn-apart souls and even people with terminal cases of illnesses.
If the book was shallow, why did it make many people find its spirit back? Even Carnegie himself is one of those people living below standard. He was trying to make a living in New York, thirty-five years before the book was written. What was in the book can somehow read as clichés, such as; “accepting your worst-case scenarios”, well, didn’t everybody know that?
Apparently, people acknowledge it not by heart, but by their mind. Depression needs to go beyond the rational. Depression induced a state of lingering in a state of irrationality. For this reason, to sound a rational, slow and easy message is like taking a deep breath when you’re suffocating with melancholy. Carnegie speaks with total clarity, loud and clear, on worst-scenario acceptance and the power of starting over.
Crowding Your Worry Out
In one of his old-fashioned sales and marketing style chapters, some are intriguing. Making examples of how to fill the unoccupied mind with a completely different and focused task. Engage with distractions that completely take nearly the whole attention of your thoughts. He called it crowd worry out of your mind. Carnegie continues further on explaining why certain tasks can alleviate the sorrow for a while. Things like helping your children build their toy, fixing a tap, or outdoor activities such as fishing or playing soccer. Here, Carnegie sets a definition of how our mind operates. He mentions the “occupational therapy” known in psychology, right since the ancient Greeks, in the Quaker’s sanatorium in Philadephia in 1774, until now. Carnegie never said it cured depression instantly. On our way to healing, crowding your worry worked like anesthesia for mental disorders, even institutionalized patients. It eased the pain.
“Every student of physics knows that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric light bulb. Break that bulb–and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space. Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind. With what? Usually with emotions. Why? Because emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy are driven by primeval vigor and the dynamic energy of the jungle. Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out our minds of all peaceful, happy thoughts and emotions (Carnegie,1981)”. Similar to Schopenhauer’s world of will and representation, Carnegie also insinuated the concept between thoughts and emotions, a driven-force within, and therefore should not be left unoccupied.
Great Grudge is a Great Loss For Carnegie
This also doesn’t sound like state-of-the-art words. Every motivator, and mental influencer around the globe has probably said or heard of this. Even we might be familiar with these teachings. But if we dissect it closely how Carnegie set examples in daily implementations, especially in a case of depression triggered by the disappointment of another party, it would ring profoundly true.
For Carnegie, a grudge can eat you from the inside and bring a great loss in life. “When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.” He goes by the teachings of Confucius that being hurt would not impact our lives massively if we decide to move along instead of keep on reminiscing about the tragedy.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Now, it may seem dismissive of people’s feelings and insensitive. It can also be pretentious to lived by those sayings, but in the extent of time, in moments when depression is not in its episodes, the words truly lived as a particular strength encouragement.
Giving Without Remembering and Remembering What Has Been Gifted
People who expect a simple form of gratitude, a gesture of thanking after a favor or a gift simply haven’t grasped the nature of human beings. Thanking isn’t automatic. Gratitude is all about how intelligent a person is nurtured by their society or education, and most of the ingrates just wasn’t competent to do it.
Carnegie adjusted the wrong expectations that when we give a favor or things there has to be a simple act of giving back even just a polite thank you. When we did not receive it, it simply masked our feelings of discontent. He mentioned how Marcus Aurelius made philosophical thinking on the unflattering part of human nature. “I’m going to be meeting with people today who talk too much –people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won’t be surprised or disturbed, for I can’t imagine a world without such people.” Because giving is one of those paths to being happier, forget what you gave, it takes off the burden earlier from setting inessential expectations.
Blindsided by places that weren’t ours to begin with
On the contrary, remembering what has been gifted to us should be deep-seated in our memories. In his interesting title of chapter fifteen “Will you take $1M for what you have?”. Lessons were opened with a story of a man named Harold Abbot.
His grocery business went to bankruptcy and he owed a huge debt. He was devastated and taking a walk on a Saturday morning just after the police shut his store down. Walking, feeling like a loser, Harold met a man with no limbs crossing down the street with his DIY wheelchair made out of plywood that was put on wheels below it.
The man smiled at Harold as they exchanged glances, and that made him think hard. It made him also understand the concept of gratitude should come from things you own, including parts of your body. It opened up his suffocating chest, and slowly lifted his sadness. Once again, Carnegie quoted from Schopenhauer “We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.” How we should be ashamed of ourselves for not counting our blessings and seem to be blindsided by paying attention to places that weren’t ours to begin with.
Dale Carnegie may fall short of writing a literature masterpiece he wrote frontally like a salesman and sometimes a preacher. But reminding gratitude, initiating to remove grudges, and distracting a deprecating condition by crowding the worry had spoken like medicine. The little depth to the words he chooses lessens the hurt with simplicity of their meanings. Dad’s Carnegie petty book is one of the first aid that rescued me from depression at the lowest, bed-ridden level. Thanks, Dale.
Author: Fraya
A writer and entrepreneur with profound interest in humankind research and insights. An avid coffee drinker and book hoarder. Hours and days spent in Jakarta.The Haptic Room is supported by our readers. Our site may contain links to affiliate websites, and if you make a purchase through these links, we receive a commission to support our site.