How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (34 page)

The demand for Mrs. Speer's home-baked pastry became so great that she had to move out of her kitchen into a shop and hire two girls to bake for her: pies, cakes, bread, and rolls. During the war, people stood in line for an hour at a time to buy her home-baked foods.

"I have never been happier in my life," Mrs. Speer said. "I work in the shop twelve to fourteen hours a day, but I don't get tired because it isn't work to me. It is an adventure in living. I am doing my part to make people a little happier. I am too busy to be lonesome or worried. My work has filled a gap in my life left vacant by the passing of my mother and husband and my home."

When I asked Mrs. Speer if she felt that other women who were good cooks could make money in their spare time in a similar way, in towns of ten thousand and up, she replied: "Yes-of course they can!"

Mrs. Ora Snyder will tell you the same thing. She lives in a town of thirty thousand-Maywood, Illinois. Yet she started in business with the kitchen stove and ten cents' worth of ingredients. Her husband fell ill. She had to earn money. But how? No experience. No skill. No capital. Just a housewife. She took the white of an egg and sugar and made some candy on the back of the kitchen stove; then she took her pan of candy and stood near the school and sold it to the children for a penny a piece as they went home. "Bring more pennies tomorrow," she said. "I'll be here every day with my home-made candy." During the first week, she not only made a profit, but had also put a new zest into living. She was making both herself and the children happy. No time now for worry.

This quiet little housewife from Maywood, Illinois, was so ambitious that she decided to branch out-to have an agent sell her kitchen-made candy in roaring, thundering Chicago. She timidly approached an Italian selling peanuts on the street. He shrugged his shoulders. His customers wanted peanuts, not candy. She gave him a sample. He liked it, began selling her candy, and made a good profit for Mrs. Snyder on the first day. Four years later, she opened her first store in Chicago. It was only eight feet wide. She made her candy at night and sold it in the daytime. This erstwhile timid housewife, who started her candy factory on her kitchen stove, now has seventeen stores-fifteen of them in the busy Loop district of Chicago.

Here is the point I am trying to make. Nellie Speer, in Jackson Heights, New York, and Mrs. Ora Snyder, in May-wood, Illinois, instead of worrying about finances, did something positive. They started in an extremely small way to make money off the kitchen stove-no overhead, no rent, no advertising, no salaries. Under these conditions, it is almost impossible for a woman to be defeated by financial worries.

Look around you. You will find many needs that are not filled. For example, if you train yourself to be a good cook, you can probably make money by starting cooking classes for young girls right in your own kitchen. You can get your students by ringing door-bells.

Books have been written about how to make money in your spare time; inquire at your public library. There are many opportunities for both men and women. But one word of warning: unless you have a natural gift for selling, don't attempt door-to-door selling. Most people hate it and fail at it.

Rule No. 10: Don't gamble-ever.

I am always astounded by the people who hope to make money by betting on the ponies or playing slot machines. I know a man who makes his living by owning a string of these "one armed bandits", and he has nothing but contempt for the foolish people who are so naive as to imagine that they can beat a machine that is already rigged against them.

I also know one of the best known bookmakers in America. He was a student in my adult-education classes. He told me that with all his knowledge of horse racing, he couldn't make money betting on the ponies. Yet the facts are that foolish people bet six billion dollars a year on the races-six times as much as our total national debt back in 1910. This bookmaker also told me that if he had an enemy he despised, he could think of no better way of ruining him than by getting him to bet on the races. When I asked him what would happen to the man who played the races according to the tipster sheets, he replied: "You could lose the Mint by betting that way."

If we are determined to gamble, let's at least be smart. Let's find out what the odds are against us. How? By reading a book entitled How to Figure the Odds, by Oswald Jacoby-an authority on bridge and poker, a top-ranking mathematician, a professional statistician, and an insurance actuary. This book devotes 215 pages to telling you what the odds are against your winning when you play the ponies, roulette, craps, slot machines, draw poker, stud poker, contract bridge, auction pinochle, the stock market. This book also give you the scientific, mathematical chances on a score of other activities. It doesn't pretend to show how to make money gambling. The author has no axe to grind. He merely shows you what the odds are against your winning in all the usual ways of gambling; and when you see the odds, you will pity the poor suckers who stake their hard-earned wages on horse races or cards or dice or slot machines. If you are tempted to shoot craps or play poker or bet on horses, this book may save you a hundred times-yes, maybe a thousand times-what it costs.

Rule No. 11: If we can't possibly improve our financial situation, let's be good to ourselves and stop resenting what can't be changed.

If we can't possibly improve our financial situation, maybe we can improve our mental attitude towards it. Let's remember that other people have their financial worries, too. We may be worried because we can't keep up with the Joneses; but the Joneses are probably worried because they can't keep up with the Ritzes; and the Ritzes are worried because they can't keep up with the Vanderbilts.

Some of the most famous men in American history have had their financial troubles. Both Lincoln and Washington had to borrow money to make the trip to be inaugurated as President.

If we can't have all we want, let's not poison our days and sour our dispositions with worry and resentment. Let's be good to ourselves. Let's try to be philosophical about it. "If you have what seems to you insufficient," said one of Rome's greatest philosophers, Seneca, "then you will be miserable even if you possess the world."

And let's remember this: even if we owned the entire United States with a hog-tight fence around it, we could eat only three meals a day and sleep in only one bed at a time.

To lessen financial worries, let's try to follow these eleven rules:

1. Get the facts down on paper.

2. Get a tailor-made budget that really fits your needs 1

3. Learn how to spend wisely.

4. Don't increase your headaches with your income.

5. Try to build credit, in the event you must borrow.

6. Protect yourself against illness, fire, and emergency expenses.

7. Do not have your life-insurance proceeds paid to your widow in cash.

8. Teach your children a responsible attitude towards money.

9. If necessary, make a little extra money off your kitchen stove.

10. Don't gamble-ever.

11. If we can't possibly improve our financial situation, let's be good to ourselves and stop resenting what can't be changed.

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Part Ten - "How I Conquered Worry"

32 True Stories

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Six Major Troubles Hit Me All At Once

BY C.I. BLACK WOOD

Proprietor, Blackwood-Davis Business College Oklahoma City, 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?

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I Can Turn Myself in to a Shouting Optimist Within an Hour

By

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.

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How I Got Rid Of An Inferiority Complex

By

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.