Personal Development

Things People Worry About:

Earl Nightingale, in  A Time to Risk or Sit  talks about things that people worry about. It is interesting account, even if the statistics are not verifiable, of how much time waste worrying about things in their life. Most worrying is a futile exercise because it uses a 'What if...?' mode of thinking. This is what Earl Nightingale says...

Out of all things that people worry about: 

• 40% - Things that never happen
• 30% - Things over and past that can never be changed by all the worry in the world
• 12% - Needless worries about our health
• 10% - Petty miscellaneous worries
• 8% - Real, legitimate worries

Therefore, 92% of all worries are futile and take up valuable time. Only 8 % of all worries are worth spending time on. Furthermore, this 8% can be classified into two groups.

There are two types of legitimate worries:

1) Problems you can solve

2) Problems beyond our ability to solve

Earl Nightingale says that most fall into category one. I would agree with this. As Albert Einstein said, "you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it". Therefore, we have the ability to solve most problems. the issue is that we don't know how, rather than it being beyond our capabilities. 

To put this in another perspective, there are  twenty-four hours in a day. Of those,  approximately eight hours are for sleep and eight hours  for work. In between, roughly, four hours are devoted to activities, ranging from school run to traffic jams to hobbies and so on. Therefore, there are four hours left everyday that you are free to use how you want. Just use one hour  per day to devote to personal development and you can change your life!

Focus that one hour on improving yourself. Whether it is exercise, diet, spiritual practise, or improving cognitive abilities, that one hour will soon start to make a huge impact in your life. Your friends, family and colleagues will soon notice the improvement in you. You will notice them too. Don't you deserve to spend a little 'me-time' in a valuable way? So go ahead, and make that change now.

Begin by making a list of things that worry you. Then decide if they fall into either the 92% or 8% category. Repeating this practice on a regular basis will show you that most worries fall into the 92%. And once in the 92% category, just bin  the worry. You only need to focus on the 8%. And most of those you can solve...

Less worry = more happy  :-)