Chapter 12 Section 2 Use the Probability Method to Eliminate Worry

When I was young, my heart was full of worries.I was afraid of being buried alive, I was afraid of being struck by lightning, and I was afraid of going to hell after death.I'm afraid a big boy named James White will cut off my ears--as he threatened me, and I'm afraid girls will make fun of me when I take my hat off and bow to them, and I'm afraid no girl will ever marry Here's to me... I used to spend hours thinking about these big, earth-shattering questions. As the years passed, I realized that 99 percent of the things I worried about never happened.Now I know that no matter what year, the chance of me being struck by lightning is 1 in 350,000.And burial alive, even in the days before mummification—maybe only one person in ten million was buried alive.

One in eight people may die of cancer.If I must worry, I should worry about getting cancer, not about being struck by lightning or buried alive. In fact, many of our adult worries are just as absurd.Nine out of ten of our worries would go away if we assessed their worthiness in terms of probabilities. Lloyd's Insurance Company of London, the world's most famous insurance company, succeeded by relying on people's psychology that the occurrence rate is extremely low and worrying enough.It is betting against ordinary people, but it is called insurance.In fact, this is a gamble based on probability.The big insurance company has been doing well for 200 years, and unless human nature changes, it can go on for at least another 5,000 years.And it just insures you against shoes and boats, and uses probability to assure you that those disasters happen, which are not as common as most people think.If we look up probabilities, we are often surprised by the facts we find.For example, if I knew that within five years I would have to fight a battle like Gettysburg, I would be terrified.I'm going to do everything I can to increase the cost of my life insurance; I'm going to write a will and sell all my possessions and I'm going to say, "I probably won't survive this war. So I better have it In fact, according to the average rate, the number of deaths per 1,000 people between the ages of 50 and 55 is the same as the average number of deaths per 1,000 of the 160,000 soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg.

One summer I met the Herbert Salingees on the shores of Bow Lake in the Canadian Rockies.Mrs. Salinger was a very calm, self-possessed woman, and I got the impression that she was never anxious.One night I asked her if she was ever troubled by worry. "Worries?" she said. "My life was almost ruined by worry. I lived in self-inflicted misery for 11 years before I learned to conquer it. I was short-tempered, irritable, and living in a very When I'm nervous, I worry about shopping—maybe the house burns down, maybe the servants run away, maybe the kids get hit by a car... I often break out in a cold sweat from worrying, rush out of the store, run Go home and see if everything is ok, no wonder my first marriage didn't work out.

"My second husband is a lawyer, also very quiet, analytical, never worried about anything. Whenever I was nervous or anxious, he said to me 'Don't panic, let me think about it ...what are you really worried about? Let's analyze the probabilities to see if this kind of thing is possible'. "I remember one summer, we went camping in the Rocky Mountains. One night, we pitched our tent at an altitude of 7,000 feet, and there was a sudden storm. The tent shook, shook, and screamed in the strong wind. Every time I I thought for a minute that the tent was going to blow up and fly into the sky. I was terrified at the time, but my husband kept saying 'Honey, we have some Indian guides, they know everything about this place, They said that they have camped in the mountains for sixty or seventy years, and there has never been a tent blown away. According to the probability, the tent will not be blown away tonight. Even if it blows away, we can hide in other tents Go in, so you don't have to be nervous'. I relaxed and got a good night's sleep. And nothing happened... 'According to the probability, this kind of thing can't happen', this sentence destroyed me 90% My worries have made my life in the past 20 years very beautiful and peaceful."

General George Cook once said: "Almost all worries and sorrows come from people's imagination rather than reality." As I look back on myself over the past few decades, I see that this is how most of my worries arose.James Grant told me that his experience was the same.Every time he buys fruit (such as oranges) from Florida, he often has some strange thoughts in his mind, such as "what if the train crashes", "what if the fruit rolls all over the ground", "what if my car passes by What should I do if the bridge suddenly collapses at the time of the bridge?"Although these fruits were insured, he still worried that if the train was delayed, his fruits would not be sold. He even suspected that he had a stomach ulcer because of excessive worry, so he went to the doctor for examination.The doctor told him that there was nothing wrong with him except that he was too nervous. "That's when I realized the truth," he said. "I started asking myself, 'James, how many truckloads of fruit have you handled over the years.' The answer was, 'About 25,000 truckloads.' How many have been in car accidents'. The answer was 'Ow - about five'. I then asked 'Do you know what this means? The probability is 1 in 5000! So what do you have to worry about'.

"Then I said to myself 'the bridge might fall'. I asked myself 'how many cars have you lost in the past because of a bridge collapse'. The answer was 'none'. I said to myself: 'You Because of a bridge that has never collapsed, because of 1/5000 of the train accidents, it is too stupid to worry about ulcers. From then on, I realized that I was stupid in the past. So I never did it for' Stomach ulcers' bother me." The U.S. Navy also uses numbers based on probability to boost morale.Clyde Mars, a former Navy man, tells the story of how he and his shipmates were terrified when they were sent aboard a tanker.This tanker is carrying high unit gasoline.They believed that if the tanker was torpedoed, they would surely die.However, the naval unit immediately issued some very correct statistics, stating that out of 100 tankers hit by torpedoes, 60% did not sink into the sea.Of the 40 ships that sank into the sea, only 5 sank in less than 5 minutes. "After knowing the numbers, everyone on the ship feels better, we know that we have a chance to jump off the ship. According to the odds, we will not die here."