Chapter 25 Chapter 3 8 steps to get out of a lonely and worried life

As mentioned earlier, Willie Carell's panacea formula for eliminating worries, can it solve all your worries?No, it is certainly not a panacea. In this case, what should we do?The answer is - we must learn the following three basic steps to analyze problems and use them to solve various difficulties.The three steps are as follows: Step 1: See the facts. Step Two: Analyze the facts. Step Three: Make a decision and then act on it. This is what Aristotle taught people, and he used them.If we want to solve the problems that oppress us and make us live in hell all day, then we must apply these methods to practical life.

Let's first look at the first step: see the facts.Why is it so important to see the facts?Because unless we see the facts, we cannot solve problems intelligently.Without these facts, we can only grope around in confusion. This is not my own research, but the late Herbert Hawkes, dean of Columbia College, Columbia University.He has helped 200,000 middle school students solve their worries."Confusion is the main cause of worry," he told me. He believes that more than half of people's worries are caused by people not having enough knowledge to make decisions.He said: "For example, if I have a problem that must be solved by next Tuesday, I will definitely not try to make a decision until next Tuesday. I will concentrate on gathering all the facts about the problem during this time. I will not worry, I will not be sad about this problem, and I will not lose sleep. I will gather all the facts with all my heart. When it gets to Tuesday, if I have seen all the facts, generally speaking, the problem It has also been resolved.”

I asked Dean Hawkes if this was proof that he had put his worries aside completely?He said, "Yes, I think I can honestly say that I'm living without any worries at all. I've found," he continued, "that if a person can spend all his worrying time in a detached If you look for the facts with a very objective attitude, then, under the sunshine of knowledge, all worries will disappear.” But how do most people do it?If we want to consider the facts——Edison once said solemnly: "In order to avoid spending time thinking, a person often adopts various means." That is to say, we usually look for what we have thought of, like hunting dogs. And ignore everything else—we need only those facts that fit us, those that fit only our preconceived prejudices, our wishful thinking.

As André Marross said: "Whatever suits our personal desires seems to be the truth, and everything else only makes us angry." No wonder we find it so difficult to get answers to our questions.It's like we always assume that 2 plus 2 equals 5. Isn't this even a second-grade arithmetic problem?But in fact, there are indeed many people in the world who insist that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or equals 500, so that they make their own life and other people's life very uncomfortable. Faced with such a situation, what should we do?We should get rid of emotional factors from our thinking. As Dean Hawkes said, we must see the essence of things clearly with a "detached and objective" attitude.

It is not an easy thing to do in times of worry.When we're worried, we tend to get emotional.However, I have found two methods that will help us see all the facts: First, while gathering all the facts, I pretended that I was not gathering them for myself, but that I was doing it for someone else. This allowed me to maintain a calm and detached attitude, and it is also very helpful for us to control our emotions. help. Second, in ascertaining the facts that cause my worries, I sometimes have to pretend that I am the other party's lawyer-in other words, I also have to collect some facts that are not good for me, collect those that undermine my hopes, and Some facts that I don't want to face.

After doing these two steps, I will write down all the facts on this side and the other side.At this point, I usually find that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. And that's the point I'm trying to make: You, me, Einstein, not even the US Supreme Court can make an intelligent decision on any issue without looking at the facts first.Edison was well aware of this, and the 2,500 notebooks he left behind after his death contained facts about the problems he faced. So, the first way to deal with worry is to see the facts.Let us follow the lead of Dean Hawkes: don't think about how to solve the problem until you have collected all the facts in an objective manner.

Gathering all the facts in the world won't do us one iota of help if you don't analyze and interpret them. In my personal experience, it is much easier if all the facts are written down first and then analyzed.In fact, simply getting the facts down on paper and articulating our problem can prompt us to make a sound decision. There is a Chinese saying that "seeing once is worth hearing a hundred times".Let me show you the results of this method by way of example, and I will tell you how one actually applies what we have said above to practical life. Take the Glenn Rickfield thing.I knew this man several years ago, and he was a very successful American businessman in the Far East. In 1942, the Japanese army occupied Shanghai, and Mr. Li Kefei was in China.When he was a guest at my house, he told the following story:

Shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they captured Shanghai. At that time, I was the manager of Shanghai Asia Life Insurance Company.They sent a so-called 'military liquidator' (actually an admiral) and ordered me to assist him in liquidating our property.Faced with this kind of thing, I have no choice but to cooperate with them, or it's over—and the so-called end means dying by their swords. I had to follow their orders because I had nowhere to go.However, I left an insurance premium of about $750,000 off the list.The reason why I didn't fill it in is because the money belongs to our company in Hong Kong and has nothing to do with the assets of the Shanghai company.But I am still worried that if the Japanese find out about this, it may be very bad for me.Sure enough, they were soon discovered.

I happened to be out of the office when they found out about it, but my head of accounting was there.He told me that the Japanese admiral lost his temper and slapped the table and cursed at people, saying that I was a traitor, a robber, and that I had insulted the Japanese Imperial Army.I knew what he meant when he said that, and I thought I might be caught by them and put in the gendarmerie.The gendarmerie is the execution chamber of the Japanese secret police.I have friends who would rather kill themselves than be sent to that place.Some friends of mine were interrogated there for 10 days and died there after being tortured in various ways.I may now be locked up in the Gendarmerie too.What should I do?When I got the news on a Sunday afternoon, I think I was terrified.If I can't find a solution to my problem, I'm going to be scared to death.For years, whenever I was worried, I would sit at my typewriter, type out the following two questions, and then allow myself to come up with an answer to the question: First, what am I worried about?Second, what can I do?

I don't write down the questions at first, I just answer the two questions in my mind.I stopped doing that a few years ago though.I found that writing down both the question and the answer helped me to think more clearly.So, on that Sunday afternoon, I went straight to my room at the Shanghai YMCA, took out my typewriter, and typed the following: First, what am I worried about? I fear that tomorrow morning I will be locked up in the Japanese Gendarmerie. Second, what can I do? I spent a few hours thinking about this problem and wrote down 4 possible actions I could take and how each would lead to me.

1.I can try to explain this to the Japanese admiral.But he can't speak English, if I find a translator to explain to him, it is likely to make him angry, then I may only have a dead end.Because he is a very cruel man, I would rather be in the gendarmerie than have useless conversations with him. 2.This is the most immediate kind - I can escape.But that's impossible because they're watching me all the time.I was registered in and out of the YMCA, and if I tried to escape, I would probably be shot straight away if caught. 3.I can also stay in the room and not go to work.But if I do this, the Japanese admiral will become suspicious, and he may send someone to arrest me, never give me a chance to speak, and put me in the gendarmerie. 4.On Monday morning, I went to work in the company as usual.If I did, the Japanese admiral would probably be busy and forget about me.And even if he thought about it, he might have calmed down and stopped bothering me.If that's the case, I'm out of trouble.Even if he still came to see me, I still had a chance to explain to him, so I should go to the office on Monday morning as usual, and pretend that nothing happened. Once I had the whole thing figured out, I decided on a fourth plan—going to work on Monday morning as usual.Afterwards, I breathed a sigh of relief. When I walked into the office the next morning, the Japanese admiral was sitting there with a cigarette in his mouth, gave me his usual look, but said nothing. 6 weeks later, man, thank goodness, he was finally transferred back to Tokyo, and by then all my worries were gone! As I said before, the reason why I was able to get this life back is probably because I wrote all kinds of different situations and the possible consequences of each step that Sunday afternoon, and then made a decision very calmly.If I didn't take that approach, I might be confused or indecisive enough to make mistakes in a pinch.If I didn't analyze my problem and make a decision, I'd be in a tizzy all Sunday afternoon, I wouldn't be able to sleep that night, and I'd probably go to work on Monday morning with a panicked, sad look on my face--that alone would make that The Japanese admiral's suspicions led him to take other actions. Experience has shown that making decisions gradually can be of great help.We all suffer from embarrassment and mental breakdown because we are unable to achieve the established goals, and we cannot control ourselves, and we are always confined to an unbearable small circle.I've found that once I make a decision with clarity and certainty, 50% of my worries go away, and the other 40% usually disappears once I act on the decision. Taking these 4 steps can usually eliminate 90% of our worries: First, write down clearly what our fears are. Second, write down what we can do about it. Third, decide what to do. Fourth, act on the decision immediately. Now, Glen Rickoff has become one of the most important American businessmen in Asia. He told me very sincerely that his success should be attributed to this method of analyzing worries and daring to face them squarely. When I asked White Phillips, the most successful oil businessman in Oklahoma, how he put his determination into action, he replied: If we think about things in an unreasonable way, there will be worries and confusion. When investigation and overthinking are harmful to us, that is when we should make up our minds, act on them, and never look back." So why don't you apply Glenn Rickoff's method to your worries?Here's the first step in getting out of a life of loneliness and worry: First question - what am I worried about? Second question - what can I do? The third question - what do I decide to do? Fourth question - when do I start doing it?