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.
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.
I would have been a failure in life if I had let those worries and fears whip me. Every day
and every hour of the day, I brooded over my tall, gaunt, weak body. I could hardly think
of anything else. My embarrassment, my fear, was so intense that it is almost
impossible to describe it. My mother knew how I felt. She had been a school-teacher, so
she said to me: "Son, you ought to get an education, you ought to make your living with
your mind because your body will always be a handicap."
Since my parents were unable to send me to college, I knew I would have to make my
own way; so I hunted and trapped opossum, skunk, mink, and raccoon one winter; sold
my hides for four dollars in the spring, and then bought two little pigs with my four
dollars. I fed the pigs slop and later corn and sold them for forty dollars the next fall.
With the proceeds from the sale of the two hogs I went away to the Central Normal
College-located at Danville, Indiana. I paid a dollar and forty cents a week for my board
and fifty cents a week for my room. I wore a brown shirt my mother had made me.
(Obviously, she used brown cloth because it wouldn't show the dirt.) I wore a suit of
clothes that had once belonged to my father. Dad's clothes didn't fit me and neither did
his old congress gaiter shoes that I wore-shoes that had elastic bands in the sides that
stretched when you put them on. But the stretch had long since gone out of the bands,