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CHAPTER TWELVE

STOP WORRYING

ore than any other change, ending your habit of worrying will create the
single biggest positive impact in your life. Believe it or not, you were taught
how to worry. As a kid, you heard your parents worrying constantly “Be careful,”
“Wear a hat or you’ll catch a cold,” and “Don’t sit so close to the TV.” As adults, we spend
way too much time and energy worrying about things that we can’t control or that
could go wrong. When you get to be near the end of your life, you’ll wish you
hadn’t.

Dr. Karl Pillemer is a professor of Human Development at Cornell University
and is the founder of the Legacy Project. He has met with 1,200 senior citizens to
discuss the meaning of life. He was “shocked” to learn that most people near the
end of their lives had the same regret: I wish I hadn’t spent so much of my
lifetime worrying. Their advice was “devastatingly simple and direct: worry is an
enormous waste of your precious and limited lifetime.”