Over the years, I’ve seen that ninety percent of the things I feared and worried about didn’t happen. I was afraid of dying from a lightning strike, but I knew that according to statistics, the probability of dying from lightning was only one in three hundred and fifty thousand. My fear of being buried alive was far more pointless… If I had to be afraid of something, I might worry about getting cancer instead of being struck by lightning or being buried alive. Which his probability was one in eight.
Of course, these are the fears, worries and sorrows I experienced during my childhood and youth. However, what happened during the maturity period is at least as funny as these. According to the law of averages, we’ll get rid of nine-tenths of those worries if we stop complaining until we know if there’s any indication that our worries are warranted.
London-based Lloyd’s, the world’s most famous insurance company, has made millions of dollars because of people’s frustrations over things that are so unlikely to happen. Lloyd’s Of London makes a kind of bet with people that the disasters they fear will never happen. However, this is called ‘insurance’, not ‘bet’. In fact, this is really nothing more than a bet made on the basis of the law of averages. This famous insurance company has been maintaining its power for exactly two hundred years, and as long as human nature does not change, it will maintain its power by insuring shoes and ships against disasters that will not occur as often as people think, according to the law of averages, for another fifty centuries.
Dale Carnegie – “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”
