Day-tight Compartments

So I got to thinking the other day (way too much time for that it seems) and I thought waaaaay back to a Dale Carnegie course that I took back in my days at Spartan Controls.

In his book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie talks about living your life in day-tight compartments. Without the book to quote, and with only my poor memory, you will have to deal with my understanding of the concept... and remember, I learned about this a long time ago.

(worth noting - we also discussed many memory improvement techniques - some set in, others did not, apparently ;)

Anyways - all of us have trouble with day-tight compartments, and until recently I had forgotten all about this. The idea here is that there is no sense in carrying forward the bad experience from yesterday into today, or to start worrying about something that you have to do in the morning before you go to sleep at night. More or less - worry about one day at a time, and once it's done, it's over - forget about it (well, still learn from our mistakes, but do not let them haunt you for days/weeks/years/decades to come - there is no point).

It has been my experience that athletes tend to carry a lot of "yesterday's negativity" with them on through eternity. I could have done this different, or should have done that. As I discussed previously in my "measuring performance" rant, you will see that this is a bad idea.

Lamenting over past performances will do you little good going forward. Yes, we can learn from our mistakes, but again - lamenting over them is pointless.

There is a lot more to this topic, in fact so much more that one (including Carnegie) could write a book :) If you are interested in improving your life, buy his book, read through it, and apply his common sense principles to your life where applicable.

The kick that I get out of Carnegie's principles on living life is that he wrote them a very long time ago - and for the most part, nearly all of them are applicable today... that in and of itself is impressive :) I think we could all stand to learn a thing or two from his writings...