Part One Fundamental Facts You Should Know about Worry
第一篇　了解忧虑的基本事实

1 Live in “Day-tight Compartments”

In the spring of 1871, a young man picked up a book and read twenty-one words that had a profound effect on his future. A medical student at the Montreal General Hospital, he was worried about passing the final examination, worried about what to do, where to go, how to build up a practice, how to make a living.

The twenty-one words that this young medical student read in 1871 helped him to become the most famous physician of his generation. He organised the world-famous Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford—the highest honour that can be bestowed upon any medical man in the British Empire. He was knighted by the King of England. When he died, two huge volumes containing 1，466 pages were required to tell the story of his life.

His name was Sir William Osler.Here are the twenty-one words that he read in the spring of 1871—twenty-one words from Thomas Carlyle that helped him lead a life free from worry:“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

Forty-two years later, on a soft spring night when the tulips were blooming on the campus, this man, Sir William Osler, addressed the students of Yale University. He told those Yale students that a man like himself who had been a professor in four universities and had written a popular book was supposed to have “brains of a special quality”. He declared that that was untrue. He said that his intimate friends knew that his brains were “of the most mediocre character”.