Audiobook (abridged)1 hour
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...And It's All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life
Written by Richard Carlson
Narrated by Richard Carlson
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...and It's All Small Stuff is an audiobook that tells you how to keep from letting the little things in life drive you crazy. In thoughtful and insightful language, author Richard Carlson reveals ways to calm down in the midst of your incredibly hurried, stress-filled life.
You can learn to put things into perspective by making the small daily changes Dr. Carlson suggests, including advice such as "Choose your battles wisely"; "Remind yourself that when you die, your 'in' box won't he empty"; and "Make peace with imperfection." With Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... you'll also learn how to:
With gentle, supportive suggestions, Dr. Carlson reveals ways to make your actions more peaceful and caring, with the added benefit of making your life more calm and stress-free.
You can learn to put things into perspective by making the small daily changes Dr. Carlson suggests, including advice such as "Choose your battles wisely"; "Remind yourself that when you die, your 'in' box won't he empty"; and "Make peace with imperfection." With Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... you'll also learn how to:
- Live in the present moment
- Let others have the glory at times
- Lower your tolerance to stress
- Trust your intuitions
- Live each day as it might be your last
With gentle, supportive suggestions, Dr. Carlson reveals ways to make your actions more peaceful and caring, with the added benefit of making your life more calm and stress-free.
Author
Richard Carlson
Richard Carlson PhD was a stress consultant in private practice and the best-selling author of numerous books, including Don't Sweat the Small Stuff and Slowing Down to the Speed of Life. He was also the co-author of Handbook for the Soul.
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Reviews for Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...And It's All Small Stuff
Rating: 4.505703422053232 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
263 ratings33 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A little too warm & fuzzy for me - I should have expected that though. I got turned off by the number of times the author uses "love" in the text. To be fair, I'm only a few dozen pages in, I'll probably keep going back to it to see if it gets any more palatable.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I got a lot out of this book. It's short chapters made it a fast and fun read. Everyone could always use tips on how to have you enjoy life more. I always thought that I didn't "sweat the small stuff" but I realize now that I could use some improvement. It was really an eye opener. I highly recommend it.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5What a load of self serving egotistical crap. It is en vogue to say how wonderful this book is but I found it to be just the authors way of telling you how wonderful he is. Pity one star is the lowest.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very practical points, easy to remember, easy to use them in everday challenges!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5?The purpose of life isn?t to get it all done, but to enjoy each step on the journey?, says Richard Carlson as the core message of this simple but engaging book.The title encourages us not to get drawn into living our lives constantly dealing with the small stuff. It?s referring to the way that things ?of the moment? gain an unwarranted importance which consumes our time, leaving us with scarcely the time to ask ourselves what is important, much less the time to pursue it.The book is structured as 100 chapters, each of only one or two pages and each dealing with a simple strategy to retrieve our lives from the reactive state that we too easily find ourselves in.The message of the book is don?t waste time on the small stuff and of course, however important we may believe our lives are, if we stand back far enough, everything becomes small stuff. Several of the chapters are used to help the reader recognise this perspective. The approach to this illustrates the simplicity of the ideas presented. For example in the midst of an argument to become aware of your breathing and count to ten. To ask yourself whether the issue you are fighting for will be important to you in a year?s time. To reflect that with the passage of a period as brief as 100 years, none of us will still be around. Other chapters offer approaches that can help you change your approach and for example become more patient, considerate, thankful, and help you gain control of your perspective on life.The ideas are simple, but this is their strength. They reflect what we already know. Richard doesn?t set out to teach ideas, rather to gently remind us and encourage us to create a little space to adopt them in our all too reactive lives.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Awesome book I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was absolutely needed. I LOVE THIS BOOK. If you are in a slump, listen. The values are life changing if applied.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was abridged. I would have given it 5 stars, but it has less chapters than the book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent book and much needed in this fast moving noisy world today.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was recommended to me by my friend whom he said greatly influenced his calm way of thinking. I loved how the author reminds us to consciously think of what's really important in our lives and not what's always urgent. Small stuffs can wait and most of the times unimportant. Sometimes we just have to shift our focus on how we be more kind, gentle, and grateful of the present moment and nurture the process just like we are planting a tree and giving an unconditional love to it. I liked how he emphasized 100 years from now do we think all the things we worry now remembered, of course not! So we should always be focusing our efforts in crafting long run contributions/legacies we can imprint on earth while we are still alive.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...And it's All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson
This book is a simple book that is comprised of 100 small ways to improve happiness and tranquility in your life. Each tip is only a page or two long and are actually simple things that make a lot of sense. For instance, instead of interrupting someone to agree or disagree on whatever they are talking about., let them finish what they are saying. In other words, let them have their glory, you don't have to be the center of attention all the time. There were several times throughout the book where I found myself saying 'I am so guilty of that!' One of them talks about not letting things get to you, meaning don't sit there and continue to think of the situation and let it fester. I am guilty of this. However, as I try to live as much of a drama free life as possible, I have found that I also already employ several tactics described in this book. For instance, I always try to see the viewpoint of others. This is a pretty quick read, or can just be read a little bit over time. I would think that by even doing a few of these things, people would find their lives to be a bit simpler and more peaceful. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book really helped me. I have some key points I took away that I plan to implement right away. I recommend it to anyone stressing over small meaningless things in life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book has benefited me a lot, I used to take everything as a priority 1, this book has taught me how to relax and at the same time complete my work, as what Carlson said: ?The purpose of life isn?t to get it all done, but to enjoy each step on the journey?, a very inspirational quote. There are 100 steps to complete the whole book, easy vocabulary that everyone can understand, its a very nice, short book that can help a lot of people.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Carlson puts life in perspective in this most enjoyably short audio-book. I am most thankful for the clarity of his thinking and at the same time for colorful presentation. The book is full of meaning without the noise that often accompanies such books!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love re reading this book! So insightful! Makes you think about things you would’ve never considered before.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Overall, I think this is a good book. It offers good advice for ways to reduce stress in our lives and to help us see that indeed, "it is all small stuff" because we often, to resort to a clich?, "make mountains out of mole hills".
I think that some of the strategies offered are so simple they should be obvious, but I suppose the point of writing a book for an audience of overly stressed people in an overly stressed world is that often things that should be obvious really aren't.
As I was reading the book, I did find that the more I got into the book, the more repetitive I thought it got. This is a very easy read with short chapters of typically no more than 1 - 2 pages each. And while those short chapters are probably great for our modern world where people seem to have the attention span of a nanosecond some days (Okay, that's a slight exaggeration on my part.), I think it's the short chapters that began to make it seem repetitive.
Carlson would mention a concept such as "turn your melodrama into a mellow-drama" in one chapter and then he would revisit that concept a couple of chapters later. Some concepts he revisited 3-4 times within the book. And while each chapter does focus on a specific strategy, I found myself withing that he had at least taken each strategy that related to a concept and grouped the chapters dealing with those particular strategy closer together in the book. Even better would perhaps have been combining some of the chapters as they addressed the same concept (i.e Each strategy for turning your melodrama into a mellow-drama could have been included in one chapter instead of three or four chapters.) - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good ideas in quick-read format.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quick book regarding the specifics in life on how to appreciate the everything without making a big deal out of the small things.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not rocket science advice but a timely reminder of some small practical tips that get the blood pressure down and put things in perspective. One of my favourites is one someone is driving you up the wall with a whole range of negative behaviour, take time out to consider what this is teaching you. Used this with a Boss who is a sexist, megalomaniac bully(sadly not an exaggeration!) to make sure that I examined any bit of my behaviour that could fall into the same way of behaviouring.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this collection of one hundred "Open Your Eyes" hints to true happiness, I often found myself drifting and wondering. Sure, the things Carlson suggests in his book are wonderful, but I couldn't help but asking: "How do you focus on inner peace when it's a struggle to keep the lights on?" I got a little too hung up on thinking these tips would only work for the affluent--and when they did seem in reach, there were simply too many of them. That's precisely the reason why I've been reading this book off and on (and over and over) for seven months. There simply isn't any other way to tackle it effectively. The short blurbs are complete wisdom, and it is a book truly worth owning and ingesting piece by piece.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5this is great if you need some help keeping your balance.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bought this years ago when it was first all the rage. I don't usually jump on bandwagons like this, but I was at a crossroads in my life and spending a lot of time in Books-A-Million, where the books were on display. It helped me rectify some things in my own mind.Recently, I've been at another crossroads and have turned to several other books for some clarification, so I decided to give this another read-through. I'm glad I did.I forgot how much insight there is within the pages of this text. Using advice and philosophies from multiple sources, Carlson delivers a series of a hundred truisms that everyone should consider at least once in their lives. He doesn't lay anything on heavy-handed, and there is no religious connotation to the advice (in fact, there is a strong Eastern philosophical leaning to many of the statements). Excellent recommendations about living your life, some that I picked up and still follow since my first read, some that I've forgotten and plan to try incorporating now.Hard not to recommend this one to anyone looking to find changes to help them live a better life.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good commonsense advice, we all should try and live by. Believe me it is quite hard to change your personality, but will always try.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5FAIR READ. MAKES YOU LOOK AT SITUATIONS DIFFERENTLY.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When I'm stressing out and about to tear my hair out until I'm bald, I hit this book. It gives you a chance to stop, breathe, and realize life isn't all that bad after all. And neither are people.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this book a quick read. It's not a particularly deep book but it does have some practical advice for keeping things in perspective (a very good thing when one is unemployed and trying to provide for one's family). The bit that fascinated me the most is that the author is from the Bay Area so some of his specific examples hit very close to home. I am sending this book along to another Bay Area resident who I hope will enjoy this book too.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Like so many books for self-help, there's a huge disconnect between the ease of stating the philosophy, and the ease of implementing it. Besides the huge disconnect between the imagined problem being solved and the real problems most people face.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent Book!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5fantastic listen, so many good points in this book, are you chasing goals “out there” or is the goal the inner content? I was also reminded not to worry about what I think I’m late to do, instead just focus one step at a time
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don?t Sweat the Small Stuff?and it?s all small stuff: simple ways to keep the little things from taking over your life, by Richard Carlson, suggests 100 ways for people to change the way they think about or address the stress in their lives. Each of the suggestions is presented on one or two small pages, which can be quickly read and understood. Most of them address specific issues such as, ?Make Peace with Imperfection? or ?Become More Patient? or ?Become a Less Aggressive Driver? or ?Do One Thing at a Time.? The book does not espouse a spiritual approach. However, several of the techniques seem to come from a Buddhist tradition, e.g., ?Quiet the Mind? or ?Practice Ignoring Your Negative Thoughts? or ?Learn to Live in the Present Moment? or ?Resist the Urge to Criticize.? Overall this book is a short and simple list of suggestions to help us understand that stress is a ubiquitous part of life, which must be addressed internally by the way we react to it. Carlson does not provide a panacea for stress, but he does provide some helpful concepts. He also presents a short list of selected reading.