Don't sweat the small stuff; it'll be a big relief

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July 20, 2012

Don't sweat the small stuff; it'll be a big relief

By MATT CHRISTIAN Princeton Times The Zope Gazette Fri Jul 20, 2012, 05:00 AM EDT

PRINCETON — — I was too young to understand the greatest piece of advice that someone ever gave me. At the time, I was 13 years old, attending Athens Middle School, and generally worried about what people thought and how to get people to like me.

It was so worrying for me that a lot of times, I came home from school and lay down on the couch, frustrated and stressed from my day. I would get severe migraine type headaches and be out of playing outside because of this.

My dad and I drove over to Concord University and when we got there, he presented me with a quandary.

“Imagine yourself on the roof of a very tall building and everything in your life is on the another building right beside of it,” He asked, “What are you willing to cross to the other building for?”

I later learned that my dad had many of the same problems and had read a book by Stephen R. Covey that told him “don't sweat the small stuff.”

When you're in middle school and high school, it's almost impossible to avoid sweating the small stuff. You're trying to wear the right brand of clothes to impress people, worried about getting good grades, and dealing with whatever drama your friends have going on.

Still, as I got older, I began to understand my dad's advice.

I think the first real time I understood was in 9th grade science class. We had a teacher that insisted we take “lots of notes.” So, I sweated the small stuff enough to take the notes but my grades were not where they needed to be.

I got an 80 on the first test, for example.

As I read and reread the test, it occurred to me that she was testing on the key concepts in the book and not on the things she was talking about in class. She would get distracted by our questions and delve into unrelated explanations that weren't on the test.

I talked with my dad and started to ignore her. I actually would ask the kind of questions to get her distracted (I was mildly vindictive at that age) just so that the people in our class would have a tougher time.

From that moment on, most of what little notes I took in class were football or basketball plays that I drew in class.

That's how I learned not to sweat the small stuff — not worrying about notes in class where everything on the tests was straight out of the book.

A few days ago, I saw that Covey had passed away and I thought about my dad because of his advice that he found in Covey's book.

Because for the last couple of weeks, I've done nothing but sweat the small stuff. People pull out in front of me and I get mad. Someone wants to argue with the Walmart cashier over $0.20, we should knife them.

Since I saw the Covey news, I've embarked on a program to rededicate myself to not sweating the small stuff. And instead of worrying about things, I actually have had time to take pictures as a hobby and to take my wife out on a date. And I've been able to get more than three hours sleep.

Matt Christian is a reporter for the Princeton Times.

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Don't sweat the small stuff; it'll be a big relief

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