As the years passed, I came to see that ninety percent of the things I had feared and worried about never came to pass. I was afraid of being killed by lightning, even though the statistics told me my chance of dying that way was only one in three hundred and fifty thousand. My fear of being buried alive was even more absurd. If I really had to fear and worry about something, then instead of lightning or live burial I might have worried about cancer — the odds of which were one in eight.

Of course, these were the fears, anxieties, and sorrows of my childhood and youth. But the ones I lived through in my mature years were every bit as ridiculous.

According to the law of averages, if we would only stop fretting long enough to ask whether there is any real reason for our worries, we would be rid of nine-tenths of them.

Lloyd’s of London, the most famous insurance company in the world, has made millions of dollars from the grief people feel over things that are very unlikely ever to happen. In essence, Lloyd’s is making a bet with people that the disasters they dread will never come to pass. Only they don’t call it a “bet” — they call it “insurance.” In truth, it is nothing more than a wager placed on the law of averages. This famous company has held its power for two full centuries, and as long as human nature does not change, it will go on for another fifty centuries, insuring shoes and ships against catastrophes that — by the law of averages — simply do not occur as often as people imagine.

— Dale Carnegie, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”