There's an old saying: “Worrying won’t stop the bad stuff from happening; it just stops you from enjoying the good.”

Such wisdom! It’s advice I take to heart and try to remember when I’m facing a situation like we’re going through today with the coronavirus pandemic.

Worry is the most destructive habit. I’m as bad about worrying as anyone. I always think about what can go wrong with any project. Over the years, I’ve learned that worrying doesn’t give you anything but wrinkles; something else to worry about. Worry doesn’t do any good. I know; most of the things I worried about didn’t happen.

Worry is wasting today’s time to clutter up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.

Dr. Charles Mayo, one of the co-founders of the Mayo Clinic, said: “Worry affects circulation, the heart and the glands, the whole nervous system, and profoundly affects the heart. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt.”

In my most recent book, “You Haven’t Hit Your Peak Yet!” I wrote a chapter on “The Second Ten Commandments.” The first of these new commandments reads: “Thou shall not worry, for worry is the most unproductive of all human activities. You can’t saw sawdust. A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work. People get so busy worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, they forget about today. And today is what you have to work with.”

For the first two months of this year I spent a lot of time in bookstores, in the middle of a promotion tour for my book. Browsing the shelves, I found plenty of self-help books. Some of the most popular books I saw were about worry, stress and simplifying your life.

Dale Carnegie's “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” has been one of my favorite books for the last 50 years. It was first published in 1948, but the advice it contains is just as fresh and valuable as it was then and is right-on for these uncertain times. Two sections that really knocked my socks off were about businesspeople trying to solve problems without the added burden of worrying. Carnegie credits Willis H. Carrier (whose name appears on many of our air conditioners) with these silver bullets:

1. Analyze the situation honestly and figure out what is the worst possible thing that could happen.

2. Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst, if necessary.

3. Then calmly try to improve upon the worst, which you have already agreed mentally to accept.

Also from Carnegie's book, this particular list describes how to “Break the Worry Habit Before It Breaks You”:

-- Keep busy.

-- Don’t fuss about trifles.

-- Cooperate with the inevitable.

-- Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth and refuse to give it more.

-- Don’t worry about the past.

I love this story of a little clock that almost worried itself to death. It worked itself into a frazzle thinking about how often it would have to tick in the coming year.

“I’ll have to tick two times per second, which means 120 times a minute, 7,200 times every hour and 172,800 every day!” Then it went further -- 1,209,600 every week, and a whopping 63 million times, give or take, over the next 12 months! The more it thought about that number, the more worried it became. Finally, anxiety overtook the little clock and it stopped ticking.

And it was miserable. So it consulted a psychiatrist. “I just don’t have what it takes to tick that often,” it complained.

The doctor asked, “How many ticks must you tick at one time?” The clock replied, “Just one.” The doctor suggested, “How about using your energy to just tick one tick at a time, and I think you’ll be just fine.”

So the little clock wound itself up, decided to take one tick at a time and ticked happily ever after. Taking life one tick at a time, instead of worrying about what will happen down the road, will buy you time that you would have wasted with untimely fears.

Mackay’s Moral: Worry pulls tomorrow’s cloud over today’s sunshine.

You might recall the popular movie “The Bucket List,” in which two terminally ill men escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die.

I recently received an email from a loyal reader asking if I had a bucket list and if I might write a column on the importance of having such a list because “many seniors just live one day at a time with no long-term plan.”

Well I don’t want to be among that group, and I hope you don’t either, no matter what your age. As I like to say, don’t count the years, make the years count. I’m not ready to hang it up yet and doubt that I ever will be. I still have too much to live for. I was about to go on a round-the-world trip with my wife in late March and April, but the trip has since been canceled due to the coronavirus. One of my bucket-list items was to visit as many countries as I could.

My good friend Lou Holtz told me that years ago he wrote down 107 things that he wanted to do in his life. He wanted to go to the White House, be on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, see the pope, win a college football national championship, coach at Notre Dame, make a hole-in-one in golf and a lot of other crazy but achievable things. Once he accomplished all 107 things, what did he do? He wrote down another 100 items, and he’s checking off the items on that list too.

Some people might get turned off by creating a bucket list -- thinking it’s a little morbid -- or by creating a list that is too difficult to achieve. I disagree. I believe having a bucket list keeps you motivated and goal-oriented. If nothing else, it makes you think about what you want to do in your life.

I remember taking a road trip with some friends years ago in which we took turns describing our perfect day. The range of ideas was remarkable, and often not what we would have predicted from each other. Our slogan from that trip became “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

I’m a big believer in writing myself little notes to remind me of my bucket-list items. For example, when I started out working as an envelope salesman, I dreamed of owning a factory. It became a reality for me at age 26. Another bucket-list item for me was selling to the No. 1 envelope user in the Twin Cities, General Mills. I even put a note in my hat. It took a few years, but I knocked that one off too.

When I decided to write my first book, I put a note on my desk that said: “Be a New York Times best-selling author.” That happened with “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive.” That feeling of accomplishment led me to write seven more books, including my latest from January of this year, “You Haven’t Hit Your Peak Yet!” That title came from a note on my bathroom mirror, reminding me that I still have mountains to conquer.

Having a bucket list drastically improves your life. It gives you a sense of purpose. I know it helps my time management because it makes me focus on my goals. I become more productive and efficient.

A lot of times people are too busy plowing through their daily to-do lists and lose track of what they really want to experience. Creating a bucket list can happen at any time in your life -- young or old. It’s never too late to create a list of things you want to achieve. And while no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending.

Mackay’s Moral: Make the rest of your life the best of your life.

Don Sutton, the Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, was occasionally accused of altering baseballs to create more movement on his pitches and make them harder to hit. When asked if it was true that he used a “foreign substance” on baseballs, Sutton replied, “Not true at all. Vaseline is manufactured right here in the United States of America.”

Cheating and integrity are back in the news, big time, as we hear about the Houston Astros and possibly other Major League Baseball teams having used technology to steal signs of their opponents, causing irreparable damage to the game. After an extensive investigation, it was determined that the Astros' video replay room was decoding opponents’ pitching signals using a centerfield camera and relaying the information to their batters via various signals.

Like the college admissions scandal, it will have far-reaching effects for years to come.

While it should be easy to verify credentials and performance history online, it should not be easy to lie about test scores or use technology to misrepresent one’s accomplishments. But it happens all the time.

The statistics are alarming when it comes to cheating on tests and homework, plagiarizing and copying papers from the internet. A stunning 95% of high school students in one survey admitted to some form of cheating during their high school years.

I recently heard from a college professor who was trying to figure out how to deal with a former student who posted his old tests (as well as other professors’ tests) online, and the current students who benefitted from ill-gotten answers. The proposed punishments went from losing course credit for current students to taking away the perpetrator’s degree. That’s a high price to pay for an already expensive college education.

Ask any human resources manager how many resumes contain a little -- or a lot -- of creative but not quite accurate self-promotion. Then ask them how many of those cheaters land the job. Or if they actually got hired, how long it took to expose their lack of qualifications.

As any businessperson knows, when you cheat at business, you lose business.

In sports, there is a referee or umpire to make sure participants play by the rules, and consequences of violations are usually immediate. But it’s different in business. Regulations and watchdog groups do their best to guard against malfeasance, but those decisions are rarely swift enough to benefit affected customers. Cheaters can drag out complaints for months or years of court proceedings. And the beleaguered client often feels doubly cheated when they have to wait for resolution.

We’re way beyond the butcher with his thumb on the scale here. Little acts of deception often lead to bigger acts. As Sir Walter Scott wrote, “Oh what a dangerous web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

My advice is to play by the rules, no matter how hard or expensive or lonely it may be. Set your code of conduct higher than the rules, so your customers know that you will never cheat them and that they can trust your word and your products and services. Your reputation as a person and a businessperson should line up. And if all else fails, ask yourself, would you want someone to treat your grandmother this way?

Mackay’s Moral: If you have to cheat to get ahead, you’ve already lost.