Trick yourself into doing your best, and you’ll stop needing the trick.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1068 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Josh Shirey.

Here’s the upgrade: You may not feel like the stakes are high today, but upgraded thinking knows the stakes are whatever story you decide to tell yourself.

Here’s the story.

Red Smith was one of the greatest sportswriters who ever lived. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. Forty years of columns, seven days a week, about ballgames and horse races. And he hated writing. He said. “I sweat. I bleed. I’m a slow writer.” Somebody once asked him how long it took to write a column. His answer: “How much time do I have?” If he had six hours, he took six hours. He said, “If you do the best you can every day, then it’s going to be better than if you brushed it off.” Even late into his career he would sometimes spend 18 hours on a column.

He covered the last-place Philadelphia Athletics for ten years. Teams that finished dead last every season. And he never phoned it in. How? He played a trick on himself. He wrote every column for one reader. Not the millions buying the paper. One person. When asked why he poured such agonizing care and detail into ephemeral daily columns that might literally wrap fish the next day, he replied that he imagined a Broadway star reading it tomorrow. He elevated the craft in his mind as if it were for the most discerning audience. The stakes weren’t really there. He invented them. And the invention made the work real.

When I would be driving to meet the first customer of the day for an appointment, I would sometimes imagine I was starting company and driving to meet my first customer. The truth was the company was more than 30 years old and I wasn’t the owner, just an employee. But the thought would motivate me to consider how I would treat the person I was going to meet–the care, attentiveness, and energy I would give; the service I would render. I think we need these mind games. Whether it’s in marriage, parenting, sport competition, or writing a newspaper column, we can trick ourselves into doing our best: this is the call my whole career depends on. It isn’t. I know it isn’t. But by the time I walk in the door, my posture’s different. My questions are sharper. I’m listening like I’ve never heard them before. And here’s the thing — they can feel it. Every time. The stakes weren’t there. I put them there. And the work got better because of it.

Red Smith called his enthusiasm “self-generating, self-renewing.” That’s not a personality trait. That’s a practice. He was generating it. He was renewing it. With the trick of the one reader. You have something today that doesn’t feel like it matters much. A call. A conversation. A task you’ve done a thousand times.

Trick yourself. Decide it’s the one that counts. Decide the person in front of you is the first one and the last one. Decide the stakes are sky-high, even when nobody else thinks so. You’ll be amazed what shows up. The better story to tell yourself is, “I’m not waiting for the stakes to matter. I’m making them matter by how I show up.”

Tell me a story of when you tricked yourself into your best work to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s the one thing today you could treat like it matters more than it does?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at www.fromchad.com.