Growth is not a result of sudden inspiration, but scheduled intentionality.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1088 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 specially dedicated to Mady Smith.
Here’s the upgrade:
You may believe growth comes from waiting for the flash of inspiration, but upgraded thinking knows growth thrives on rhythm and design.
Here’s the story:
In 1869, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev faced a deadline. The next volume of his introductory chemistry textbook was due to the publisher. The first volume had covered the first eight elements in detail. The second volume for the contract needed to organize the remaining fifty-five known elements into the same framework. There was no time to describe each one as an isolated curiosity. He had to compare them. Systematize them. Make them fit.
So he did what any person under constraint does. He stopped treating elements individually and started grouping them by properties. He made cards for each one—their atomic weights, their characteristics—and arranged them like a game of solitaire. Looking for pattern. And the pattern emerged. The periodic table wasn’t handed to him in a dream. It was built under pressure, through methodical work, by a man who had to organize chaos because his deadline demanded it.
This is what historians like Michael Gordin discovered when they looked past the myth. The romanticized story says Mendeleev fell asleep exhausted and woke with the answer. The real story is better. It’s practical. It’s reproducible. He didn’t need unlimited freedom. He needed the constraint of a project. The boundary of a deadline. The necessity to figure out a design.
We’ve been looking this week at The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth as outlined by John Maxwell. The 7th is The Law of Design. To maximize growth, you must design your life and schedule intentionally rather than living reactively. Growth doesn’t just fall from the sky. You design it into your days. Most people have the most control over the beginning and end of each day. These have been called AM/PM bookends. What if you committed to one ritual of growth in the morning and evening? You block your time deliberately. You show up at the same time. You commit to the structure.
Then the growth appears. Not the other way around. Mendeleev had sixty-three known elements. He didn’t have total freedom. He had a framework. And inside that framework, he built something that 150 years of scientific growth has relied upon. What you have is every single day. You have an AM and a PM. You have the power to control how you will show up every day. Not react to it. Design it.
The better story to tell yourself is, “I design my days for growth.” Growth thrives on rhythm. You will never randomly fall into growth by reacting to what each day throws at you. Constraint creates freedom. Structure creates capacity. Intention creates results. The periodic occurring of atomic structure wasn’t a dream. It was design. And your growth won’t be a dream either. It will be a choice. Every morning. Every evening. Every single day.
Tell me a story of how your days are designed to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “What parts of your days do you have the most control of and what do you do with them?” 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 http://www.fromchad.com.
