He taught about the same river for thirty years. Then, at retirement, he built a boat and got in it.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1137 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. And this message is dedicated to Chip Phillips.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may know the river by heart, but upgraded thinking knows that knowing the river and riding it are two different lives.

Here’s the story:

Chip Phillips spent his career as a high school English teacher. For decades, one of the books he taught was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain’s story of a boy, a raft, and the great brown river running down the middle of the country.

He taught the Mississippi. He diagrammed it on the board. He explained the pull of the current, the freedom of the raft, the meaning of the water. Year after year, class after class, he stood at the front of the room and talked about the river.

And then he retired.

Most people, when they finally put down the chalk, put down the dream with it. Chip did the opposite. He went out to his yard and, with his own hands, he built a houseboat. He named her the Northern Sun. And one morning he pushed off from Hannibal, Missouri — Mark Twain’s own hometown — and floated down the Mississippi.

Not as a lesson plan. Not as a unit on symbolism. As a man finally living inside the thing he had spent thirty years only pointing at.

Chip already knew everything about that water. He’d read every chapter, taught every theme, answered every question a sixteen-year-old could throw at him. Knowledge was never his problem. Getting in the boat was.

There is something you have studied for years. Some river you can describe better than almost anyone. You know the theory of the marriage you want, the business you’d start, the book you’d write, the life you keep sketching in your head. You’ve explained it to other people. You could teach a class on it.

Stop teaching the river. Get in the boat. For Chip his love for literature became his lived experience. What’s the shift for you?

The better story to tell yourself is, “I don’t have to read about an adventure when I’m living it.”

Tell me a story of launching to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s the boat you keep describing but never board?” 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.