He made a $69 million masterpiece by never trying to make one.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1147 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 Mike Winkelmann. 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.
Here’s the upgrade:
You want a great life, but upgraded thinking knows it’s built out of great days, one after another.
Here’s the story:
On May 1st, 2007, a graphic designer in Charleston, South Carolina, named Mike Winkelmann decided to make one piece of digital art and post it. Nothing special. The early ones weren’t good, and he’d be the first to tell you that. Crude little sketches. The kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to show anybody. But he made another one the next day. And the next. He called the project “Everydays.”
He kept going. He didn’t stop through his kids being born. He didn’t stop on the days he didn’t feel like it. The sketches became illustrations. The illustrations became elaborate 3D scenes. Every single day for over thirteen years, one new piece, no misses.
Five thousand days.
Then in early 2021 he stitched the first 5,000 of those images into one giant collage. Christie’s — the 255-year-old auction house — put it up for sale. It sold for $69 million, and made him one of the three most valuable living artists on earth, next to names like Hockney and Koons.
Nobody paid sixty-nine million dollars for day one. Day one was a throwaway. They paid for the stack. The masterpiece was never a single image — it was 5,000 ordinary days that no one applauded, sitting on top of each other until they were worth a fortune.
My mentor Brian Johnson has a name for this. He calls them Masterpiece Days. His whole philosophy is simple: if you want to create a great life, you create a great day — and then you do it again tomorrow. You don’t win the life. You win the day. Today’s the day. Not someday. Someday never comes. There’s a target you’re building toward, and there’s one thing you can do today that moves you an inch closer to it. That inch is the whole game.
The better story to tell yourself is, “My life is a masterpiece built one day at a time.” Mike never did a great thing. He did a small thing on a day that didn’t matter, and then again on the next day that didn’t matter, until the days that didn’t matter became the thing that mattered most. That’s a Masterpiece Day. And a life is just a pile of them.
Tell me a story of a Masterpiece Day to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask, “What is one thing you accomplish on your best days?”
