The work is the shortcut.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1152 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 Jamie Lynn Austel Smith, the hardest worker I know.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may be hunting for the shortcut, but upgraded thinking knows the work is the shortcut.

Here’s the story:

Most people celebrate their birthday. John D. Rockefeller celebrated a different day more. He called it Job Day. September 26, 1855. It was his personal holiday. He had a commemorative flag flown over his home and marked the occasion of the day he said gave him identity, independence, and his path out of the instability of his upbringing.

Rockefeller’s childhood was unstable. His father was a con man who came and went. His mother held the family together. When he was sixteen, he moved to Cleveland and made one thing his full-time occupation: finding work.

He went door to door. Banks, railroads, merchants, commission houses. He made a list of businesses to pursue and he asked to speak to whoever was in charge. Six days a week, for six straight weeks. When he ran out of businesses, he started the list over and walked it again. He later called it “the business of looking for work.” Rejection didn’t discourage him. It made him more determined.

Then, on September 26, a Cleveland commission house called Hewitt and Tuttle hired him as a bookkeeper. About a dollar a day.

A dollar a day. And Rockefeller treated it like the hinge his whole life turned on. He said his entire future seemed to depend on that day. He wondered for the rest of his life what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten it.

So every year after, he celebrated September 26 as Job Day. More than his birthday. Because his birthday was handed to him. Job Day he earned.

And here’s what he did with it. He didn’t act like a sixteen-year-old clerk. He acted like he owned the place. He checked every bill. He mastered the books. He learned the business better than the men above him. That diligence made the next door open, and the next, all the way to Standard Oil.

He wasn’t waiting for the shortcut. The work was the shortcut. It gave him an identity, independence, and a way out.

Dorothy Sayers once argued that work isn’t the curse we treat it as. It’s not just something we endure to get to the weekend. It’s meant to be done for the love of doing a thing well worth doing. The work itself is the reward.

You keep looking for the thing that comes after the work. The break. The connection. The lucky day. But the work is the thing that makes the luck. Work doesn’t have to be something you get paid for, just the use of your abilities in a thing worth doing. Rockefeller went looking for a job for six weeks, and the looking was already the work that made him who he was.

The better story to tell yourself is, “The work is the shortcut.”

Tell me a story of your own Job Day to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s the day you’d celebrate more than your birthday?” 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.