When it sounds too bad to be true.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1160 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 Jason Sloan on his birthday. Happy birthday Jason!

Here’s the upgrade:

You think you’re too smart to be fooled, but upgraded thinking knows you don’t get fooled by lies. You get fooled by facts arranged to frighten you.

Here’s the story:

In 1997, a fourteen-year-old named Nathan Zohner walked into his science fair with a project called “How Gullible Are We?”

He handed fifty ninth-graders a warning about the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, DHMO. The chemical is colorless. Odorless. Tasteless. It kills thousands of people every year, mostly by accidental inhalation. It’s found in the tumors of terminal cancer patients. It’s used in nuclear power plants and in cruel animal research. Companies dump it in our rivers, and it’s still legal. He asked the students what should be done about it. Forty-three voted to ban it. Six weren’t sure. Only one saw what was going on.

In 2004 a California city in Orange County schedule a council vote on banning this substance after a paralegal convinced city officials of the danger. In 2013, two radio disc jockey caused a panic in Lee County Florida when they announced this chemical was coming out of resident’s taps. The local utility began receiving calls about the water being unsafe. A utility spokesperson had to send an email to all the media outlets that there was nothing to be concerned about and the county water supply was safe. You see, the chemical DHMO, dihydrogen monoxide, is also known as H2O. It’s water.

Every single claim was true. Water does kill people who inhale it. It is in tumors, because it’s in everything. Nothing was a lie. And that’s the whole trick. The listeners weren’t stupid. They were doing what humans do. They read the frame instead of the facts. Nobody gave them a comparison. Nobody gave them a baseline. Nobody said, “Compared to what?”

Similar sentences are being run on you everyday. Not about water. It may be about the economy. It may be about your competitor. It could be about your kids’ school, health trend, supplement, or city initiative. There are all kinds of stories out there aimed to get your attention. Real facts. True facts. Selected and stacked until an ordinary thing looks like a monster.

The uncomfortable thing about the DHMO hoax is that the cure isn’t blanket disbelief. It’s good to be skeptical, but not cynical. Cynicism is just gullibility taken to the other extreme. You’re still letting a rule do your thinking. Separate the nonsensical from the plausible by being more methodical, more voracious for insight, and more patient with details than everyone else. You don’t have to be a genius, just more diligent than most. The ancient prophets gave their students wise advice: test the spirits.

So, dihydrogen monoxide is not dangerous, and you should drink more of it. But the way that whipped up people’s fear is probably happening with something else on you right now. There is something you actually care about, a technology narrative, some story that caught your ear and elicited your fears. The cure isn’t to disbelieve everything. The cure is to slow down and ask the question a six-year-old asks. Why? And maybe it needs to be asked again. Two rounds of “why” would have killed that petition in the hallway. Two rounds of “why” would kill most of what scares you today. The better story to tell yourself is, “I ask why twice before I believe it once.”

Tell me a story of when you almost got fooled to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s something everybody believes that you’ve stopped believing?” 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.