There’s sugar on the floor.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1162 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 Tvaris Brown. 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 think you have a personal problem, but upgraded thinking knows you almost always have a reward problem.

Here’s the story:

You get more of whatever you reward. This is true personally. This is true as a manager or team leader. This applies to parenting. Incentives are the biggest driver of behavior. If you wonder why you act the way you do, look at the rewards you give yourself. Where do your desires get satisfied? Your desire for recognition, comfort, or control. If you have sugar on the floor, you’re going to have ants. If you give yourself or those around you a certain reward, you’re going to get the behavior that leads to that reward.

Larry Ellison co-founded the software giant Oracle in 1977. At 82 years old he still leads the company. He tells a story about how he got incentives wrong at one point in Oracle. He paid salespeople a bigger commission when a deal ran through an outside vendor than when they closed it directly. So a million-dollar deal sold direct earned the rep a hundred thousand. That same million routed through a partner earned him a hundred and twenty — and handed a cut to the partner, so Oracle walked away with far less. Guess what the reps did. They ran everything through partners. The salespeople were happy. The partners were happy. The only one bleeding was Oracle.

Were the reps crooks? No. They were ants. They walked straight to the sugar somebody poured on the floor. The system was set up for that behavior. The reps were just acting rationally within that system. Now turn it on yourself. You keep failing at the thing you swore you’d do, and the story you tell is, “What is wrong with me? Why am I so weak, so lazy, so undisciplined?” This is like yelling at ants that have infested your kitchen, when you have a bunch of sugar on the floor. The ants are doing what they are wired to do. They aren’t the problem.

The most important question to ask yourself is what am I actually rewarding? If you want to finish that project, don’t let yourself open that app until you work on it. If you want to get fit, once you hit 10k steps, then you reward yourself with the snack. If you need the team to be on time, reward it. You say you want to write, but the second you sit down you reward yourself with your phone. You say you want out of debt, but every hard day ends with the thing that feels good tonight. You’re not broken. You’re doing what every living thing does. You’re walking to the sugar.

So quit sweeping ants. Find the sugar and move it. Put the reward on the behavior you actually want, and watch how fast you march toward it. The better story to tell yourself is, “Don’t blame the ants. Find the sugar.” You get more of whatever you reward.

Tell me a story of a reward pointed the wrong way to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s one thing you keep rewarding by accident?”