Finish when the job is done, not the clock is out.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1,163 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 Heroic superstar Christine O’Connell.

Here’s the upgrade:

You think the fix for bad quality is watching the hours more closely, but upgraded thinking knows the hour is the wrong thing to pay for in the first place.

Here’s the story:

Paul Van Doren was a high school dropout who started as a sixteen-year-old service boy and spent twenty years learning every inch of the shoe trade before he ever owned anything. By the time he started Vans, there was almost nobody alive who knew more about making a canvas shoe.

And he had a problem every operator knows in his bones. When he pushed his factory for production numbers, quality fell. When he pushed for quality, production fell. A seesaw. Shove one side down, the other pops right back up.

The experts’ answer was to send in Harvard-trained efficiency men to stand behind the workers with stopwatches. Paul threw them out. He found it demeaning — and worse, he found it wrong. They were tuning one worker while ignoring the whole system. And the deepest flaw was the pay itself. He was paying by the hour, which doesn’t address quantity or quality. Hourly pay rewards a person for taking hour to do whatever they’re doing.

So Paul stopped paying for time and started paying for the outcome. He told his people: hit your eight-hour quota, at top quality, and if you finish in six hours — go home. And the seesaw stopped, because now the same reward pulled speed and quality at once. It worked so well some crews went to four-day weeks.

The exact same move saved Federal Express. I told that story in message #725. Their night shift, paid by the hour, had every reason to drag — until someone paid them per shift and let them leave when the planes were loaded. Two men, two industries, one lesson: you get the behavior you incentivize for, not the one you instruct.

Now put it on yourself, because you run a factory too. It’s your day. And most of us pay ourselves by the hour. We feel good because we were busy, because we sat there a long time, because we ended up tired. But the hour is not the shoe. The hour is not the loaded plane. You can log ten hours and finish nothing.

The better story to tell yourself is, “Reward the outcome, not the hour.” Van Doren’s real credo was that Vans was a people company that made shoes — he said the distinction sounded like nothing and was everything. Start there. Then quit paying yourself for time in the chair. Name the quota, the real finish, and when you hit it, go home. Reward the shoe, not the stopwatch.

Tell me a story of paying for the outcome instead of the clock to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What could you finish faster if the hours stopped counting?” 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.