Apple didn’t make Steve Jobs a billionaire.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1167 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 Scott Manke. 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 the obstacle is yours to carry alone, but upgraded thinking knows the obstacle becomes bearable the moment somebody else puts their arm around it with you.

Here’s the story:

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought a struggling computer graphics division off George Lucas. Nobody else wanted it. Two dozen buyers passed. The papers got signed, and before anybody celebrated, Jobs pulled the two lead guys, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, off to the side. He put his arms around them and said, “Whatever happens, we have to be loyal to each other.”

That sentence is the whole story. Everything after it is Jobs keeping the promise. Because what happened next was almost a decade of nothing going right. This company, which you now know as Pixar, had no business model. Every single month, Catmull had to walk in and tell Jobs they were short on payroll. And every single month, Jobs wrote a check. Not once. Not for a quarter. For years. By the end it added up to $54 million of his own money, while his other company, NeXT, was failing at the exact same time. Two sinking ships, and he stayed on both.

Three separate times he tried to sell it. Microsoft offered $90 million once. He turned it down. Catmull figured out why: Jobs wasn’t hunting an exit. He was hunting proof he hadn’t wasted the loyalty. He’d already sunk fifty million dollars in. He’d already done layoffs. And his animator, John Lasseter, walked in and asked for $300,000 more, for a short film with zero commercial upside. Jobs said yes. He revealed his motivation saying, “It was art, he cared and I cared, I always said yes.” That short film, Tin Toy, won the Academy Award. And when Disney tried to poach Lasseter away, Lasseter said no, out of loyalty to the man who’d said yes to him. That loyalty is what built the Toy Story deal.

Toy Story opened in 1995. Four days later, Pixar went public, and Jobs’s stake was worth $1.2 billion. Five times what he made when Apple itself went public. Pixar made him a billionaire. Not Apple. And the people who studied him closely said without those years he never gets a second act at Apple at all.

Ten years in the wilderness. One arm around two shoulders. One sentence that outlasted every bad month. The better story to tell yourself is, “My burdens are bearable because I’m not bearing them alone.”

Tell me a story of somebody sticking with you when they didn’t have to, to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text right now and tell them, “I’m glad we’re in this together.”