He had 28 stores and 21 closed in one week.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1168 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 Noah Harris.

Here’s the upgrade:

You think the truth will scare your team away, but upgraded thinking knows the truth is what makes them stay.

Here’s the story:

Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane’s, built the whole company on four items — chicken fingers, fries, coleslaw, Texas toast. Bankers told him he was crazy for it. He didn’t have the money to prove them wrong the easy way, so he financed growth the hard way: an angel investor to put in $250,000, personally signed a one-page contract promising a 15% return, then took that note to a community bank, which counted it as equity and let him borrow a million more against it. He did that deal 28 times. He was floating payroll every two weeks, food every thirty days, rent every thirty days — living on the gap between what came in and what he owed. Then Hurricane Katrina hit. 21 of his 28 restaurants went dark. Revenue stopped. The bills didn’t.

Most leaders in that spot manage the story. Say something confident. Keep the crew calm, keep the panic contained. Todd did the opposite. He called his crew together and told them the whole thing, no filter. Our community needs food, and you need to come back to work — that part first. And then the part that costs a leader something to say out loud: if we don’t reopen, we’re done. The business is gone. He didn’t pick one reason and hide the other. He handed them the mission and the math in the same breath, and trusted them with both.

They reopened before anyone else. For ninety days, Raising Cane’s was the only restaurant open in some of those neighborhoods. He says it now: “We crushed it.” But he doesn’t recommend stretching things so thin. Graves sharing the reality of the struggle has become a big part of the corporate story. And that’s exactly why his crew came back in the first place. Not because he sold them a story. Because he never had to.

The better story to tell yourself is, “Those around me can handle the weight of reality better than I assume.” Raising Cane’s opened their 1000th store this year.

Tell me a story of a team that rose to reality instead of the spin to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s a time someone handled the hard truth better than you expected?” 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.