Nobody is waiting for your review. They’re waiting for your recommendation.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1176 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 Karin Abarbanel, a really good recommender. You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. Why is it free? If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a super nice guy. But the other reason is I want to help people think better and it’s a tool that does just that. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may think you have nothing new to give anybody, but upgraded thinking knows the best thing you’ve already found is the best thing you have to hand off.

Here’s the story:

On Monday, Wendell Berry died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was ninety-two. Novelist, poet, essayist, farmer. I did a message on him a while back. It’s number 675. Today I’m doing one more, because the best way I know to honor a writer is to recommend him.

In the summer of 2011 I finished a novel called Hannah Coulter and started the next one the same day. I wrote a little post called “On a Wendell Berry Kick.” I said I was hooked. I’ve been hooked for fifteen years. If you’ve never read the Port William novels, I’m recommending them again today.

Berry built a small cabin above the Kentucky River in 1963 out of reclaimed family timber. No plumbing. No electricity. He wrote more than fifty books at a worktable in that cabin, facing the woods and the river, with a pencil. He didn’t have to live that way. He had early success. A Guggenheim year in Europe. A teaching job at NYU. In the mid-sixties he walked away from all of it, went home to Henry County, Kentucky, bought a farm with his wife Tanya, and worked it with horses. His New York colleagues called it intellectual suicide. He said he was born with an aptitude for a way of life that was already doomed.

Then he spent sixty years telling the story of one little town. Port William doesn’t exist. But Berry’s stories about it run from 1864 all the way to 2025. One hundred sixty years. One small community. Farming, family, loss, and the people who stayed. He called them the membership.

When Dorothy Wickenden visited him for the New Yorker a few years ago, she asked about hope. Here’s what he said. Do the right things today. Don’t speculate about tomorrow. Wickenden wrote that from that sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivated the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. That’s what a recommendation is. A small, neighborly act you can do today.

Berry didn’t fix American agriculture. He wrote about one county. He didn’t save every farm. He worked one. And that one farm and that one made-up town have been handed from one reader to the next for half a century. Somebody handed a book to Michael Pollan. Somebody handed one to Alice Waters. Somebody handed one to me. Now I’m handing it to you.

Here’s what a recommendation says. I found this. It was good for me. I think it will be good for you. That’s it. You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to be a person who found something and didn’t keep it to yourself. You already have one. A book. A song. A person. Somebody near you needs it and doesn’t know it exists. You are the whole supply chain.

The better story to tell yourself is, “Somebody needs what I’ve already found.” Don’t wait until you find something better. Hand off the thing you’ve got. Go recommend something today, like I’m doing with Berry.

Tell me a story of the best recommendation anyone ever gave you at fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “You need to read this. Here’s why.” Then tell them why.