Fall seven. Rise eight.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1178 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 Dale Sanders and a hat-tip to my dad for passing this story along to me.

You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. What have you got to lose? It’s free! The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may think the fall is what stops you, but upgraded thinking knows it’s not getting back up.

Here’s the story:

Dale Sanders is 91 years old. He’s a retired Navy man from Tennessee. They call him Grey Beard. On Monday, August 31, he climbed to the top of Mount KaTAHdin in Maine and finished the Appalachian Trail. About 2,193 miles. Georgia to Maine. At 91. That makes him the oldest person to ever thru-hike the whole thing.

He already had that record. He set it in 2017 at age 82. Then a friend of his, a man they call Nimblewill Nomad, took it from him in 2021 at 83. Most people at 83 would say, “Good for him.” Dale said, “I’ll go get it back.” And then he waited until he was 90 to start.

He didn’t do it the pretty way. He started last September, walked a section, stopped for the winter, walked another section, out of order, wherever he could. That still counts. The rules say you have to finish every mile within twelve months. They don’t say anything about how you look doing it. He fell 71 times. Several of them were hard falls. One put him in the hospital.

And then, 200 yards from the summit, 200 yards from the end of 2,193 miles, he fell again. He got up and finished. Fall seventy-one. Rise seventy-two. By the way, he also holds the record as the oldest person to paddle the Mississippi River’s full length, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in his 15-foot canoe he named Perseverance—an 87-day trip he began on his 87th birthday.

I keep thinking about the fall at 200 yards. That’s the one that gets most of us. Not the first fall. The last one. The one where you can see the finish and you think, “Of course. Of course this would happen now.” Grey Beard has fallen so many times he’s stopped counting them as failures. He counts them as part of the trail. A fall isn’t the end of the hike. It’s a spot on the map.

The better story to tell yourself is, “When I fall, I will rise.” The Japanese have a proverb: Fall seven times, rise eight. Notice the math. It doesn’t add up. If you fall seven times, you only have to get up seven times. Where does the eighth one come from? Here’s my way of reading the equation. The eighth is your stance before you ever fell. The morning you decided to go. That’s the one that counts. You practice resurrection. Repeated setbacks should be met with continued resilience. The ancients would call it percussus resurgo – struck down, I rise again. There are two kinds of people: the ones who count the falls, and the ones who count the get-ups. Be the second one today. Keep rising.

Tell me a story of the time you got up to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone this message and text them, “I know you’re knocked down, but I know you can get back up.”