He was smoking sixty cigarettes a day.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1179 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 Kevin Hudson.

Here’s the upgrade:

You think a bad habit has to be pulled out, but upgraded thinking knows a nail is driven out by a nail.

Here’s the story:

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer whose novels have been translated into more than fifty languages. But in the beginning, he’d just become a novelist. For years he’d run a jazz bar in Tokyo. On his feet all day, hard physical work. It kept him lean without a single thought about it.

Then he sat down at a desk. His energy dropped. The weight came on. And the smoking got worse, because concentration and cigarettes had fused into one act. Sixty a day. One every fifteen minutes he was awake. No amount of willpower was going to touch that. So here’s what he did. He quit smoking by never trying to quit. He treated it as a logistics problem. The job had changed, so the body had to change. He took up running.

The reason he picked it was you don’t need a team. You don’t need equipment. You don’t need a special place. Shoes and a road. Murakami realized of himself that he’s a loner and team sports never suited him. It helped him keep things simple. Reading, writing, running. Three things you do alone. The new habit fit the man.

Then the direction matters. He didn’t say, “I want to quit smoking, so I’ll run.” He said, “I want to keep running, and smoking is in the way.” Quitting was, in his words, a natural result of running every day. The desire to run carried him through the withdrawal. He called it a farewell to the life he used to lead.

All this led him to write a personal non-fiction book titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He didn’t drive the old nail out. He drove a new one in, and the old one fell out the other side. Same hole. New nail. And he built his whole day around it. He says the repetition itself becomes the important thing. Sixty cigarettes a day was a trance. He didn’t remove the trance. He replaced it with a better one.

The better story to tell yourself is, “I’m not quitting anything. I’m starting something.” Stop quitting. Start something. The upgrade at the beginning of this message today is an old proverb from Erasmus that a nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit. You can’t pull a bad habit out. You can only push it out.

Tell me a story of a habit that pushed out another one to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What are you starting?” 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.