A sixteen-year-old walked up to a stranger and asked to be criticized.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1181 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 Whitney Ruble.

Here’s the upgrade:

You hear failure, but upgraded thinking hears feedback.

Here’s the story:

I’ve told you about the Johari Window before. (Check out message number 506.) Picture a window divided into four panes. What you know about yourself and others know too — Open. What you know and hide — Closed. What nobody knows yet, not even you — Mystery. And the one that matters today: what others can see about you that you can’t see about yourself — Blind. You cannot think your way into that pane. You cannot journal your way into it. Somebody has to hand it to you.

Michael Jordan was a junior in high school when a recruiting analyst named Bob Gibbons was introduced to him. The first thing out of Jordan’s mouth wasn’t a boast. It was a question: what do I need to do better to be a better player? That’s the Johari move, executed by a teenager, unprompted, on a stranger whose entire job was evaluating players like him. He wasn’t defending his game. He was requesting the contents of his own Blind pane.

Nick Saban has a line that fits him exactly. Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want the coach to tell them the truth every day, on every play, because they want to be perfect.

In Jordan’s freshman year at North Carolina, Roy Williams flagged him for coasting. Jordan pushed back, said he was working as hard as anybody on the floor. Williams told him if he wanted to accomplish great things, he had to work harder than everybody else. That was the whole conversation. One time. Williams said years later that no one ever outworked Michael Jordan again. One piece of the Blind pane, handed over once, and it never had to be handed over again.

It wasn’t always that clean. Doug Collins once told him he was shooting too much and missing too much, and Jordan responded by forcing up eight shots the very next game just to prove Collins wrong. Collins told the front office privately the team couldn’t win with him like that. Even Jordan slammed the window shut before he learned to leave it open.

But by the 1991 Finals, doubled and forcing up bad shots, Phil Jackson called timeout and looked right at him. Who’s open? Jordan wouldn’t answer. Jackson asked again. Finally, quietly: “Pax.” Jackson said, then throw him the ball. Paxson hit five straight fourth-quarter shots, helping Chicago close out its first title. The most gifted scorer alive couldn’t see the one thing that would win the game. His coach could. That’s the whole window in one timeout.

Jordan explained the mechanism himself, years later, in his book Driven From Within. He said he could admit when he was wrong, accept criticism, take a better idea from someone other than himself, because most people can’t do that — they treat it as an attack on their intelligence, and they want so much credit they can’t share it. Jordan said, “Successful people listen; those who don’t listen don’t survive.”

Successful people learn from the outside in. Successful people get knowledge they can’t obtain on their own. He said successful people listen — because talent tells you what you already know about yourself, and listening is the only thing that opens the pane you can’t get to alone.

The better story to tell yourself is, “I separate feedback from a verdict on my identity.” Some self-knowledge you can dig up on your own — enough silence, enough honesty, enough staring at the guy or gal in the mirror, and you’ll find it. But the Blind pane doesn’t work that way. By definition, it’s the part of you that you cannot see no matter how hard you look. The only road in runs through somebody else’s mouth. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s a feature. Listening to others isn’t one method among many for knowing yourself — for that pane, it’s the only one that works.

Tell me a story of something someone saw in your blind spot that you couldn’t see yourself to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s something I need to hear that you’ve been afraid to tell me?” 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.