The same task can be menial or meaningful.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1183 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 Dr. Rob Gilbert of the Success Hotline (973-743-4690) — congratulations on message number 13,000 today, recorded every day since January 22, 1992!

Here’s the upgrade:

A task may look menial, but upgraded thinking knows the fine line between menial and meaningful.

Here’s the story:

A writer once visited a small shop in Milan famous for handmade shirts. The cut was a work of art — sleeves tapered to a trim cuff, collars with the exact amount of tie-space for the knot. In the corner sat an elderly man, white-haired, bent over a cutting table. It was the owner’s father. He had been cutting shirts for over sixty years and had just turned 84. The writer asked him his secret. The old man thought for a minute, then answered through his son. “He says he has no technical answer. He says that to make a beautiful shirt, you don’t cut with the knife. You cut the cloth with love.”

Cutting fabric is about as menial a task as exists. You could do it fast, do it cheap, do it careless, and nobody watching would know the difference, for a while. That’s the exact warning the critic John Ruskin is remembered for: “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the person who considers price alone is that man’s lawful prey.” The old tailor in Milan refused to become that man. He knew the difference between artwork and factory work was never in the task. It was in the meaning he brought to it, stitch after stitch, for sixty years.

Dr. Rob Gilbert has been doing his own version of that for 34 years. A short, three-minute recorded message. Nothing about it looks meaningful from the outside. It would be the easiest thing in the world to skip a day, to cut corners, to let it slide into something menial. Instead, he treated it the way the shirtmaker treats a shirt. Nobody would call three minutes on a recorded line significant. But three minutes done with care, repeated day after day for 13,000 days without missing one, becomes something Ruskin’s cheap man could never produce. Today he records message number 13,000, and what started as a small recording has become one of the most respected traditions in his field.

The better story to tell yourself is, “I get to decide whether what I do is meaningful or menial.”

Tell me about a task you’ve turned from menial into meaningful, to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text today and tell them, “Call this recorded message at 973-743-4690.” 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.