There’s a double agent working against you right now.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1186, 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 Owen Fitzpatrick, whose new book planted the seed for today’s story.

Here’s the upgrade:

You tell yourself that you have your best interests in mind, but upgraded thinking understands you are a double crosser.

Here’s the story:

The most famous double agent of the twentieth century never set foot on a single battlefield. His name was Juan Pujol García. The British called him Garbo. The Germans called him Alaric.

Pujol wanted to fight the Nazis. British intelligence turned him down. So he walked into the German embassy in Madrid and talked his way into becoming one of their spies in Britain — except he’d never been to Britain. He ran the whole operation from a desk in Lisbon, using tourist maps and newspaper clippings to invent a network of British agents who didn’t exist. Twenty-seven of them, eventually. Complete with names, families, arguments, expense reports. He even reported one of them dying, and the Germans mourned him.

When British intelligence finally caught on, they didn’t arrest him. They hired him. And on the eve of D-Day, Garbo went to work on the German high command. Night after night, he fed Berlin a story: Normandy is the decoy. The real invasion is still coming, at Calais. Hold your divisions there.

They believed him. German tank divisions sat parked at Calais for weeks after the Normandy landing had already begun, waiting for an invasion that was never coming, because the story in their heads was more convincing than the war in front of them.

Germany gave Pujol the Iron Cross. Britain gave him the MBE, Member of the Order of the British Empire, an honor awarded by the king for outstanding achievement. He fooled both sides so completely that when he died in 1988, most people had never heard of him.

This message was prompted by a new book I’m going through by Owen Fitzpatrick titled Inner Propaganda. The brain is not a neutral observer of reality, but a “double agent” that manufactures reality, for good or ill. Your brain prioritizes safety and stability even over success. It generates stories and predictions that shape what you notice, feel, and accept as “truth”. This is your inner propagandist, who wants to double cross you.

The same tactics that spies, regimes, and media use for external propaganda is at work inside your mind. Do you recognize your own internal propaganda? This is the premise of these daily messages. The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. This is the thesis of Fitzpatrick’s book, Inner Propaganda: you’ve got a Garbo running inside your own head. He’s not trying to deceive an enemy. He’s managing you. He’ll invent a whole network of reasons you can’t, reasons you shouldn’t, reasons it’s not the right time — all fabricated, all convincing, all built for one purpose: to keep his side safe and make the other side lose the war.

The better story to tell yourself is, “My mind is running a campaign on me, and I don’t have to believe every report it files.” Here’s your next step: download the free PDF of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, and start training your brain with the mindset acrostic today. You can get it at fromchad.gumroad.com.

Tell me a story about a time you caught your own mind lying to you — send it to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text right now and ask them, “What’s the story you’ve been telling yourself that might not be true?”