Never confuse a temporary assignment with a permanent identity.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your Daily Message From Chad number 1203 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 Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane’s, who still puts “fry cook” on his business card.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may think the job you have to do is keeping you from the life you want, but upgraded thinking sees it as scaffolding.

Here’s the story:

While at Louisiana State University, Todd Graves and Craig Silvey wrote a business plan for a restaurant that would sell one thing: chicken fingers. The professor gave it the lowest grade in the class. A B-minus. Then the banks said no. They had no management experience. Go work for a restaurant company for ten years, they said. Then come back. So Todd Graves went to California and worked as a boilermaker in the oil refineries. Ninety-five-hour weeks. No days off. A kid doing work he didn’t know how to do, who never shut up about chicken fingers. His co-workers called him Hollywood.

One of them, a guy named Wild Bill, told him where the real money was: sockeye salmon in Alaska. So Todd flew to Anchorage. Took a floatplane and hitchhiked to fisheries. Pitched a tent on the tundra, lived on pork and beans, and walked boat to boat begging captains for a spot.

He got one. If you’ve ever seen the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, it was that. Waves breaking over a stern loaded with salmon. Medical helicopters pulling people out. His words: “I was out there for this chicken finger dream.” Todd says he would have worked construction in Nebraska. He would have knitted blankets. The work was never the point. It was the scaffolding, ugly and temporary, to build what he really wanted.

Zig Ziglar put it this way: “If you do what you need to do when you need to do it, then the day will come when you can do what you want to do when you want to do it.” That’s scaffolding. It’s ugly. It’s temporary. And it comes down once the building can stand. But watch what else the scaffolding built. Some of his earliest investors were fellow boilermakers, including Wild Bill. The men who worked beside him in the have-to season believed in him for the want-to season.

Todd did much of the work on the first Raising Cane’s with his own hands. First month’s profit: thirty dollars. But he was finally living his dream. Thirty years later, he still calls himself a fry cook. The scaffolding came down. The relationships stayed up. Don’t confuse a temporary assignment with a permanent identity. The job you’ve got to do today isn’t who you are. It may be what’s holding up who you’re becoming. And the people working beside you right now? Treat them well. They might be your first investors. The better story to tell yourself is, “If I do what I need to do when I need to do it, then the day will come when I can do what I want to do when I want to do it.”

Tell me a story about the job that got you to where you are to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “What you’re doing right now is scaffolding, not the building.” 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.