Preparation is the performance.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your Daily Message From Chad number 1206 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. Today is a first on these Daily Messages. This is dedicated not to a person, but an animal, Backpack the brown bear.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may think the big moment is where you win or lose, but upgraded thinking knows the big moment only reveals what you did when nobody was watching.

Here’s the story:

Every fall, Katmai National Park in Alaska holds Fat Bear Week. Millions of people vote online for the brown bear who best prepared for winter. Fat is the trophy. Fat is what carries a bear through five or six months in a den without a single meal.

This year’s champion is a 20-year-old bear named Backpack. He got the name as a cub because he loved riding across the Brooks River on his mother’s back. His mother, Holly, won Fat Bear Week in 2019.

Not long ago, Backpack had a badly injured leg. Viewers worried he wouldn’t make it. Then he went back to work. One salmon. Then another. Then another. Nobody watches a bear eat one fish and calls it impressive. But a summer of day after day gulping down salmon added up to an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 pounds for Backpack. By September, he looked so different they needed identification records to confirm it was the same bear.

And he did it his way. Most bears stand in the cold water. Backpack sits on a rock in the middle of the river and fishes from there. He didn’t copy anybody. He found the method he could sustain. Nobody crowns the bear who survives winter best. They crown the bear who prepared best in summer. Winter doesn’t test the bear. It audits him. It reveals what was already deposited in the summer.

You have your summers and winters too. How you survive the winter is determined by the work you do in the summer. Your presentation is winter. Your race is winter. The hard conversation, the tough season, the day everything goes wrong. That’s winter. And the unremarkable work you do today, the one-salmon day nobody claps for, that’s summer.

The better story to tell yourself is, “My winter is won in the summer.” The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. Today go catch one more fish in preparation for your winter. You can learn more about Bear Week and check out camera feeds that are set up in many national parks at explore.org.

Tell me a story of preparation that paid off when it mattered to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “Your winter is won in the summer.” 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.