The whole country was told to turn off the lights. His were already off.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1207 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. This message is dedicated to Charlie Smith.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may feel like you’ve run out of options, but upgraded thinking knows you’ve only run out of the easy ones.

Here’s the story:

It’s the winter of 1974, and Britain is falling apart. Coal miners are on strike. Oil prices have exploded. The government puts businesses on a three-day week to save electricity. Television goes dark at 10:30 at night. One minister even suggests people learn to shave in the dark.

A young man named Felix Dennis is trying to start a publishing company with no money. And he says the shortage was nothing new to him. His electricity had been cut off weeks earlier. So had the gas. He couldn’t pay the bills. He’s living in an unheated flat behind a sweatshop in London. To stay warm, he pulls broken furniture out of the trash and burns it in the fireplace. His girlfriend has a normal job. She tells him to quit and get one too. He won’t. So she leaves.

Years later, he wrote this: “That was the secret ingredient. I would not take no for an answer. I would not give in. I was going to be rich. Somehow. Some way. And I would not retreat to the safety of a decent job until I was starved out of house and home.” He didn’t pretend it was noble. He called those the worst months of his life. Pure misery. Bashing his head against a brick wall.

But looking back, he suspected it was his finest moment. Thomas Edison is credited with saying, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this — you haven’t.”

That broke young man built Dennis Publishing which eventually had fifty magazines. He was one of the richest self-made men in Britain. Near the end of his life, he started planting trees. Not a few. A forest. Over a million saplings in the English countryside. When he died in 2014 he left most of his fortune to make sure the planting never stops. I love the juxtaposition. The man who once burned scavenged wood just to survive the winter spent his last years planting a forest that will outlive everyone who knew him.

That’s what persisting looks like. The better story to tell yourself is, “I haven’t run out of options. I’ve only run out of easy ones.” You haven’t exhausted all possibilities. You’ve exhausted the comfortable ones. The real ones are still out there, waiting for the person who won’t retreat. Winston Churchill, after his famous “Never give in” line continues, “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms. Great work is never done by temperamental geniuses, but by obstinate donkey-men.”

Tell me a story of persisting through a dark season to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “You haven’t run out of options. You’ve only run out of easy ones. Keep going.” 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.