You’re underestimating.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1210 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 Greg Enas.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may look at one year of work and see nothing, but upgraded thinking knows the forest shows up in year ten.

Here’s the story:

After photographing the genocide in Rwanda, a Brazilian photographer named Sebastião Salgado returned to his family’s 1700 acre farm emotionally devastated. This one assignment had nearly broken him. He remembered that farm as paradise. What he found was land stripped of almost all its trees. Eroded. Exhausted.

He said, “The land was as sick as I was. Everything was destroyed.” His wife, Lélia, had an idea: plant the forest back. So they got started. In 1998, they founded Instituto Terra. Over the next year, with students, workers, and partners helping, they began planting native trees. The first planting: ten thousand trees.

But a seedling isn’t a forest. Early on, the work can look nothing like the thing you’re trying to build. If you judge the whole project by what you see at the beginning, you can miss what it’s becoming. In his 1965 book Libraries of the Future, J. C. R. Licklider quoted a maxim: “People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.”

They didn’t judge it by the beginning. Over roughly twenty years, their team planted more than two million trees. That’s the equivalent of about 274 trees a day, averaged over two decades. And then came the part nobody planted. Eight natural springs returned to flow. Wildlife returned too. More than 170 species of birds, along with mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

And the man came back too. In Salgado’s words: “And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees, I, too, was reborn.” You don’t plant a forest. You plant a tree. Then you plant another one tomorrow. A forest is just what a lot of tomorrows look like from the air.

The better story to tell yourself is, “Plant today. The forest is coming.” Whatever you’re building that still looks like dirt, go plant today’s tree anyway and another one tomorrow and the day after that. You overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in twenty years. You will have your forest.

You may have heard Salgado’s story. It gained a lot of attention around 2019, twenty years after the start, when before and after pictures circulated online, and again last year, in 2025, when Salgado passed away at the age of 81. Search for the before-and-after photos if you’ve never seen them. The transformation is stunning.

Tell me a story of something you planted that took years to grow to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “Just out of curiosity, what would you start today if you knew you had twenty years?” Just imagine what that could be in twenty years. 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.