The most confident bank robber in Pittsburgh had a plan that couldn’t fail.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1228 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. When you subscribe, follow, like, or comment it helps others find these messages.

Here’s the upgrade:

You may feel certain, but upgraded thinking asks how you’d know if you were wrong.

Here’s the story:

McArthur Wheeler walked into two banks in Pittsburgh in January of 1995. He didn’t wear a mask. He covered his face in lemon juice. He had read that lemon juice works as invisible ink, so he figured it would make him invisible to the security cameras.

He even tested it. He covered his face, pointed a Polaroid camera at himself, and took the picture. The photo was blank. To him, that proved it worked. It was actually just

Months later, police broadcast his surveillance photo on the local news. Tips came in, and they arrested him. When officers confronted him, he reportedly protested, “But I wore the juice.” Confident and wrong feel exactly the same from the inside.

A Cornell psychologist named David Dunning read about the case. He and a graduate student, Justin Kruger, wanted to know why people who are bad at something so often think they’re good at it. Their 1999 paper became the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Their explanation was that the knowledge you need to do something well is often the same knowledge you need to spot your own mistakes. Without it, you don’t even see the error.

Charles Darwin put it plainly in The Descent of Man, in 1871. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Read that again. Wheeler’s test passed because he was the one grading it. His self-awareness of his own ignorance was as blank as the unexposed Polaroid.

Be honest. How many of your certainties have a Polaroid like that? An argument you won because you argued it in your own head. A test you Aced in your own head. So don’t grade your own test. Find a standard outside your own head, and decide before you look what result would prove you wrong. The better story to tell yourself is, “I assume I know less than I think I do.”

Tell me a story of a time you were completely sure and completely wrong to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s something you were completely sure about that turned out to be wrong?” 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.