Transcript

Rising #1178 · From Chad

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Fall 7. Rise 8.
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There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
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Chad #1178 to upgrade your mental game today by telling
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yourself a better story. Because the most important story
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you hear is the story you tell yourself.
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This message is dedicated to Dale Sanders and a hat tip to my
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dad for passing this story along to me.
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You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
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the World, by going to from chad.gumroad.com.
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What have you got to lose? It's free.
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The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
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always available at www.fromchad.com.
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Here's the upgrade. You may think the fall is what
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stops you, but upgraded thinking knows it's not getting back up.
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Here's the story. Dale Sanders is 91 years old.
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He's a retired Navy man from Tennessee.
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They call him Greybeard. On Monday, August 31st, he
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climbed to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine and finished
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the Appalachian Trail about 2193 miles Georgia to Maine.
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At 91, that makes him the oldest person to ever through hike.
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The whole thing. He already had that record.
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He set it in 2017 at age 82. Then a friend of his, a man they
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call Nimble Will Nomad, took it from him in 2021 at 83.
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Most people at 83 would say, good for him, Dale said.
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I'll go get it back. And then he waited until he was
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90 to start, and he didn't do it the pretty way he started last
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September. Walked a section, stopped for
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the winter, walked another section out of order wherever he
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could. That still counts.
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The rules say you have to finish every mile within 12 months.
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They don't say anything about how you look doing it.
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He fell 71 times. Several of them were hard falls.
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One put him in the hospital and then 200 yards from the summit,
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200 yards from the end of the 2193 miles, he fell again.
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He got up and finished. Fall 71, rise 72.
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By the way, he also holds the record as the oldest person to
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pass paddle the Mississippi River's full length from
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Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in his 15 foot canoe he named
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Perseverance, an 87 day trip he began on his 87th birthday.
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I keep thinking about the fall at 200 yards.
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That's the one that gets most of us.
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It's not the first fall, the last one, the one where you can
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see the finish and you think, of course, of course this would
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happen now. Gray Beard has fallen so many
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times, he stopped counting them as failures.
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He counts them as part of the trail.
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A fall isn't the end of the hike.
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It's just a spot on the map. The better story to tell
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yourself is when I fall, I will rise.
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The Japanese have a proverb, Fall 7 times, rise 8.
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Notice the math it it doesn't add up.
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If you fall 7 times, you only have to get up 7 times.
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Where does the 8th one come from?
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Here's my way of reading the equation.
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The 8th is your stance before you ever fell.
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The morning you decided to go because that's the one that
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counts, you practice resurrection.
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Repeated setbacks should be met with continued resilience.
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The ancients would call it percussus.
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Resurgio struck down. I rise again.
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There are two kinds of people, the ones who count the falls and
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the ones who count the get UPS. Be the second one today.
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Keep rising. Tell me a story of the time you
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got up to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
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Send someone this message and text them.
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I know you're knocked down, but I know you can get back up.