Latest / From Chad / Underestimating #1210

Transcript

Underestimating #1210 · From Chad

• 0:00
  You are underestimating. There's a story behind that.
• 0:06
  This is your daily message from Chad #12110 to upgrade your
• 0:09
  mental game today by telling yourself a better story.
• 0:12
  Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
• 0:14
  yourself. This message is dedicated to
• 0:17
  Greg Ennis. Here's the upgrade.
• 0:20
  You may look at one year of work and see nothing but upgraded
• 0:23
  Thinking knows the forest shows up in year 10.
• 0:26
  Here's the story. After photographing the genocide
• 0:30
  in Rwanda, a Brazilian photographer named Sabasteo
• 0:34
  Salgado returned to his family 1700 acre farm, emotionally
• 0:39
  devastated. This one assignment had nearly
• 0:42
  broken him, he remembered. That farm is paradise.
• 0:45
  What he found was laying stripped of almost all its
• 0:48
  trees, eroded, exhausted, he said.
• 0:52
  The land was as sick as I was. Everything was destroyed.
• 0:56
  His wife La Leia had an idea plant the forest back.
• 1:01
  So they got started. In 1998 they founded Instituto
• 1:05
  Terra. Over the next year, with
• 1:07
  students, workers and partners helping, they began planting
• 1:11
  native trees. The 1st planting 10,000 trees.
• 1:16
  But a seedling isn't a forest, and early on, the work can look
• 1:21
  nothing like the thing you're trying to build.
• 1:24
  If you judge the whole project by what you see at the
• 1:26
  beginning, you can miss what it's becoming.
• 1:29
  In his 1965 book Libraries of the Future, JCR Lit Licklitter
• 1:35
  quoted a maxim. People tend to overestimate what
• 1:39
  can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done
• 1:42
  in 5 or 10 years. They didn't judge it by the
• 1:46
  beginning. Over roughly 20 years, their
• 1:50
  team planted more than two million trees.
• 1:54
  That's the equivalent of about 274 trees a day averaged over 2
• 1:58
  decades. And then came the part nobody
• 2:01
  planted 8 natural springs returned to flow.
• 2:05
  Wildlife returned to more than 170 species of birds, along with
• 2:10
  mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
• 2:14
  And the man came back to in Salgado's words.
• 2:18
  And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds
• 2:21
  and fish returned. And thanks to this increase of
• 2:24
  the trees, I too was reborn. You don't plant a forest.
• 2:31
  You plant a tree and then you plant another one tomorrow.
• 2:35
  A forest is just what a lot of tomorrow's look like from the
• 2:38
  air. The better story to tell
• 2:41
  yourself is plant today. The forest is coming.
• 2:46
  Whatever you're building that still looks like dirt, go plant
• 2:49
  today's tree anyway, and another one tomorrow, and the day after
• 2:53
  that. You overestimate what can be
• 2:56
  done in one year and underestimate what can be done
• 2:59
  in 20 years. You will have your forest.
• 3:04
  You may have heard Salgado's story.
• 3:06
  It gained a lot of attention around 20/19/20 years after the
• 3:10
  start when before and after pictures circulated online and
• 3:14
  again last year in 2025 when Salgado passed away at the age
• 3:19
  of 81. Search for the before and after
• 3:22
  photos if you've never seen them.
• 3:24
  The transformation is stunning. Tell me a story of something you
• 3:28
  planted that took years to grow to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
• 3:33
  Send someone a text and ask them.
• 3:35
  Just out of curiosity, what would you start today if you
• 3:38
  knew you had 20 years? Just imagine what that could be
• 3:42
  in 20 years. You get a free copy of my book,
• 3:45
  The Most Powerful Story in the World by going to from
• 3:48
  chad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message
• 3:51
  and hundreds of others are always available at
• 3:53
  www.fromchad.com.