The Subplot

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I’ve been thinking about my life as a story, and about who’s actually holding the pen.

Here’s where I’ve landed. God’s design is the plot. It’s going somewhere, and it reaches its ending whether or not I cooperate. I don’t get to write that. What I get is a subplot — my contribution, my thread — and the story arrives at its destination either along with my work or in spite of it. That’s the whole of my agency. Not authorship of the plot. Participation in it.

It’s a smaller role than I’d like some days. It’s also a bigger one than I usually act like I believe.

The first thing the Bible says about God is that He creates. Before anything else is established about who He is, we watch Him bring order out of chaos — light out of dark, form out of formlessness, something out of nothing. And a few lines later, it says I’m made in His image.

I’ve read past that a hundred times without sitting in what it means. If the defining act we’re shown first is creation, then being made in that image means being made to create. Not necessarily art. Creation in the wide sense — bringing order out of chaos wherever I find it. Leading a team out of confusion. Writing the code that makes the broken thing work. Shaping a song. Raising a kid. Turning a mess into something that holds together. That’s the image. That’s the assignment.

Which means passivity isn’t neutral. When I choose not to bring order out of the chaos in front of me — when I sit on what I was given — I’m not resting. I’m refusing the one thing I was most clearly made to do.

I know this because I did it for years.

I told myself a lot of things during those years. That I was waiting. That the timing wasn’t right. That the plans I talked about would happen eventually. What I was actually doing was burying what I’d been given and calling the hole a virtue. I had a subplot the whole time. I just wasn’t writing it.

I didn’t fix this. I don’t get to fix it once. The choice to participate in my subplot instead of letting the story move on without me is not a decision I made in January and get to coast on. It’s a decision I have to make again every single day, and some days I still lose it. Some days the passivity wins and the chaos stays chaos and the gift stays in the ground.

This is a note to myself, out loud, on a Saturday. The plot is going to reach its zenith with me or without me. The only thing I actually control is whether my thread is part of how it gets there.

Today I have to choose to be. Tomorrow I’ll have to choose again.

The Third of July

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

My son and I don’t get out alone much. Tonight we did.

Our town shoots fireworks on the third and the fourth, so my wife kissed us both goodnight and sent us off — just the two of us, no plan beyond finding a spot and watching the sky come apart.

He’s graduated now. I’ve started doing the math I don’t like doing — how many of these are left before the evenings out are the ones he drives to on his own, in another town, with his own life pulling at him. Hopefully we have several left, but these are special. So I’m not going to waste this one narrating it. I’m going to go watch fireworks with my boy.

Happy Fourth. Go find your people while they’re still in reach.

The Spirit of the Thing

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I caught myself saying something today that stopped me mid-sentence. I was talking about my work, and I heard myself say I don’t just get to solve problems — I get to take care of people while I do it.

I sat with that, because it explained something I’d never quite been able to name: why I love a job I never planned to have.

I didn’t set out to work in data. I saw myself as a creative — someone who makes things, who helps people. A technical role wasn’t on my list. And for a while I carried a quiet assumption that I’d taken a detour, that the analytical work was a departure from who I really was.

I was wrong about that. The work wasn’t a detour from helping people. It was a vehicle for it. I just didn’t recognize the door when I walked through it.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll keep it to the shape of the work rather than the specifics.

When you crawl into a hard problem with someone, something happens that doesn’t happen when you just hand them an answer. You isolate where the trouble actually stems from — not where it shows up, but where it starts. You trace it back through the logic, the structure, the places where one thing hands off to another. And to do that, you have to genuinely understand their world, not just your own. They walk you through what they know. You bring what you know. Somewhere in the middle, the two things join, and the problem gives.

That’s the part I love. Not the fix. The joining.

But I want to be honest about what’s actually happening in that exchange, because the noble version — “I selflessly serve, and knowledge flows to those I help” — isn’t the whole truth.

I get better every time I do this. Every problem I climb into that I didn’t create is a problem that stretches my range. The person I’m helping isn’t just receiving. They’re handing me the raw material my own skill sharpens against. I serve them, and the serving is also how I stay sharp. Both things are true, and pretending it’s only the first one would be a lie dressed up as humility.

That’s the difference between showing up to serve and showing up for a paycheck. It isn’t that one is virtuous and the other is greedy — everybody cashes the check. It’s that the person who’s only there for the check leaves the best part on the table. They solve the problem and miss the joining. They never find out that the fastest way to get better at your own craft is to spend it freely on someone else’s problem.

So that’s the thing I noticed today. The spirit you bring to the work changes what the work gives back. Bring the whole of what you’ve got — your skill, your attention, your genuine interest in the other person’s world — and you don’t just solve the thing in front of you. You build the people around you, and they build you right back.

I don’t have that fully figured out. But I know it’s why the work never feels like a detour anymore.

I Hate Being Sick

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I have a cold. It’s just a cold — no deeper meaning, no metaphor, no lesson the universe is trying to teach me. I got sick. And I hate it.

I’ve almost lost my voice, which is a special kind of cruel, because my whole system runs on talking. I think out loud. I draft by speaking. Every post I write starts as words I say on a walk. Take my voice and you take my main tool. So here I am, full of things I want to make, and the machine I make them with is down.

I’m not derailed. I want to be clear about that. This isn’t a crisis or a turning point. It’s an inconvenience — a few days of forced slowness right when I don’t want to be slow.

But the frustration underneath it surprised me, because of what it revealed. I’m not frustrated because I’m behind. I’m frustrated because I finally have something worth interrupting.

For most of my life, I sold myself short. I talked big about what I’d do and produced little. I had grand plans and a graveyard of half-starts. If I’d gotten a cold five years ago, it would have been a relief — a permission slip to stop pretending I was going to get to the thing.

This year is different. This year I found out I’m far more capable than I ever believed — I’ve published two books, written every day, built things I’m proud of. I finally found my gear. And now that I’m in it, being pulled out — even for a few days, even for a good reason — makes me want to climb the walls.

That’s the honest thing tonight. The annoyance isn’t weakness or impatience. It’s the sound a person makes when they’ve finally found their stride and something stops them mid-step.

I’ll rest. I’ll get well. I’ll be back in the gym Friday and back at full speed right after. But I’m not going to pretend I’ve made peace with the pause. I haven’t. I just found out what I’m capable of, and I want to go do it.

The cold will pass. The hunger it interrupted is the part worth keeping.

The Answer Has Been Staring Me in the Face

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

Zig Ziglar said it decades ago: “You can have everything in life you want, if you just help enough other people get what they want.”

I’ve read that quote a dozen times over the years. Tonight it finally landed, because it answers the exact thing I’ve been stuck on for six months.

I’ve spent this whole year tangled up about promotion. Telling people about my book felt like begging. Asking for a sale felt like having my hand out. Every time I sat down to market something I’d built, a voice said you’re being self-serving, you’re asking people for something. And I’d close the laptop.

But Ziglar’s quote exposes the lie in that. I had the transaction backwards. I thought promotion was me taking — asking for attention, asking for money, asking people to care about me. It’s not. Promotion is me offering. It’s telling someone who’s bored on a plane that there’s a story that’ll make the flight disappear. It’s telling someone who grew up in the 90s that there’s a book that sounds like the inside of their teenage head.

I’m not asking them for something. I’m trying to give them something.

That’s the whole shift. When I post about Phase Defiant, I’m not begging a stranger to validate me. I’m raising my hand and saying if you want to feel the way I felt writing this, here’s how. Some people will want it. Some won’t. But withholding it — keeping it quiet because telling people felt uncomfortable — wasn’t humility. It was just selfishness dressed up as modesty.

If the book is good — and the people who’ve read it tell me it is — then keeping it hidden doesn’t protect anybody. It just keeps the people who’d love it from ever finding it.