The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand it.

When Nothing Comes

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 8

Creativity isn’t a hobby for me. It’s close to the center of who I am — the thing I’d still be doing if nobody ever read a word of it.

Which is exactly why the nights it won’t come feel like more than a bad night. I sit down to work on something specific and get nothing. Not a slow start — nothing. And because creativity is so tangled up with my sense of myself, an empty night doesn’t register as an empty night. It registers as a verdict.

Tonight was one of those. I sat down with a specific thing to make and it wouldn’t come.

So I recorded a video instead. Here’s part of what I said into the camera, mostly to myself:

Is there something you want to do? Are you willing to do it now? If you’re not willing to do it now, put it down for a little while. Go do the other things you are willing to do now. If you want to get it done, come back to it. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Because if it’s something you really want to do, you’ll figure out how to do it. But if it’s just something you’re talking about, then maybe it’s not for you. And it may come back around one of these days. You never know. Be nice to yourself.

I didn’t realize until afterward that I’d answered my own question.

The thing I couldn’t make tonight didn’t stop existing because I couldn’t make it tonight. It’s still there. It’ll still be there tomorrow, and I’ll still want it, which is how I know it’s mine. The empty night wasn’t a verdict on whether I have it in me. It was just a night I wasn’t willing, and there’s a difference between a well that’s dry and a well you’re too tired to lower the bucket into.

What I could do tonight was that video. So that’s what I did.

The Room I Don’t Walk Into

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 7

I’ve spent this year trying to be one person.

Not one person at work and another at home. Not a version for the office, a version for church, a version for my family. Same guy everywhere. Part of that is conviction — I don’t want to play games or keep track of which face I’m wearing. But part of it is that I’ve found it actually works. What I learn at work sharpens what I do at home. What I figure out at home comes back and makes me better at work. The lessons only flow both directions because there’s no wall between them. There’s just one of me, learning.

There’s a line I’ve always liked, from Remember the Titans: I may be a miserable cuss, but I’m the same miserable cuss to everybody. Consistency is its own kind of fairness. People know what they’re getting. So do I, which means I get to be at ease instead of performing. Performing is exhausting — it never lets you rest in yourself.

Which brings me to the room I won’t walk into.

I don’t rest well. I’m bad at it in a way I can’t explain away as a scheduling problem. There’s always something left on the list, and somewhere underneath that is a conviction that getting it all done depends on me. So I keep moving. And if I’m honest about why I don’t stop, it isn’t that I lack the time. It’s that admitting I need rest feels like admitting I’m failing.

I know that’s not true. I can tell you exactly why it isn’t. The rest is what makes the working hours worth anything — I’m sharper, kinder, more useful to everyone around me when I’ve actually stopped. My faith tells me the same thing, more plainly than I’d like. Rest isn’t a reward for finishing. It’s commanded. It’s built right into the week, no achievement required.

So here’s the crack in the whole thing. I’ve been going on about being the same person everywhere, one integrated life, nothing walled off — and the one part of my life I’ve quietly refused to bring into the system is the exact part God explicitly asked for. My theology says rest is holy. My gut reads it as weakness. Those two have never met.

The way through, I think, looks like tithing. I already trust God with ten percent of the money. Not because the math works — the math never works, that’s the whole point — but because I believe He does more with the ninety than I’d ever squeeze out of the hundred. That’s not a budgeting strategy. That’s faith, applied to something I can count.

I’ve just never extended it to the calendar. Rest is a tithe of time. You give back the seventh and trust that six days in His hands beat seven in yours.

I believe that about my money. I’m still learning to believe it about my week.

The Voice I Like to Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 6

I read Phase Defiant somewhere between eight and ten times before I finished it. Not just to fix it — I’d already fixed a lot of it. I read it because I liked reading it. Every pass, it still struck me. I’d written the kind of book I actually enjoy picking up, in the voice I reach for when I read for pleasure, and it landed on me every single time.

I’m thirty thousand words into a new one — Welcome to New York, a 1920s mob story — and something’s been off, and until tonight I couldn’t name it. The writing is fine. The plot works. I like it, in the way you like something competent. But it doesn’t strike me. I’ve been reading my own pages and feeling nothing move, and I kept telling myself that was normal — that not everything can hit the way the first book did.

Tonight I finally understood why. It’s the voice. It isn’t mine.

When I sat down to write a 1920s gangster story, I decided — without ever really deciding — that the story required noir. Shadowy, clipped, that particular cold register the genre is known for. So that’s what I wrote. Thirty thousand words of it. The trouble is I’m not a noir guy. I love a thriller. I read thrillers, I think in thrillers, and it turns out the story I’m telling would sit perfectly well as one. The genre never asked me for noir. I asked me for noir, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do with this kind of book.

And here’s the part that actually rattled me: the tell was there the whole time, and it wasn’t in the writing. It was in the reading. The reader in me — the one who read Phase Defiant ten times, part of the process and because I enjoyed every pass — kept picking the new pages up and setting them down unmoved. He knew before I did. The writer had drifted; the reader caught it. I just wasn’t listening to him.

So now I’m looking at thirty thousand words I have to take back apart. Not throw away — take apart, and rebuild in my own register. I’d be lying if I said that felt great. That’s real work I already did, and a good chunk of it doesn’t survive the change. There’s a version of me that wants to argue those words are fine, that finishing matters more than fussing over style, that I should just push through.

But I know what pushing through gets me: a whole book that reads the way these thirty thousand words do — competent, fine, and never quite mine. I’ve already got the proof of what happens when I write in a voice that isn’t my own.

So I’m going back to the start, and this time I’m writing it the way I’d want to read it.

What You’re For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 5

An AI tool will do almost anything you ask it to. For a while I treated that as the whole point — like the win was the capability. Look how much I can produce now. Look how fast.

But something strange happens when capacity stops being the bottleneck. It exposes the question that was hiding underneath it, and the question turns out to be harder: not can I do this, but is this worth doing at all.

For most of history, “I don’t have the time, the skill, the resources” was a real answer. It was also a hiding place. You could want to do something and be honestly, legitimately unable — and the wanting never had to be tested. AI takes that excuse away. When the tool can draft and edit and organize and produce, when the capacity is just there for the asking, the only thing left standing between you and the work is whether you actually have something you’re trying to do.

That’s where I think a lot of people are going to get stuck. Not because they can’t run the tool. Because they never worked out what they’d point it at. Hand someone all that capacity and no direction, and it becomes an expensive toy — something to kill an afternoon with, to research nothing in particular, to make a little noise.

I know what I’m for. I’m here to honor God with what I do, to love and take care of my family, to do work that’s worth something, and to leave the people around me better than I found them. That isn’t a slogan I keep on a shelf. It’s the thing that tells the tool where to aim.

The capability will never hand you that. It was never supposed to. It only amplifies what’s already there — and if nothing’s there, it amplifies the nothing.