7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 4

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My wife looked at me one day and said, “You’re supposed to be the communicator. Communicate with me.”

That’s when I started paying attention to how I actually think. And what I realized is that my thoughts aren’t fully formed until they come out of my mouth. They take substance when I hear them. I either agree or disagree with myself, and I keep going.

I think out loud. That’s how I’m wired.

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For years, I forced myself into workflows that didn’t fit. Sit at the desk. Open the document. Type. That’s how you’re supposed to do it, right?

I can type. I’m decent at it. But I hit a wall every time — my brain and my mouth run faster than my fingers can translate. I’d get maybe 1,500 words into something and want to quit. Not because I was out of ideas. Because the method was fighting the way my mind actually works.

I wrote my first novel on my iPhone. Voice dictation and my thumbs. That’s how 98% of Phase Defiant was written. Not at a desk. Not in a word processor. Walking around, talking, getting it out at the speed my brain wanted to move.

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Yesterday I drove from Oklahoma City to Dallas. I had a list of questions I knew I needed to work through — business strategy, distribution plans, a writing series I’m developing. I turned on the voice recorder and talked.

Two and a half hours. 18,000 words.

That’s a third of a novel. If I’d tried to type that, I’d have gotten tired, frustrated, and quit somewhere around page three. But talking? I could have kept going.

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Here’s what makes it work: the questions. Having something specific to respond to turns talking into structured thinking. I’ve given hundreds of speeches through Toastmasters — my brain has a framework for taking a question and building a response without planning it out. The questions are the ignition. The talking is the engine.

Forming the right question is the hard part. Answering it is the easy part.

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The talking is the generation. The writing is what comes after — editing, shaping, cutting the rambling from the substance. Eighteen thousand spoken words might be ten thousand usable ones. But ten thousand usable words in a day is more than I ever produced sitting at a desk pretending that was how I worked.

I’m a grown man who still needs to move to think. I spent a long time pretending that wasn’t true.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 3

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Earl Nightingale said the strangest secret in the world is that we become what we think about. The mind is fertile ground — it returns what you plant, and it doesn’t care what you plant.

I’d put it differently. Repetitions build strength. Strength changes your physique. And before long, you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror.

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My junior year of high school, I was determined to make the All-State choir. I’d missed the cut the year before and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. I knew I had to get the music so locked into my memory that when I heard the cues, my brain already knew where the notes were.

So I put in the reps. Over and over — listened, sang, practiced, repeated. My choir teacher, Mrs. Wilkins, told me she was worried about me. I smiled and said, “I got it. This is not a big deal.”

I walked in, sang right through it, and made the cut. Not because I got lucky. Not because I was more talented than the year before. Because I had done the reps until the music was part of me.

I wasn’t hoping I could do it. I knew.

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Years later, I was afraid of SQL. I don’t know why — it was irrational. I’d been writing Excel formulas for years. I could make a spreadsheet sing. But SQL felt like a wall I couldn’t get past.

Then I pushed through it. Learned how to write a proper query — select, from, where. And suddenly all those transformations I was doing by hand in Excel, I could write in scripts that ran themselves.

Then I moved into more advanced tools. Then into AI-assisted development. Now I mostly just talk about the business context of the data, and the tools handle the execution.

Each level of reps made the previous one obsolete. I didn’t plan that progression — it happened because I kept showing up and doing the work. The guy writing Excel formulas fifteen years ago wouldn’t recognize what I do now. The physique changed.

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Here’s the part Nightingale got right that most people skip past: the ground doesn’t care what you plant.

I spent years at a job where I was using maybe one percent of my available brain power. I did routine tasks for routine money and spaced out with the rest. The ground was fertile. I just wasn’t planting anything in it.

I could say the same about the season I spent at an art gallery, sitting on my hands instead of figuring out better ways to bring people through the door. The talent was there. The mind was there. I was using it for small jobs because small jobs were comfortable.

Nightingale’s warning isn’t just about planting the wrong thing. It’s about planting nothing at all — and watching the weeds take over anyway.

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The reps I’ve been doing this year have changed more than my habits. They’ve changed how I see myself. The creative kid I was and the serious professional I became spent a long time living in separate rooms. I thought I had to choose. Be taken seriously, or be creative. Build a career, or chase the things I actually cared about.

I finally realized they fit together. They always did. I just hadn’t done enough reps in both rooms to see it.

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Round 4 is here.

The seven habits stay the same. Bible study, gratitude, exercise, calories, hydration, reading, creative time. Those are the floor and they don’t change.

What changes is when. Morning belongs to Bible study, BiblePictures365, gratitude, and walking. Afternoon and evening belong to creative work and studying. After the gym, I’m done.

Two things are locked for this round: get ready to sit my CDMP exam at the end of June, and get Phase Defiant in front of more people. Light Bearer ships early — it’s two days of work from finished.

The question for Round 4 isn’t whether I can keep going. I’ve answered that three times already. The question is whether I can get what I’ve built in front of the people who need to see it.

Let’s go.

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

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I work in data. A big part of my job involves tracing data pipelines, reading SQL, debugging problems, and figuring out where things break. I’ve been doing it for almost twenty years.

Recently I’ve been using AI — specifically Claude — as a working partner in that process. And it’s changed my productivity in ways I didn’t expect.

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Here’s what AI does well. I can hand it a SQL statement and it will walk through it step by step, telling me exactly what it’s doing. For someone who already reads and writes SQL, this is incredible — I can cut through code at speed and get instant answers on things that used to take research and thinking time. Questions that would have meant twenty minutes of digging through documentation, I get answered in seconds. As I trace a pipeline from start to finish, I can see how each step is built and how real data moves through it.

It is, without question, the most powerful tool I’ve ever used at work.

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Here’s what it can’t do.

It doesn’t know what the business meant.

I was debugging a problem recently. The AI looked at the data and told me everything was correct. It wasn’t. I had to go back and define what the data fields actually meant — what they represented in the real business process, not just what the code said they were called. Once I did, the AI admitted it had made a logic jump. It had assumed it understood the data because it could read the code. But reading the code and understanding the business are two different things.

That’s the gap. SQL is a language, just like English. AI can process the language. It cannot supply the intent. It doesn’t know what a data point is supposed to represent. It doesn’t know the standards. It doesn’t know the stage gates. It doesn’t know the rules that exist because a human made a decision five years ago that still matters today.

So I have to define everything — every data point, every standard, every rule — for the AI to have any framework for how it’s supposed to operate.

Without that, it’s just a machine sitting by itself, not knowing what it’s doing.

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Data exists because people made decisions. Pipelines exist because someone had an intent. The code is just the execution of something a human needed to happen. Without the person who understands why the data is there, the tool has nothing to work with.

AI processes the language. It does not supply the intent.

Humans don’t like to follow rules. Computers do. We innovate outside the rules.

The tool isn’t replacing me. It’s making me faster at the work that still requires me to show up — the definitions, the context, the judgment calls. That’s not going away. If anything, it matters more now than it did before I had a tool this powerful sitting next to me.