Deep Breath

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 19

Every once in a while, you need to take a deep breath.

We had friends over tonight that we’ve known for over twenty-five years. Good people. The kind you don’t have to perform for. The kind where you sit down, the conversation starts, and three hours disappear.

Whatever I was working on today fell by the wayside. And that was exactly right.

Some nights the most productive thing you can do is stop producing and be present with people who restore you in a way that nothing else can.

My Fault

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 19

I was in a business conversation today. I thought I was being clear. I gave what I believed were straightforward directives — here’s the problem, here’s what I need done, here are the actions to take.

One person on the call almost point-blank refused to accept the message.

After a lot of going around, I realized it wasn’t that my words were wrong. It was that their understanding of the problem was different from mine. The solution I was prescribing didn’t make sense because they were stopped by their own mental model of the issue — and I had never checked whether we were looking at the same thing.

That wasn’t their fault. It was mine.

Here’s what I should have done. Before I prescribed a solution, I should have started with the problem statement. Here’s the issue. Here’s what I understand about it. Here’s how I see the pieces fitting together. Does everyone in this room see it the same way?

If they did, we move forward. If they didn’t, I’d have the chance to adjust my framework before I tried to build on top of it.

Instead, I assumed everyone was already crystal clear on the problem. I skipped the foundation and went straight to the fix. And the fix made no sense to someone who was standing on different ground.

Once I walked it back — restated the problem, rebuilt the understanding, asked “is this correct?” — everyone agreed and we moved on. The solution was the same one I’d proposed at the start. It just needed the foundation underneath it.

That ten minutes of conflict resolution could have been two minutes of consensus building at the top.

Breaking Parkinson’s Law

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 18

Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give yourself two weeks to do something that takes a day, and it’ll take two weeks. Not because the work is hard. Because you’ll let it.

I’ve been watching myself do this for months. I had a manuscript that needed two hours of edits. It took sixteen days. I had a music album ready to upload. It sat. I had a promotion plan to build. It drifted.

None of these were blocked. None of them were waiting on someone else. They just didn’t have deadlines, so they expanded to fill whatever space I gave them.

This morning, I broke the law.

Here’s what I committed to before 6:30 AM today, publicly, so I can’t take it back:

Light Bearer — my second novel — goes up on KDP by Saturday. Cover art adjusted, manuscript finalized, submitted. No exceptions.

The Phase Defiant companion album goes up on DistroKid by June 10. Music pulled, metadata tagged, one final listen, uploaded.

Phase Defiant promotion starts tomorrow. Sixty content ideas ready. Two posts a day for thirty days. Pictures, videos, music clips — the book gets in front of people every single day for a month.

LLC formation — research and planning done by June 17.

AI for Beginners course content mapped and built by July 3.

We fill available time because nobody told us not to. The cure isn’t discipline in the abstract. It’s specific deadlines on specific tasks, stated out loud, where someone can see them.

So here they are. You can see them. And in thirty days, you’ll see whether I hit them.

The Wing-It Tax

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 17

I was 19 and a bit unobservant. I signed up for what I thought was personal finance. I wanted to learn how to balance my checkbook. I ended up in fundamentals of business finance, learning bond valuation.

I did what I always did in college — I winged it. Showed up, skated through, and crammed at the end. Pretty sure I got a D. I was happy with it.

In retrospect, I’ve worked a corporate job for almost twenty years. The financials aren’t that hard to understand. If I had taken some focused time early that semester, I would have learned the material and been fine. It wasn’t a smarts thing. It was a wing-it thing that almost bit me.

I leaned on talent for most of my life. Smart kid, underachieving student. A 2.87 GPA in my undergrad, mostly propped up by passing all of my music courses.

Then I went back for my master’s degree and decided to get my act together. I studied. I did the assignments. I prepared instead of crammed. I graduated with a 3.95.

The only thing that changed was the work ethic.

I think most people romanticize the idea of working well under pressure. I think that’s nonsense. Very few of us actually work well under pressure we manufactured through our own laziness. We just convince ourselves we do because we survived it. Surviving isn’t thriving. And the work that comes out of a last-minute scramble shows it.

If I could go back and tell the kid in that finance class one thing, it would be this: the difference between a 2.87 and a 3.95 wasn’t talent. It was deciding to stop paying the wing-it tax.

Dare Mighty Things (Fifteen Years Later)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 16

In 2011, I wrote a short passage about a prisoner escaping a cell. He finds a footprint on the floor — proof that someone walked this path before him. He picks up a sword and feels something pulse through his arm. He remembers: I am a warrior. I have purpose. How long have I been hidden away?

I was writing about myself. I just didn’t know how to say it directly yet.

The fear I described fifteen years ago is the same fear I’m still fighting. The what-ifs. What if I’m not good enough? What if nobody cares? What if I put everything I have into this and it doesn’t work?

In 2011, I took those what-ifs to their logical end and concluded they wouldn’t kill me. That was true. But I didn’t do anything about them. I wrote about escaping and then stayed in the cell for another decade.

This year I walked out.

Not because the fear went away. It didn’t. I still feel it when I think about promoting my work. I still feel it when I put something personal on the page and hit publish. I felt it two weeks ago when I wrote that promotion feels like begging and named it for what it is — pride.

The difference between 2011 and 2026 isn’t courage. It’s decision. I decided that knowing what to do and not doing it was no longer acceptable. I built a structure — seven daily habits, forty-day rounds — and I started doing the reps. One hundred and fifty-two days later, the what-ifs are still there. They just don’t run the schedule anymore.

The passage I wrote back then had a line I didn’t fully understand when I wrote it: “The first step was finding the path, and as I make my way I start to remember who I really am.”

I understand it now. The path was always there. The warrior was always there. I just needed enough reps to remember.