Whose Name Is On It?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent close to twenty years in data, and a lot of that time on project work. Some of it high profile. On the ones I led, I wasn’t a manager — I was the technical subject matter expert, which meant I wasn’t responsible for anyone’s paycheck but I was responsible for the work packages going out the door.

That distinction matters less than it sounds like it should.

When everything runs clean, I look good. When it doesn’t, the people doing the work get looked at, and then everyone looks at me, because I’m the one who reviewed it. I’m the one who signed off. Multiple points of failure, one name at the bottom.

So when something got past me — when work went out and around before I could catch it — I didn’t just have a quality problem. I had damage control. Remediation. And then the harder part, which is sitting down with a person and having the conversation nobody wants to have, sometimes more than once, focused on solving the issue.

It always worked out. That’s not the point. The point is that I learned a long time ago that my name is the thing I’m actually trading on, and everything that goes out under it is a withdrawal or a deposit.

I’ve been telling myself I have a camera problem.

I don’t have a problem with my face being attached to things. I don’t have a problem standing in front of a room. I’ve given a lot of speeches to a lot of people and I like doing it. Put me on a stage and I’m fine.

So the anxiety around shooting video for the book has been confusing to me, right up until I put it next to the sign-off.

I’m old school enough that if I’m going to put something on video, I want to be saying something helpful and true — something I’d sign. And what I’ve noticed is that the videos come easy when I’m talking about the book. The characters, the writing process, why I made a choice. I can vouch for all of it. I wrote it. I know exactly what’s in there.

Where I freeze is the stuff where I haven’t finished the thinking yet. Where the message is still four-fifths formed and I can feel the soft spot in it. My mouth knows it before my head does.

That’s not fear of the lens. That’s my sign-off reflex firing correctly.

Which means I’ve been solving for the wrong thing. I kept trying to get comfortable on camera, and comfortable was never the variable. Vouchable was.

If I can’t stand behind it, I shouldn’t be the one selling it. If I want to be able to shoot the video, the work isn’t in the video — it’s upstream, in getting the message clear enough that I’d put my name at the bottom without flinching.

And I’ve been doing that for twenty years. Just not for myself.

There’s a version of this I don’t love admitting. Some of the videos I’ve avoided weren’t avoided because the message was unclear. They were avoided because clarifying it would have taken an afternoon I didn’t want to give it, and “I’m not comfortable on camera” is a much more flattering sentence than “I haven’t done the work yet.”

I signed off on a lot of other people’s work over the years and never once thought it was strange to be accountable for something I didn’t personally build.

The camera just asks the same question, pointed the other direction.

The Thing Became The Message

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

When I found Toastmasters I fell in love with it immediately. Not with speaking — with the machinery of speaking. Structure, delivery, the evaluation loop, the whole beautiful system of it.

There was one problem, and it took me years to see it.

I didn’t have anything to say.

So I did the natural thing. I talked about speaking. I gave speeches about how to give speeches. I helped other people get better at the thing I was getting better at, which is genuinely useful work and I’d do it again — but somewhere in there the vehicle quietly became the destination. I had picked up a tool for carrying a message and then spent years admiring the tool.

Same thing happened with Dan Miller.

I read 48 Days to the Work You Love, then No More Mondays, and they lit me up. Here was a framework for building something of my own. I wanted that badly.

I didn’t know how to apply it. So instead of starting the business, I wanted to talk about starting the business. I could explain his framework to you cleanly. I could not point at a thing I had built with it.

That’s twice now. There’s probably a third I haven’t caught.

The pattern goes like this: I get excited about something because I want to learn it, and instead of running my own material through it, I make the learning itself the whole enterprise. It feels like progress. It produces content. It even helps people. And it lets me stay one comfortable step back from the thing I actually have to say.

Which brings me to the obvious risk sitting in front of me right now.

I use AI something like eight hours a day. I have conversations with people who are still deciding whether it belongs in their business at all, and I’m not an early adopter by any stretch, but I’m clearly further down the road than most of the room I’m standing in. That gap is real and it won’t stay open long.

And the easiest possible move from here is: I learned AI, let me teach you AI.

That’s the trap. That’s Toastmasters again with new vocabulary.

Because AI isn’t my strength. I’ll say that plainly. My strength isn’t knowing how large language models work under the hood, and it isn’t prompting — I’m good at it, but so are a lot of people, and it’s getting easier by the month. My strength is taking something difficult to understand and making a person feel like they understand it. That’s what twenty years of technical work built, and it’s what Toastmasters sharpened, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever been consistently better at than the people around me.

So the message isn’t AI.

The message is communication. It always was — I just spent years talking about the delivery mechanism instead. AI is what makes the message urgent, because we’ve handed a huge portion of human communication to a machine and almost nobody was taught how to talk to it, and the ones who don’t learn are going to lose ground fast.

The tool is the reason people will listen. It isn’t the thing I’m saying.

I’ve caught this in myself twice. Both times, years late.

The tell is the same in every case: when I can teach the framework more fluently than I can show you what I made with it, I’ve swapped the vehicle for the road.

Your Agency Is the Story

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Open any business feed this month and you’ll see the same headline wearing a dozen different logos. Oracle cutting tens of thousands. Snap trimming another slice. Block reshaping itself and watching the stock climb the same afternoon. Different companies, different numbers, but almost all of them reach for the same three-word explanation:

AI did it.

I want you to notice what those three words are doing. They turn a decision into a weather event. Nobody chose anything. Nobody is accountable. A force of nature swept through the org chart, and management was just standing there holding an umbrella. It’s tidy. It’s clean. And more often than the headlines admit, it isn’t true.

Here’s what I’d actually pay attention to, though, because it’s useful. Watch how a company talks about this — not whether they cut, since nearly everyone is, but how they describe it. Some own the decision plainly: here’s the call we made, here’s why, here’s who it affects. Others reach for the machine. Some are genuinely ready, moving real capital toward an AI future. Some are calling layoffs a strategy when they’re really just a funding mechanism. And some, I have reason to believe, cut the people first and went looking for the reason afterward. I can’t always tell from the outside which is which — but the framing gives them away. The difference between a company that owns its choices and one that hides behind a machine is stark, and it’s usually sitting right there in the press release. I’m not saying corporations are evil. I’m saying there’s a real gap between the good ones and the bad ones, and how they narrate this exact moment is one of the clearest tells you’ll get.

But whether they’re lying or just hiding, I don’t want to spend this piece litigating it — because for your purposes, it doesn’t matter which. That’s the easy essay, and it’s the less important one. Those three words aren’t only excusing the people who wrote them. They’re quietly trying to take something from you: the belief that any of this is still in your hands.

Agency or abdication

When leadership frames a decision as inevitable, that’s abdication. They made a choice about where money flows and whose livelihood absorbs the cost, and then they dressed that choice up as destiny so no one would ask whether it was a good one. Agency or abdication — there is no third option. They picked abdication. That’s on them.

You do not have to accept the same frame for your own life. Their honesty is their problem to answer for. Whether they owned the cut or hid it behind a machine changes nothing about the one thing that stays yours no matter what they do: the responsibility for what you build next. That doesn’t transfer to them. It never did, and no press release can take it from you.

Perspective is everything here, and I mean that almost literally. Two people can read the exact same headline. One reads it and hears: you are a line item, and deletion is coming. The other reads it and hears: the institutions are telling on themselves — so I’d better be the one thing they can’t hand-wave away. Same words. Same economy. Completely different life, depending on which one you decide is true.

The value you build is yours. The skill you sharpen is yours. The way you show up, adapt, and make yourself genuinely harder to replace — no quarterly announcement controls that. It was never theirs to automate.

What’s still yours

I talk a lot about augmentation over abdication when it comes to these tools, and usually I’m aiming it at how we use AI. But it cuts the same way for a career. Abdication is waiting to see what gets decided about you. Augmentation is picking up the same tools these companies are betting billions on and becoming more capable, more valuable, more undeniable because of them.

I won’t pretend that’s armor. Doing everything right doesn’t make you bulletproof — plenty of people augmented fully, made themselves indispensable by every reasonable measure, and still got cut because a spreadsheet needed a number. What the work buys you isn’t immunity. It’s mobility. The person who kept getting sharper walks into the next room with something to offer; the person who waited walks in with a story about what was done to them.

Not because a company will notice and reward you. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. You do it because it’s yours to do, and because the alternative is handing your sense of worth to people who’ve already shown you they’ll blame a machine rather than own a decision.

For the people actually in it

I want to be careful, because there are real people behind those numbers, and they’re carrying real loss right now. This is not a pep talk that pretends nobody got hurt. Plenty did.

But the most respectful thing I can offer anyone standing in that spot isn’t it was inevitable. That’s the lie. The honest word is the opposite: it wasn’t inevitable — and your next move still belongs to you. Your worth was not calculated by a model. It was never on the ledger they were cutting from.

The companies want you to believe a machine decided your value. Don’t give them that. Your agency was never theirs to automate — and in a season where so many institutions are abdicating theirs, yours matters more than it ever has.

Aim for the Top of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around our house, we love a good puzzle. It’s part of the furniture — brain-teasers at the table, riddles in the car, a general suspicion that anything can be turned into a game if you look at it right. So when my son’s eighteenth birthday came around and he told me what he wanted, it wasn’t just a party. He wanted a murder mystery — a night where he and his friends could sit down together and solve something.

That’s a brief. A real one. A specific thing, for a specific group, on a specific night. And a brief like that is the best gift a person can hand you if you like to make things, because it tells you exactly what you’re solving for.

So I built the night. Nine puzzles in all — seven scattered around the house for the teams to move through and work out together, then two more that funneled everyone down into the final whodunit. Dinner first, then about an hour of teasers, then the Clue-style reveal at the end. And here’s the thing I had to keep reminding myself the whole time I was designing it: it did not matter one bit what I found fun.

I’m older than eighteen. I like a hard puzzle, the kind you chew on for a day. If I’d built the night I’d want, I’d have built it for me, and it would have died on the table in front of a room of teenagers. So I set that version of me aside and built for them — for what my son loves, the history and the Professor Layton brain-teasers and the wordplay he’s been doing for years, and for his friends, who are cut from the same cloth. The question was never “can I solve this?” It was “can they?”

And that turned out to be a harder question than I expected, because I got the answer wrong in the most interesting way.

I wrote a cipher — a letter-shift, where you slide each letter back three spaces to read the hidden word. I thought it would be a good challenge. My son cracked it in about five seconds. Then I wrote what I thought was a gentle riddle, a little play on making a toast, the kind of thing I figured they’d get instantly. It stopped them cold. Clue after clue, and they still had to fight for it.

I’ve thought about that flip a lot since. It wasn’t random. These are kids who grew up pattern-matching at speed — puzzles, games, screens, systems with rules to crack. The mechanical cipher was their native language; they saw the pattern before I finished explaining it. But the slow, lateral riddle — the one where you have to read every single word and sit with what it actually means — that’s a different muscle, and it’s the one they flex the least. Without meaning to, I’d run a little experiment on how this generation thinks, and it inverted everything I assumed.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say, because there’s a trap on both sides of designing for other people.

I could have handed them something easy. They’d asked for a fun night, and it would have been simple to give them puzzles a child could solve and call it a crowd-pleaser. But that’s not respect — that’s pandering, and pandering gives people less than they’re capable of. The other trap is the opposite one, and it’s the one people like me fall into: build it high and hard and clever, the way I’d want it, and let them feel the reach of my own cleverness. That gives them less too. It just dresses the withholding up as sophistication.

The whole job was to aim at neither. To build for the top of what they could actually rise to — hard enough to be worth solving, fair enough that solving it felt earned. Respecting people’s capacity means calibrating to it, not performing above it and not stooping below it.

I didn’t get every puzzle right. But I built in enough variety that when my calibration was off, there was still something on the other side that landed. By the end of the night they’d worked their way down to the killer, and it had taken them the full hour, and it was satisfying in the way only a thing you had to work for is satisfying.

A couple of the kids told me I needed to throw another one soon. That made me smile — you make something, and it lands, and that feels good.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was my son, at the end of his party, having had a genuinely good night with his friends in our home. That was the whole brief. Everything else was just me trying to be worthy of it.

The Rules Behind the Magic

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been building a book about a detective who believes everything has a rational explanation, and I’ve dropped him into a world where magic is real on the first page.

The detective is the Scarecrow. That’s the joke underneath the whole thing — he isn’t an outsider who wanders into Oz skeptical of it. He’s a native. But at the end of the story we all know, the Scarecrow got his brain, and ever since he’s leaned hard into it, becoming the most rigorously logical mind in a land that runs on enchantment. He’s the one figure in Oz actively trying to reason the magic away. His Watson — the one telling the story — is the Tin Man, which feels right, because who better to narrate a tale about the head and the heart than the man who went looking for one of them.

It’s called A Scandal in Emerald, and if that rings a bell, it should. I built it on the bones of A Scandal in Bohemia — the one Sherlock Holmes story where somebody finally out-thinks Holmes. That somebody was Irene Adler, and in my version she’s Dorothy. Not the little girl who wanted to go home. A grown woman who, it turns out, never lost the silver shoes over the desert the way the old books say she did. She kept them. She’s been slipping between Kansas and Oz for years, gathering what she knows, and when she reappears she looks for all the world like the villain of the piece — while she’s quietly trying to save Oz all over again.

So that’s the setup. Here’s the part I actually care about.

When the magic breaks his rules, the Scarecrow does what a mind like his always does: he gets annoyed. He needs an answer. He keeps trying to force the enchantment back into something logical, and when he can’t, it frustrates him to no end. He’s built to reduce the world to explanations, and the world won’t cooperate.

And then he starts to find that the magic has rules.

I don’t have every beat of this worked out yet — I’m still in the outline and the world bible. But the idea driving it is one I believe outside the book entirely. Somebody standing two hundred years ago would look at the world we live in now and call it magic, top to bottom. It isn’t. It’s science finally catching up to what people used to only imagine. Even in Oz, half of what everyone called magic was the Wizard behind a curtain, working the levers. The real work is finding the line: what’s genuinely wondrous, and what only looked like magic until somebody understood how it worked.

Here’s what surprised me about my own detective. Finding the rules doesn’t ruin the magic for him. It makes him love it.

That cuts against the thing everybody assumes — that understanding kills wonder, that the magician who explains the trick has murdered it. But a mind like his doesn’t run on mystery. It runs on curiosity. Take away the puzzle and he goes restless and hollow; he needs something to figure out or the engine turns on itself. So the last thing he wants is for the magic to stay unknowable. He wants to know how it works — and once he does, two things happen at once. He appreciates it more, not less. And he can finally use it, because anything you truly understand becomes something you can put to work.

We’ve got our own magic now. Tools that make the impossible look effortless, that dazzle some people and frighten others. You can stand in front of that and feel small, or you can do what the Scarecrow does and go looking for the rules. Almost everything is learnable, at least far enough to stop being afraid of it. A little reading, a little discernment, and most of the curtain comes down.

That’s the thing I’m really writing about, underneath a mystery in a green city. Not how to escape into a world of magic. How to stretch our minds enough to meet the world we’re actually in — instead of the one we wish we’d been handed.