I Only Rearrange

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

God spoke into a void and something was there.

That’s the first thing the Bible tells you about Him. Before the law, before the judgment, before any of the Renaissance paintings that shaped how most of us picture Him — the first fact on the record is that He made things.

I never noticed that until somebody pointed it out to me a little while back, and I haven’t been able to put it down since.

Because whatever I do when I sit down to write, it isn’t that.

I’m not pulling from nothing. I’m pulling from forty-seven years of everything I’ve read and watched and overheard and lived through, and I’m taking those pieces and putting them in an order they haven’t been in before. What I start with isn’t chaos exactly. It’s just not arranged the way it could be yet.

That’s the whole job. Rearranging.

Made in His image, not equal to it. He creates. I organize what He already made and hand it back slightly differently.

And every story I’ll ever tell has been told for thousands of years anyway — redemption, loss, somebody getting up off the floor when they had no business getting up. I’m not inventing those. I’m setting them somewhere new, in a voice that hits a little differently, so somebody hears the old thing for the first time.

That used to sound like a limitation to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Since I was a teenager I wanted to write songs. Not perform them — there’s a line in The Wedding Singer where Robbie says he never wanted to be a rock star, he just wanted to write the song that makes somebody go man, I know exactly what that guy was thinking. That’s been it for me since before I could have told you why.

I’ve since found out that’s what all of it is. The books, the pictures, the posts, the songs I finally did write. Every one of them is an attempt to arrange existing material so precisely that somebody else recognizes their own insides in it.

If being creative is what I was built to reflect, then doing it is a form of praise. Not because the output is any good — most of mine isn’t, and the pieces that are took twelve passes — but because wanting to return my creativity to Him is the point, to honor Him with the gifts He has given me.

I’ve been around people whose creativity flattened me. Watching what they can do with the same raw materials everybody else has access to is awesome inspiring to say the least. And to think their best is still just a poor reflection of THE Creative.

Here’s the part that keeps unsettling me.

If the first thing God tells us about Himself is that He creates, and that’s not the first thing I think of when I think about Him, then I’ve been carrying around a picture that isn’t accurate. And I doubt it stops there. What else have I absorbed about God from a painting or a sermon or a bad year that never got checked against the actual text?

Because if I’ve got wrong ideas about God, I’ve almost certainly got wrong ideas about myself. The two aren’t separable. How I see Him is upstream of how I see what I’m for.

For most of my life I treated the wanting-to-make-things part as a hobby that pulled me away from more serious business. Something to get to after the real work.

Turns out it might be the part that looks the most like Him.

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.