The Battle

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a battle going on inside me that I’m only now learning to talk about.

On one side is the craftsman. He wants systems. Structure. Reps. He wants to know the plan, follow the plan, and measure the results. He’s the one who built a 280-day challenge with assessment weeks and daily checklists. He’s the one who taught himself SQL by sitting with select statements until they made sense. He’s the one who revised a 105-chapter novel down to 59 chapters because the story needed it, not because it was fun.

On the other side is the free spirit. He’s the one who picks up a guitar and writes a song he’ll never share. The one who starts a story because the idea is electric and stops when the electricity fades. He’s the one who connects data management to Sherlock Holmes in the middle of a conference speech and thinks, where did that come from? He’s the one who has filled notebooks for twenty years with dreams that never became anything — not because they weren’t good, but because he got bored before the boring part was over.

The free spirit loves the spark. The craftsman loves the grind. And for most of my life, they haven’t been on speaking terms.

The free spirit would start something — a song, a story, a challenge — and ride the wave until the wave broke. Then the craftsman would show up too late, look at the wreckage, and say, “If you’d just stuck with it.” And the free spirit would shrug and say, “But it stopped being fun.”

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last hundred days.

The free spirit isn’t the enemy. And the craftsman isn’t the hero. They need each other in ways I spent twenty years refusing to admit. The problem was never that one of them was wrong. The problem was that I kept letting them take turns instead of making them work together.

The truce I’ve found — and it is a truce, not a peace treaty — is this: the craftsman builds the system, and the free spirit works inside it. The system gives the free spirit a container. The free spirit gives the system a soul.

Some days the free spirit fights the plan. He doesn’t want to do the boring part. He doesn’t want to sit at the edge of what he knows and push into what he doesn’t. He wants to go back to the imaginative part where everything is new and nothing is hard.

But he’s gotten older. And a whole lot more cooperative. Because the books are getting written, the framework is taking shape, and for the first time in his life, the notebooks are turning into something real.

So I let them fight. And then I make them both show up tomorrow.

The Craftsman and the Machine

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I keep seeing his argument play out in real time at work.

Newport says rare and valuable skills — career capital — are what give you leverage. The craftsman builds that capital through reps, not passion. Show up, get deep, get good. The leverage follows.

But what happens to the craftsman when a machine can do the surface-level work in thirty seconds?

I’ve been watching AI adoption in my field for months now, and I see three groups forming.

The first group is leaning in. They’re learning everything they can. They’re training the AI, building context, making the partnership between human and machine as smart as it can be. They’re using the tool to augment their thinking — not replace it. These are today’s craftsmen, and the career capital they’re building right now is going to pay off.

The second group is leaning harder into the work itself — but ignoring the tool. They’re getting the right answers, but not as fast as they could. They’re not teaching the AI their context. They’re not augmenting their thinking so they can do more. They’re good at what they do, and that’s going to carry them for a while. But they’re going to fall behind, because the first group is doing everything they’re doing plus more.

The third group is saying screw it. No AI. Not interested. And they’re the ones who are going to get left behind entirely.

Here’s the thing Newport gets right that applies directly to this moment: career capital isn’t devalued by AI if you know what you’re doing. If you can partner with the machine to do your work better, faster, and deeper — your skills become more valuable, not less. The craftsman who picks up a power tool doesn’t lose his craft. He builds faster.

But if you’ve been pretending — if you’ve been skating on surface knowledge and the AI exposes that — you’re in trouble. There’s no other way to say it.

I ran a demo last week where I asked a system a question in plain English and watched it produce the SQL in real time. I could evaluate whether the output was right because I’ve been doing this work for twenty years. But what happens in five years when someone with two years of experience runs that same demo and can’t catch the errors?

That’s the question that keeps me up at night.

The answer isn’t to fear the machine. The answer is humility. Learn. Do your reps. Stop being arrogant about what you think you know and start being honest about what you don’t. Because the AI is going to have more compute power than any of us, and it’s going to get to answers faster than any of us. But it’s not going to have the human filter we need.

You’ve got to be humble. You’ve got to be aware. And you’ve got to do your job the best that you can to keep the AI honest.

That’s the craftsman’s job now. Not just building the thing. Building the thing and making sure the machine didn’t cut the corners you’d never accept.

The Challenge From My Son

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My son was a couple of days into a 30-day ab challenge when he invited me to join him — and that’s not the kind of invitation you turn down.

So I jumped in. And then, because apparently I can’t leave well enough alone, I extended it to 60 days. He got me started. That’s what matters.

Today was Day 24. A hundred and thirty crunches. Fifty-two leg lifts. A two-minute and five-second plank.

On Day 1, it was fifteen crunches, six leg raises, and a ten-second plank. Every day adds reps. Every day gets a little harder. And every day I show up and do it anyway.

I’m a barrel-chested man in the 270s. I’m probably never going to have a six-pack. But I can already see more definition through my midsection than I’ve seen in years. The fact that I can see muscle forming underneath the weight I’m still trying to lose is more encouraging than any number on the scale.

The planks are getting long enough now that I have to start breaking them up. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much until you’re holding your body weight off the ground and counting seconds. At 270-something pounds, every second earns its place.

My son invited me into something he was already doing. He didn’t lecture me about fitness. He didn’t send me an article. He just started, and then he asked if I wanted to come along.

That’s how the best challenges work. Somebody’s already in motion, and they make room for you to join.

I’m grateful for a son who challenges his dad to be better. And I’m grateful that twenty-four days in, the reps are getting harder and I’m getting stronger.

The Craftsman

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and he makes an argument that I can’t stop thinking about.

Most people are told to follow their passion. Find the thing you love, then figure out how to get paid for it. Newport says that’s backwards. The craftsman doesn’t start with passion. The craftsman starts with skill. They show up, do the work, get better, and somewhere along the way the passion finds them.

The distinction is in the question. The passion seeker asks, “what can the world offer me?” The craftsman asks, “what can I offer the world?” One is focused inward. The other is focused outward. And the one focused outward is the one who ends up building something that lasts.

I’ve lived both sides of this.

In the spring 1998, I was a singer on a full scholarship finishing sophomore year. I had thrown myself into music since the tenth grade with everything I had. Performing at church, writing songs, chasing every stage I could find. It felt like passion, and it was intense. But it wasn’t disciplined. I was taking voice classes, but I wasn’t studying voice. I wasn’t refining my craft with any kind of system. I was winging it and riding the feeling as far as it would carry me.

Then I met my wife. We went from strangers to married in eight months. And suddenly the thing I had been so intense about didn’t burn the same way. The passion got redirected toward something I loved more, and the singing just quietly faded into a hobby.

That’s what happens when intensity is the engine instead of craft. It burns hot until something hotter shows up.

Then I had to find work. Several years into our marriage, I fell into data management sideways, without a plan. I never saw myself as a data person. It was just a job.

And then I showed up for it. Day after day, year after year, learning the systems, understanding the architecture, solving problems. One day I woke up and realized that’s what I really enjoyed doing.

The thing I get most passionate about at work these days is making sure data is right so people can do their jobs better. The kid who wanted to be a rock star grew up to fight about data quality. And somehow, that’s exactly where I’m supposed to be.

The skill came first. The passion followed.

My time in Toastmasters taught me the same thing. I had a natural comfort on stage, but I could stick my foot all the way down my throat and just keep talking. I knew I needed to improve.

The craftsman work was learning to shape that raw ability into something useful — speech after speech, critique after critique, rep after rep. Two years of grinding before it started to click. Nobody handed me a passion for public speaking. I built it through reps.

But the clearest proof came when I tried it both ways back to back.

In 2022, I built a challenge called 100 Days Strong. It was fueled by frustration and raw energy — the feeling that something had to change. I muscled through it, lost almost 40 pounds, and burned out the moment it ended. I had intensity. I had desire. What I didn’t have was a system. The weight came back. The habits didn’t stick. The passion fizzled because there was nothing underneath it holding the structure together.

On January 1, 2026, I built the system first. I told myself there was no halfway option. No excuse. I was going to get in and learn the bones of this thing. I laid out the vision. I set goals behind the habits. I committed to writing every single day — not because I felt like it, but because the system required it.

The energy on Day 1 this year was different than any other time I’ve tried to change my life. It wasn’t passion driving me. It was a decision. And eighty-seven days later, the decision has produced more passion, more creativity, more output, and more clarity than any burst of inspiration I’ve ever chased.

Same person. Two approaches. Different outcomes.

Newport is right. The craftsman standard beats the passion standard. Not because passion doesn’t matter — it does. But because passion is the reward for mastery, not the prerequisite for it.

Show up. Get good. The passion will find you.

Twenty-Two

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve sold twenty-two copies of my first novel.

I’m going to sit with that number for a second, because it means two things at once.

First — I wrote a book. A real book. A story I’m genuinely proud of. It has four five-star reviews on Amazon from people who aren’t just being nice. One of them is a stranger who picked it up because a friend recommended it. He put everything else down to finish it. He’s waiting for book two.

Twenty-two people have read something I created, and the ones who’ve talked to me about it say it’s good. Not polite good. Real good.

That feels like something.

Second — twenty-two is not enough. Not because I need validation, but because I know this book could reach people if they could find it. And right now, they can’t. Because I have no idea how to make that happen.

I spent tonight doing research. Honest, unglamorous research into what it actually takes to get a self-published novel in front of readers on Amazon. And here’s what I learned: I don’t know anything about this part of the process.

I know how to write a book. I don’t know how to sell one. Getting the algorithm to show it to people, building the kind of social proof that makes a stranger willing to take a chance on an author they’ve never heard of — I’m standing at the edge of what I know. And there’s nothing out here but questions I haven’t answered yet.

That’s an uncomfortable place to be. Especially after eighty-five days of building systems and shipping work and feeling like the momentum is real. Because the momentum is real. I know where I’m going. I just don’t have the skill yet to get the book there with me. And the only way to learn it is the same way I’ve learned everything else this year. Read. Ask questions. Build a system. Execute. Adjust.

I didn’t know how to write a novel until I wrote one. I didn’t know how to build a daily habit system until I built one. I don’t know how to market a book yet. But I will.

Twenty-two copies. Four five-star reviews. One stranger who couldn’t put it down.

That’s not a failure. That’s a foundation.

P.S. If you want to check it out: https://a.co/d/06d0FLNf