7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 5

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Some days you hit everything on the list. Some days you don’t.

Today I got my Bible study done. Gratitude done. Calories and hydration tracked. Bible pictures posted. Reading done. That’s five out of seven habits, and on a day where I had nothing left, I’ll take it.

No workout. No Substack. No creative hours. Just a man who ran out of gas before the day ran out of hours.

The system was built for days like this. Not every day is a clean sweep. The habit participation is what matters — not the streak, not the perfection. Show up for what you can. Let the rest come back tomorrow.

Tomorrow it will.

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.