Make Your Own Map

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 75 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Nobody is going to hand you the plan.

I’ve only started realizing that this year. I knew if I wanted to be successful, I had to name my own goals — not adopt someone else’s and try to chase them with my own passion. That just doesn’t work. I don’t want somebody else’s dream. I want my dream. I don’t want somebody else’s body. I want my body to look the way it’s supposed to. I don’t want to write somebody else’s book. I want to write the books that are inside of me, about the things I’m interested in.

So I had to make the map.

Not a map someone gave me in a class. Not one I found in a self-help book. Not one my boss outlined for me. Mine. Built from scratch. Designed for the terrain I’m actually walking on.

I’ve been reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and his principles keep landing on things I’m already living. But the truth is, I didn’t need Henry to tell me these things. I needed him to name what I was already doing — so I could see it clearly and do it better.

I’m seventy-five days into a 280-day transformation experiment that I designed myself. Seven daily habits, forty-day cycles, daily blogging, a published novel, a Bible illustration project, and a philosophical manifesto in progress. Nobody assigned this to me. Nobody approved it. I just decided it was time to stop filling notebooks with “someday” and start building.

That’s what map-making looks like. Not waiting for instructions. Deciding what the terrain requires and drawing the route yourself.

Do your best work even when no one’s watching.

My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Some days, one or two. I’m seventy-five posts in. Why do I keep writing for an audience that small?

Because I’m not writing it for them.

I’m writing it as my own content library — a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve been thinking. I know deep inside me that the questions I’m asking are good ones. The development I’m doing, whether publicly or privately, is still my own personal growth. It’s still interacting with my goals. It’s still getting things done.

And here’s the practical reason: if I don’t do my best now and have my rhythm down, and everybody shows up one day and I screw up — everything blows up. The time to get good is before the audience arrives, not after.

Say yes.

In the last seventy-five days, I said yes to publishing my book. I said yes to throwing myself out there and engaging online with people I don’t know. And from the limited feedback I’ve gotten, it’s all been positive.

What I’m discovering is that the real limitation was put on me by me. The limitations we live inside are self-inflicted most of the time. If we really wanted to get things done — put a plan together, build a system, and just said yes to doing it — we’d be so much further than we thought we’d be.

I’m finding that for myself, seventy-five days in.

But here’s the one that cuts deepest.

Take responsibility for your own progress.

Who was I waiting on for permission? Not my boss. Not a mentor. Not even a sign from God — although a finger is always welcome.

I was waiting on me.

Getting older has had an effect. The man I look at in the mirror these days is a whole lot grayer than he used to be. He’s having to work a whole lot harder to get back in shape. And I’m realizing that if I want to make a contribution to the world like I intend to, I have to do it right now. I cannot wait, in good conscience, for anybody else to give me permission to be the best version of myself.

I think it’s been a sin, in many ways, to limit myself from striving for excellence over the years. I’ve always tried to do my best. But I’ve let the fact that I didn’t know how to do something stop me from even wanting to learn how to do it.

I can’t do that anymore.

I was going through chemotherapy in 2005 for the first time. I would go back to work after my sessions, and I would sit in the office feeling like I’d been burned from the inside. Raw. Just as gross as you can feel. The guy I worked for was smoking cigars in there, and life was still moving at its regular pace. I just wasn’t.

And I remember sitting there thinking: I’m going to choose to take care of the things I’m responsible for, because I chose to. Not because someone’s making me. Because I decided that excellence was my standard, even when I felt like I was on fire inside.

That ability to choose excellence has served me for the rest of my life.

If you can choose it through chemotherapy, you can choose it at any other time.

You’re going to get well. You’re going to get better. And you’re going to come back with a map in your hand that you drew yourself — because nobody else was going to draw it for you.

That’s agency. That’s the yes that changes everything.

Day 75 of 280. Five days left in Round 2.

740Challenge #MakeYourOwnMap #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

The Man in the Mirror

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 74 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Sometimes I stare in the mirror, and I know exactly who’s staring back at me.

He’s the guy I’ve grown up with. The guy who’s worked alongside me throughout the years to be more and do more than I ever thought I could. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of where he’s come from. I’m proud of the progress he’s made. And I look forward to seeing what he looks like several years from now as the progress continues.

Then there are other times I look in the mirror, and I think to myself — who are you? Where did you come from?

Not because I don’t like what I see. Because in some ways, I’ve turned into someone I didn’t expect. I’ve become things I didn’t plan for.

And truth be told, I really like this guy too.

When we’re younger and looking at our future, I think it’s easy to see an ideal picture of what our current life is like and how it could be cast out over time. If we like our current life, we can imagine a future that looks similar — maybe bigger, maybe shinier, but familiar.

But what happens when you like your current life and you also know that without growth comes stagnation? And without growth comes degradation? You don’t just stop improving — you start sliding backward, because by nature, things are always moving in one direction or the other. You’re either growing or you’re receding. The idea of stasis is, in many ways, a myth.

So how do you embrace where you are with the dream of where you want to be — while also realizing that in growing, in getting better, in being unwilling to become less than you should be, you have to be open to change? How do you change from something you like now into something you’ll hopefully like later that may not look the same at all?

One of the reasons I’m doing the 7-40 Challenge is to give myself a framework to process those kinds of changes.

The framework is the habits I practice every day. Seven of them. Here’s why each one matters to me.

I read my Bible every day because I want to be close to God. I want to know His word, and I want to have a foundation for how I make all the other choices in my life. It’s where I start. It’s the first app I open on my phone every morning. That one habit, developed over several years, has become my cornerstone. It stays exactly where it is.

My exercise goal, paired with calorie tracking and water, has been transformative — because I love food. I love to eat food. I love to eat too much food. I love food that’s good for me and food that’s bad for me. I love flavors. And if I don’t give myself a good framework — how much to eat, how much water to drink, how much to move — I will lean into my foodie self and start to degrade instead of improve. Every good thing in moderation. Keep moving forward.

I read for thirty minutes a day — or take in thirty minutes of audiobook content — because I don’t want my mind to stagnate. Whether I’m revisiting concepts I’ve heard before or exploring new authors and ideas, I always want to be feeding my mind something engaging, something positive, something that builds me to be more and do more than I am now. If I don’t, I’m stuck with only the thoughts I already have. I’m not expanding. I’m not growing.

Gratitude is a position I’ve decided to take daily because I recognize that my life is a gift. Everything I have is a privilege. I’m grateful for the people I’ve gotten to surround myself with — some of the best friends imaginable. I’m grateful for my family. I have parents I love. I have in-laws I love. I have a job and a career I absolutely love, with people who push me to be better. I have to live from a position of gratefulness. Not because things are perfect, but because they are mine, and they were given to me.

And then, at the core of who I am — I am creative.

I love that the first thing the Bible tells us about God is that in the beginning, God created. And the Bible tells us we were made in His image. So we too are creative beings. I take that seriously. I’m creative in my approach to life. I’m creative in how I problem-solve. I’m creative in how I write. I’m creative in how I analyze data. I’m creative in how I think about the world.

I’m creative, I’m creative, I’m creative — because I was made in the image of a God who loves me, and I want to make Him proud. So I set an hour aside every day to create.

Now, I know you might be reading this and thinking — David, I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t share all the beliefs you have.

And I’d say: I understand.

But here’s the question that’s the same for both of us, regardless of what we believe:

What are the things that are core and important to you? How do you describe them in a way that when you stare in the mirror, you see the person staring back and think — I know you, and I’m proud of you? I’m proud of what you’re working on. I’m proud of what you’re accomplishing.

And how do you also stare in the mirror and think — you look familiar, but you’re somebody new, and I like you too?

How do you keep building those two pictures hand in hand — so that you keep getting better, keep striving for the goals you’ve set in front of you, keep becoming someone you recognize and respect?

The 7-40 Challenge is how I’m accomplishing that. Seventy-four days in, the man in the mirror is someone I know and someone I’m becoming. Both at the same time. And I’m proud of them both.

740Challenge #TheManInTheMirror #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #Gratitude #Faith

Context Comes Before Learning

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 73 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to go see a movie at the theater. We hadn’t heard anything about it. Didn’t read a review. Didn’t watch a trailer. Just picked one and sat down.

It was horrible. We walked out in the middle of it. I wanted to poke my eyes out.

That’s what happens when you consume something without context. You don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know why you’re there, and you have no framework for deciding whether it’s worth your time. You’re just sitting in the dark hoping something good happens.

I don’t pick up books that way anymore. I need to know what I’m diving into — what it’s about, why I’m reading it, and what potential benefit it has for me before I start. At work, when I sit down with a dataset, the first thing I do is figure out what I’m looking at. What system did this come from? What business purpose does it serve? What am I trying to answer? Even if the point is just discovery — just trying to understand what I have — that’s still a point. There’s still a reason I’m sitting down.

Context comes first. Learning comes second. And when you flip that order, you waste time, money, and energy consuming things that never stick.

I read Atomic Habits years ago. Good book. I could recite the habit loop: cue, craving, response, reward. The concepts stuck with me, at least on the surface.

But here’s what’s different now. Seventy-two days into the 7-40 Challenge, with a daily data management career running alongside a personal transformation experiment, I can see that habit loop everywhere — and not just in habits. I see it in bad data flowing into systems. In process failures that repeat because nobody defined the steps well enough. In shortcuts people take because the workflow was never designed properly.

Those associations didn’t exist for me before. Not because the book was lacking, but because I was. I didn’t have the professional and personal context to hang the framework on. The book was the same. I was the variable.

Todd Henry put it simply today: we learn best in the context of what we already know. Building context is key.

I’ve watched this play out in corporate settings for eighteen years. Companies train people on new systems and tools without ever explaining why the system exists or what business problem it was built to solve. Six months later, some of those people are using the tool well — the curious ones, the ones who started asking questions on their own. And the rest? They’re clicking buttons. Doing exactly what they were told and nothing more. No enthusiasm. No skin in the game. No growth.

The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s context. The ones who thrive went looking for the why behind the tool. The ones who stagnated never had it and never sought it out.

A data architect looks at a table and sees the system it came from, the business purpose, the relationships to other data. A regular user sees rows and columns. What the regular user misses — because they don’t have the context — is whether they’re even looking at the right data. Is this the source of origin or a reporting copy? Can you trace the lineage? Is it reliable? I’ve heard people call Excel a database. It mimics one, but it has none of the governance, procedure, or protocol that needs to sit on top of real data.

Without context, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you make decisions based on that ignorance.

A kid in college takes a class on personal finance. They learn the principles: spend less than you earn, pay off debt, invest early. Five years later, they’re drowning in credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck.

The principles were sound. The education was delivered. But nobody connected the spreadsheet to the Saturday night. Nobody showed them what “spend less than you earn” looks like when your friends are all going out and you’re twenty-two and the credit card company just handed you a $5,000 limit. The knowledge was there. The context for applying it to their actual life wasn’t.

This is the same thing happening across every “how-to” space right now. The AI crowd skips to the prompts. The self-help crowd skips to the habits. The fitness crowd skips to the workout plan. All three are chasing the shortcut past the same hard work: Who are you? What do you value? What do you want?

That’s not a warmup exercise. That’s the foundation everything else is built on. Lifting weights is great — but understanding what you want your body to do is even better. Prompts are useful — but you have to know what you want before the tool can help you get it.

So how do you build context for someone who doesn’t have any? Someone with no data background, no self-help reading, no system for their life?

You start with one question: Are you happy?

Are you living the life you want to live? Yes or no. If it’s no — what are the things you’re unhappy about? You start picking out the points of dissatisfaction and look for the common theme. Is it because you don’t have the habits? Is it envy? Is it a lack of direction? What’s the reason behind the frustration?

Find the common theme. Work through the pain points. Build context from the inside out — starting with who they are, not what they should learn.

My son is seventeen. He’s watching me transform in real time. And one of the things I’ve learned as a parent is that you’re constantly building context into your kid’s life so they can understand why you bring them the things you do. You’re trying to help them see the world with more wisdom, but you’ve got to find the balance between letting them explore and just doing it for them.

They don’t learn anything if you do it all for them. But it takes forever if you just let them figure everything out alone.

Here’s what I love about my boy: he asks why. And once you satisfy the why, he’s generally pretty good at coming along. That’s the whole argument for context-before-learning in one kid.

I’ve been in church my whole adult life. I’ve heard sermons from the same passages dozens of times. But the clearest example I have of context changing everything about how you receive information comes from a story I’ve known since I was a teenager — one that only broke me open this year.

These people saw the Red Sea part. They saw the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day. They saw Mount Sinai. The Spirit of God lived in the camp with them. And yet — when God said they could go into the promised land, they said no. A trip that should have taken eleven days took forty years. And everyone who said no didn’t get to go.

I’d like to believe I would have had the faith to go. But truth be told, I’m no better than them. There have been opportunities in my life where I knew God was opening a door, and I still said no.

It means more to me now because I’m actively trying to pursue what I think God wants from my life. I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore. When I see something I need to do, I want to go do it — because I don’t want to be standing right on the edge of the promised land and not get to go in because I was a bonehead.

My life context finally caught up to a passage I’ve heard since I was a teenager. Same words. Different reader. That’s what context does.

If context comes before learning, then most education systems have it backwards. They deliver the learning first and hope the context catches up later. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.

If I could design it from scratch, I’d start with aptitude and self-knowledge. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up” — but what do you enjoy? What are you good at? What do you find yourself doing when nobody’s making you do anything?

I never knew at eighteen that I’d be an IT professional who loved data. It made no sense to me. I didn’t find data management until I was twenty-eight — eleven years after I graduated high school. I had to learn about myself first. I had to understand what made me me. And when I finally had the context of who I was and figured out where education could help me become more of who I was — that’s where I landed. And that’s when I really started to take off.

Context comes before learning. Always has. The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to learn — it’s whether you’ve done the quieter work of knowing yourself well enough for the learning to land. I spent twenty years skipping that step. The last seventy-two days have been what happens when you stop.

Day 73 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking and Lifitng
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ BiblePictures365 (Deuteronomy 21-23)
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #ContextBeforeLearning #DIKW #PersonalDataModel #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #ToddHenry

The Dashboard Moved

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 72 of the 7-40 Challenge

One of the interesting things about publishing a book is you get a dashboard.

It tells you how you’re doing. The number goes up, that’s good. The number sits still — well, that’s data too. Either way, you’re watching it.

This past week, since I let people know about my novel Phase Defiant, I’ve sold seventeen copies.

I know what you might be thinking. Seventeen? That’s not very many.

Here’s what I thought when I saw seventeen: I feel honored and blessed that seventeen times, someone was interested enough to pay actual money to read something I wrote. Seventeen times, somebody looked at what I put into the world and said, “Yeah, I’ll try that.”

That number is small. And it means everything.

What Seventeen Tells Me

It tells me that if I can get this book in front of people, they’re going to like it. The feedback I’ve gotten so far confirms what I hoped — this is a good story. Getting to watch that number climb is a scorecard, not just for the book, but for the effort I’m putting into promoting it, letting people know it exists, and learning how to talk about it.

I don’t even know who all seventeen buyers are. I might know ten or twelve of them from Facebook comments and personal conversations. I’ve reached out to the ones I could identify and said thank you. But somewhere in that number are people I’ve never met who found this book and decided it was worth their time.

The idea that someone I don’t know would pick up this book and think, Hey, that was cool — I have to admit, that’s a nice feeling.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

Here’s something I’ve been aware of for a while but am only now experiencing firsthand: getting the book written, edited, formatted, and up on Amazon is maybe ten percent of the actual battle.

The other ninety percent is what comes after you hit publish.

It’s not losing your enthusiasm. It’s learning how to talk to people about what you’ve done. It’s being your own cheerleader and spokesperson. And I’ll be honest — this is the part I’m having to work on. As a creative, I love creating. I can get stuck in the promotion stage and feel a little restless, wanting to move on to the next thing.

But this is where I have to be more grown up in my approach.

I’ve created things in the past that I made quickly, shipped quickly, and moved on from so fast that it didn’t matter whether anyone noticed. This was different. I spent months writing. Months editing. I designed the cover, built the images, handled every piece of this thing myself. I am more invested in Phase Defiant than any creative project I’ve ever done.

And because of that, I’m more invested in telling people about it.

The Sweet Spot

There’s a space I’m trying to find — and I think every creative person who puts something into the world has to find it. It’s the place where you’re excited about what you’ve made, you’re sharing it genuinely, you’re leading people into the intrigue of the story — but you’re not desperate. You’re not begging. You’re not performing.

You’re just a person who made something, and you’d like other people to experience it.

Learning to live in that space — enthusiastic but not frantic, proud but not pushy — is a skill. And it’s one I’m building in real time, seventeen copies at a time.

Why This Book

Every writer wants their work to be loved by a lot of people. I’m no different. But what I really want is for the people who find Phase Defiant to be able to relax for a little while inside a story set thirty years ago, where they don’t have to think too hard. Just flow with the narrative. Get lost in a thriller. And walk away satisfied when it’s over.

The characters grow in ways that I think are deeply relevant to teens today — ways that could inspire you to see things differently than what you’re facing and how you’re handling them.

I wrote this book because I enjoy it. And while I’m a little weird at times, I know there’s a whole lot of people out there who are weird too.

So if you haven’t picked it up yet — Phase Defiant is available on Amazon. And if you have, thank you. You’re one of my seventeen. That means something to me.

The dashboard moved. And I’m just getting started.

See you tomorrow for Day 73.

A Tomb or a Library

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 71 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in data management. It’s my day job. I think about how data flows through systems, how it gets organized, how it turns into something useful. I think about the architecture behind it — the tables, the databases, the business processes, the people who care enough to enter things correctly and the people who throw things at random into places they don’t belong.

And about ten years ago, I started seeing the same framework everywhere — not just at work, but in life.

In my field, there’s something called the DIKW pyramid. It works like this:

Data is raw. It’s the unprocessed facts of your life — the events, the numbers, the experiences piling up with no context.

Information is data with context. When you start to organize what’s happened to you and see patterns, you’ve turned data into information.

Knowledge is information you’ve absorbed. The books you’ve read, the lessons you’ve been taught, the principles you can recite from memory.

Wisdom is knowledge tested against your own life — wrestled with, questioned, and earned through action.

Most people stop at knowledge. They read the book. They save the post. They listen to the podcast. They can recite the principles. And they stay stuck. Because knowledge without action is just a shelf full of books you never opened twice.

I didn’t learn this from a textbook. I learned it the hard way.

I was lying in a hospital bed during my second bout with cancer. I had time to think — more time than I wanted. And I started seeing the connections. The way data moved through my company was the same way information moved through my life. Raw inputs get processed into something contextual. Context builds into understanding. Understanding, if you act on it, becomes wisdom.

And I realized: if I control the inputs — what I read, how I eat, how I exercise, what I feed my mind and my spirit — I can, in a lot of ways, influence the output. That’s true in data management. And it’s true in life.

Here’s the question that keeps coming back to me: What’s the difference between someone who reads Atomic Habits and changes their life versus someone who reads the same book and puts it on the shelf?

Same book. Same information. Same knowledge available to both.

The variable is agency. The willingness to act on what you know. The realization that nobody is coming to save you, nobody is going to do it for you, and the information sitting on your shelf is useless until you decide to apply it.

That’s the leap from knowledge to wisdom. Not reading more. Doing something with what you’ve already read.

My data management brain sees things in a different way. I see systems. I see related sets of information that join together. I see frameworks and architecture. I think about how things connect — and more importantly, I think about what happens when they don’t.

And here’s what I notice about how most people organize their lives: their inputs are at odds with their stated goals.

Someone says they want to be a writer but never sits down to write. Someone says they want to get in shape and fills their body with garbage. Someone says they want a strong marriage and spends their energy tearing their spouse down behind closed doors.

A data architect would look at that and flag it immediately: you have a structural problem. Your inputs don’t match your desired output. No amount of motivation will fix that. You need to redesign the system.

That’s what healthy habits do. They redesign the system. They align your daily inputs with the life you say you want. And when the system is aligned, the outputs start to change — not because you’re trying harder, but because the architecture finally supports the goal.

So if you’re sitting at your desk right now, with a shelf full of books behind you and a head full of knowledge that hasn’t changed anything — I have one question for you.

Is that shelf a tomb or a library?

A tomb is something that’s never opened because it’s full of dead bones. Decay and rot and silence live there. The information inside has stopped moving. It serves no one.

A library is alive. It’s rich with possibility. It’s full of words that want to guide you somewhere better. It’s waiting for someone to pull a book off the shelf, open it, and do something with what’s inside.

If you’ve been collecting books the way I collected books for twenty years, I have a feeling you want more than you have right now. You want to be more and do more than you are. But you’re stuck on this word: agency. You don’t feel like you have any. You feel like every time you try to move forward, something pushes back.

Here’s what a data architect would tell you: that pushback is a system conflict. Your old architecture — the habits, the patterns, the defaults you’ve been running on for years — is fighting the new inputs you’re trying to introduce. That’s not a sign that you’re failing. That’s a sign that the redesign is working. Every system resists change at first. The old processes don’t want to be replaced. But if you keep feeding the new system with the right inputs, consistently, the old one loses its grip. The architecture shifts. And the outputs start to change.

So I’ll ask you plainly: what do you want?

And if you know what you want — what are you willing to do to get it?

I spent twenty years with a shelf full of books and a head full of knowledge that wasn’t going anywhere. I had data. I had information. I even had knowledge. What I didn’t have was the willingness to put it to work — to wrestle it into wisdom through daily, unglamorous action.

Don’t let your shelf be a tomb. Turn it into a library. Take what you know, apply it to your life, and start the climb from knowledge to wisdom. Do it today. Do it again tomorrow. And pretty soon, you’ll look in the mirror and barely recognize yourself — not because you became someone new, but because you finally became who you were always supposed to be.

Day 71 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry + Keep Going — Austin Kleon)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ Exercise
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #DIKW #DataToWisdom #TombOrLibrary #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #ToddHenry #SystemsThinking