Two-Thirds Down The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We missed a kayak rental this morning because of something printed on a piece of paper in our room.

It was there. That’s the part I want to say first, because it would be easy to write this as a complaint and the complaint isn’t honest. The information was in our stateroom, in a packet, on a page, and it explained exactly what we needed to do. We had it the whole time.

We just didn’t read down that far.

Here’s the shape of it. The island is a tender port, which means the ship anchors and small boats run you ashore. You need a ticket to get on a tender. We did not know that.

We showed up when we thought we were supposed to show up, without a ticket, and it took over an hour to get across.

The page that would have told us started with general information about being in port that day. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, tucked into the middle of everything else, was the one operational instruction that actually mattered.

I asked somebody. The ship was in full frenzy trying to move a few thousand people onto boats, so the answer I got was quick and incomplete, and I didn’t know enough to ask the follow-up. He had to go ask somebody else. We crossed the ship twice and stood around a long time.

We got ashore around eleven and were back aboard by two-thirty. Sunburned, worn out, and we’d swum with stingrays. It was a good day.

The kayak was thirty dollars.

So I’ve been thinking about the page instead of the kayak.

Years ago I worked somewhere that brought in a consultancy for a very large ERP implementation. Enormous project, enormous money. Their focus was functional design documentation, and they wrote it — hundreds of hours of it, genuinely thorough, full of exactly the information people needed.

It didn’t read like anything a user would ever want to open. So we ended up building training to teach people what was already written down.

As far as I know, every one of those documents got filed and never opened again.

I’ve spent twenty years around that problem. Information being available is not the same as information being findable, and the gap between those two things is where most of the real failure happens. It never looks like failure, either. It looks like documentation. Somebody can always point at the page and say it’s right there.

It was right there this morning too.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

This is our seventh cruise. It’s our first with this line.

I didn’t skim that page because I’m new at this. I skimmed it because I’m not. I know how a port day works. I’ve been handed a version of that packet six times before and it has never once contained anything I needed. So my eyes did what eyes do with a document they’ve already decided is boilerplate — took the top third, confirmed nothing had changed, moved on.

Something had changed. Different line, different ticketing, one paragraph two-thirds down.

Six cruises of experience is exactly what made me not read it.

If I’d been at work, reading that same page professionally, I’d probably have caught it. I’d have marked it up, pulled the actions out, made a list.

I was on vacation and I already knew how this worked.

That’s not a failure of the document.

Twenty for Twenty

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My son and I went to music trivia tonight. Country music.

We went twenty for twenty. Every song, every artist, plus the bonus question at the end. Perfect score.

I walked out of there feeling pretty good about my ear.

Then I did the math on the way back and had to admit something. Of those twenty, I got three he didn’t get. He got the other seventeen.

He’s eighteen years old and he knows my music as well as I do.

Not music from his life. Music from mine — the stuff that was playing in the truck and the kitchen and the garage for the whole time he was growing up, absorbed without either of us noticing it was happening.

Which is the part I’ve been turning over since. If he picked that up off me that easily, he picked up other things the same way. Some of it good. Some of it probably not. I’ve been in the room the entire time and I don’t get to choose which parts landed.

Here’s what I can see from where I’m sitting.

He loves ferociously. He takes care of his mother the way he’s seen me do it. I showed him how to treat a lady and he does it. He’s devoted to this family, and he is a good friend to his friends — the kind who shows up, not the kind who means well.

He’s also more creative than I am, and I say that without any complicated feeling about it. The things he makes with his hands, the way he comes at a problem sideways from an angle I didn’t see — that’s not from me. Some of it’s his mother. Most of it is just him.

And this morning, on vacation, with nothing on the schedule and every excuse in the world, I looked over and he was reading his Bible.

Nobody asked him to. Nobody was watching except me, and he didn’t know I was.

His mother and I taught him that faith. It isn’t ours anymore. He’s got his own, and he keeps it whether or not there’s anyone around to see him do it.

I’m hopeful he’s been watching us all these years. I’m a little afraid of it too, for the obvious reason.

But he was sitting there this morning with a Bible open, and tonight he carried us both through seventeen questions I had no business getting.

I don’t brag on him often enough. Being away from home for a week has been a good reminder.

What I’m Taking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Friday I get on a plane, and for the first time in two and a half years I’m going somewhere with nothing to do.

I want to be precise about that, because I’ve taken time off. Plenty of it. Days with family, weeks around the house. But those weeks still had a kitchen in them, and a yard, and a list of things I’d been meaning to get to that I finally had time to get to.

This one has none of that. I don’t cook. I don’t drive. There is no list. Whatever needs doing, somebody else is doing it, and I’ve paid them to.

I’ve never been much good at that.

The seven habits I’ve run every day since January are going on pause.

Not all of them. I’ll drink the water, because it’ll be hot and I’d be stupid not to. I’ll read my Bible, because that’s not a habit anymore, it’s just a thing I do in the mornings and I’d have to work to stop. The pictures keep going out.

The rest of it — the tracking, the counting, the lifting, the whole apparatus — stays home. I’m calling it a Sabbath and I mean it that way. There’s a difference between resting and taking a break from something, and I’d like to find out if I know what it is.

The writing goes with me.

Not the laptop. Phone, iPad, and a notebook in case I want to do it the old way. The ship has internet and I’ve already paid for it, more of it than any one man needs.

I’ve written something here every single day since January 1st. Two hundred and twenty-some days. There are a hundred and forty left in the year and I’m not going to miss one now over a vacation, which would be an idiotic place to break a streak I’ve carried this far.

But I’m not planning to be deep about it.

For most of this year the posts have gone inward — old jobs, old wounds, patterns I’ve caught in myself. Some of that’s been useful and a couple of them cost me something to write. Next week I’d like to just tell you what I saw. A meal. A person. Something beautiful I stood in front of for a while. Human interest, light on the interior.

There’ll be plenty. New places make material without you having to dig for it. That’s most of what a new place is for.

Here’s the part that surprised me when I sat down to think about it.

I’m not worried I’ll quit. Nothing about this is fragile anymore — I could put the whole thing down for eight days and it would all be waiting Monday, and I know that now in a way I wouldn’t have in February.

What I’m curious about is the other direction. I’m bringing my mid-year review with me, and I’ll open it somewhere around day four when my head has cleared out. I’ve got a real suspicion that some of what I’ve been building this year is going to look different from a deck chair a long way from home.

I might come back and change direction entirely.

I don’t think I will. But I like knowing I could, and I don’t think I’ve been in a position to know that in a very long time.

I write this thing for me. On a good day twenty or twenty-five people come by and I am so grateful for that. The one person who’d actually ask me why there is a gap is my wife. She’s is with me and won’t ask.

So there’s no obligation here. It’s time to unwind.

I’m bringing the notebook anyway.

The Wall

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Christmas of 1997 I asked my parents for a guitar, and they got me one.

I was halfway through my sophomore year, home for the break. I opened the box and I was genuinely thrilled — right up until I got my hands on the neck. It was a beginner’s three-quarter model, and my hands are not small hands.

I remember working very hard at not seeming ungrateful. Dad, this is awesome, I said, I just — I can’t get my fingers where they go.

He said, well, how about we take it back and see what we can find.

My uncle ran a music store in Duncan. We drove it over, got the money back, and he put a Jasmine in my hands — Takamine’s beginner line, full size, light face and darker wood on the sides. Pretty guitar.

Next year I’ll have had it thirty years. It hangs on the wall right inside my office door and I tuned it up this week and it still sounds right. I’ve written twenty or twenty-five songs on it.

I never got any good in the way people mean when they say good.

I started a guitar class in college and it didn’t take, mostly because it was aimed at lead playing and I didn’t want to play lead. I wasn’t trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to play rhythm, sing, and write my own things, and for that you need chords and patterns and a feel for it, which I taught myself over about three decades.

What stuck wasn’t skill. It was the instrument.

We used to run a booth in an antiques mall, which meant a lot of Saturdays at estate sales looking for things to resell. Some of it we sold. Some of it stayed.

I don’t remember whose house it was. I’ve been to too many. But I walked in and there was a guitar sitting in a hard case, and normally I look right past guitars at these things — the classicals with the dead nylon strings, the corroded wire, the wood that’s been dry in a closet for twenty years.

This one was clean. Solid. Still roughly in tune, which tells you something about whoever had it. I picked it up and it was playable right there in a stranger’s house.

Seventy-five dollars. It’s a Ventura — designed in the States, built in Japan, and the name doesn’t exist anymore as far as I can tell. From what I’ve been able to piece together it was made before I was born.

It hangs next to the Jasmine. Those two are the featured wall in my office, and the Ventura is the one I actually reach for. Lightest strings of anything I own, so it doesn’t hurt my fingers, and the tone on it is rich in a way I didn’t pay for.

Somebody kept that guitar in shape for fifty years and then it came to my house.

I collect a few other things.

Six guitars. Thirty-some pipes, including a Gandalf one my wife gave me one Christmas, because I’ve always loved the stories about C.S. Lewis being absent-minded enough to set his own jacket pocket on fire. A couple hundred records — Bob Seger’s on the player right now. Comic books from years ago, up on a shelf. Cast iron, eight pans in the oven and another twenty-five out in the garage I haven’t gotten to since we moved. Cookbooks, for a project I haven’t started.

And books. Enough books that my wife has, over the years, gently suggested some of them could go. I rearranged them until they fit instead, which she let me get away with.

On our twentieth anniversary we were in Fredericksburg, Texas, and found a charity thrift store with a complete set of the Harvard Classics — the five-foot shelf, early 1900s, all of it. Twenty-five dollars. They sit on top of the china cabinet in my office.

Here’s the honest part about the books, and it took me a while to say it out loud. I’ve read maybe half of them. The rest I know about. I’ve read summaries, I could tell you the argument, I keep them where I can see them.

That’s knowledge near me rather than in me, and I know the difference.

There’s one more thing on my walls and I didn’t acquire any of it.

My son paints and draws. I’ve got eight of his pieces hanging in this office — I can see all eight from where I’m sitting. Drawings and oils.

I’ve told him I’m his collector. That’s the word I use for it, and I meant it as a joke the first time, and then I kept saying it.

Everything else in this room I went and found. Estate sales, thrift stores, a music store in Duncan in 1997. All of it was finished before it got here — somebody else built the guitar, somebody else bound the books, somebody else played the Ventura for fifty years, and I’m the one who came along afterward and put it on a wall.

His are the only ones where the collection isn’t done yet.

Thirty Copies

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around 2013 I was very good at Excel, and Excel was slowly ruining me.

The job needed SQL. I had built SQL up in my head into a wall — I’m a business person, I’d say, not a technical person, and they’ve got me doing technical things. It’ll take too long. It’s too hard. I’m not getting enough help.

So I stayed in the spreadsheet, where I was fast and looked competent.

Here’s the embarrassing part. I was using Excel as a WHERE clause. Dumping data in and filtering it. I was doing SQL’s job, with SQL’s logic, in a tool that made it ten times slower, and calling that expertise.

When I finally sat down and wrote actual queries, the surprise wasn’t that it was worth the effort. The surprise was that it was easier. All that time, the entire barrier had been something I made up.

I wasn’t avoiding SQL because queries were difficult. I was avoiding it because learning it meant putting down the thing I was already good at and being a beginner in front of people.

That’s usually what stuck is. Not missing information — I knew exactly what to do. It was that doing it required becoming a slightly different person than the one I’d already built and gotten some credit for.

The proof is what happened afterward. The guy who insisted he wasn’t an IT person now thinks technically before anything else, has administered systems, and reads through thousands of lines of code to find where a record went missing.

But the belief came after. It always came after. I never once believed I could do the thing until I’d already been doing it for a while, and I have never gotten that order to run the other direction no matter how badly I wanted it to.

Which brings me to the part I’d rather not write.

I have published three books. I’m in the middle of a fourth and a fifth is finished, waiting on illustrations. I’ve sold about thirty copies of everything, combined, in total, ever.

And I have been treating “having my own business” like something mystical sitting out at the edge of my vision. Like it’s a thing other people know how to do and I don’t.

Here’s the problem with that. I sell every single day. It’s most of my job. I walk into offices and persuade people to do things differently, I sell ideas and standards and solutions to problems they didn’t know they had, and I’m good at it — good enough that it’s what they pay me for.

I just can’t do it for my own work.

I know what this is. I recognize every symptom of it, because I spent three years in a spreadsheet running the identical program.

It isn’t a knowledge problem. I don’t need somebody to explain marketing to me. I need to be a man who asks people to buy his book, and I am currently a man who writes another book instead.

Writing another book is the small step. It’s the productive-looking one. It’s the Excel of this whole situation — the thing I’m already good at, done faster and better, in service of not doing the thing.

I don’t have the ending for this one.

A year from now I’ll either have asked somebody to buy something or I’ll have four more books and the same thirty copies. I know which one I’d like to report. I also know that the guy in 2013 knew exactly what SQL was for, and could have told you at length why he should learn it, and sat in that spreadsheet for three more years.