Passion Is Not a North Star

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I just finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His thesis is that passion follows mastery — you don’t find your dream job by following your heart, you build it by getting so good at something valuable that opportunities find you. He profiles people who spent years developing rare skills before the work they were meant to do finally revealed itself.

I think he’s right. But I think there’s a layer underneath his argument that he doesn’t quite name.

Passion comes and goes.

Take marriage. My wife and I love each other deeply. I’ll be with her as long as my wedding vows stipulate, because that’s my wife, and I love her. Do we always feel swelling passion for each other? No. That doesn’t mean we feel the opposite. It just means passion is a feeling. And feelings move. We can’t spend every day just being passionate about each other. We have to get groceries. Cook meals. Take care of the house. Go to work. Raise our children. And the passion that runs in and through all of that is what makes it rich.

I think work is the same way. We find things we have an aptitude for. We get good at them. Some days we’re fired up about it. Other days we grind through it because it needs to be done. I’ve been in data management for twenty years. I didn’t get genuinely good at it until maybe 2021, when I was handed a project and told to get it finished and make it work. I had to crawl back into every design decision, review every technical document, and make sure what was written in the code was what we were actually delivering. When we went live, I felt proud. I didn’t realize until years later how impressive what we’d built actually was, given how scattered things were when we started.

That wasn’t passion that got me through that project. It was dedication. The passion came later, when I could see what the work had built.

Months into this challenge, the grind hasn’t made me more passionate. It’s made things clearer. I can see where the skills I’ve built are converging. I can feel the intersection getting closer. And I know — because marriage taught me this, and work confirmed it — that passion isn’t the thing that gets you there. Dedication is. Passion is just what you feel when you look up and realize you’ve arrived.

The Estate Sale

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

One of our favorite things to do as a family is go to estate sales. We’ve been doing it for years. Walk through our house and you’ll see the evidence — furniture, quilts, cookware, books, decorations. There’s no shortage of things we’ve found in other people’s homes that have become part of ours.

What I’ve learned from walking through these sales is that you can feel who lived there. Some homes are full of life — evidence of family, hobbies, holidays, projects half-finished because the person who started them was too busy living to sit still. Others carry a weight you can sense the moment you step inside. The conditions of the house, the state of the belongings, the quiet that sits in the rooms. You know.

Today was one of the good ones.

This house was packed. The family told us they’d spent close to two months going through everything, pulled out what they wanted, and what we were looking at was what was left. And there was still a ridiculous amount of stuff. Old sewing machines. A shop full of tools for machinery work. More cookbooks than you could count — shopping bags stuffed with them, eight dollars a bag. Quilting supplies. Evidence of a life spent making things with your hands.

Out beside a barn sat an Econoline van from the early eighties. Looked like something the A-Team would have driven. It had been sitting there so long that a tree was growing up through the front grille. When they tried to move it, the tires had rotted off and the tie rods snapped. Someone bought it for three hundred dollars for the engine. The rest was gone.

I think about this stuff every time we go to one of these sales. One day, someone is going to walk through my house. They’re going to look at what I left behind and get a sense of who I was. They’re going to feel something when they step through the door.

I want them to feel the good kind. The kind that says this person was here on purpose.

One day there won’t be any time left. Today there is.

Music Never Dies

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I did something today that I haven’t done in a very long time. I played.

I stumbled across a music AI service called Suno, and on a whim, I uploaded a couple of songs I wrote a long time ago. Raw recordings. Just me and a guitar and whatever I had back then. One of them was a grungy little number called “Nothing Comes Easy” that I wrote in 2013. I uploaded the recording and let the AI arrange it.

What came back blew me away. Check it out here: Nothing Comes East

Full arrangement. Drums, bass, layers I never could have produced on my own. And underneath all of it — my words. My melody. My song. Just dressed up in clothes I could never afford to buy it.

I sat there grinning like an idiot. I played it again. And again. Then I uploaded another one. And another. I took old recordings of me singing — songs I’d written, songs I’d performed — and watched this tool take my melodies and arrangements and push them somewhere I couldn’t have taken them alone.

I haven’t been that creatively excited about music in fifteen years.

Here’s the thing — I never stopped writing music. There have been prolific years and quiet years. Ideas still show up. A melody in the car. A lyric on a walk. But somewhere along the way, the distance between the idea and the finished product got so wide that I stopped trying to cross it. I didn’t have a studio. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t have the production skills to make what I heard in my head come out of a speaker.

Today a piece of technology closed that gap. Not by replacing what I created — by elevating it. The AI can make cool-sounding stuff on its own. But what made today matter wasn’t the tool. It was the fact that it took something I made and carried it somewhere I couldn’t get to alone.

My wife and son heard it and were impressed. I heard it and remembered who I was before life got so serious.

Music never dies. Sometimes it just waits for you to come back to it.

Nothing Comes Easy

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Some days you grind. Some days you rest so you can grind again tomorrow. Today was a good day — Bible study before the sun came up, a walk at lunch, finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, all in all a good day.

But tonight I’m keeping it short. The tank is low, and I’ve learned enough about this process to know that pushing through tired just to prove a point is not the same thing as discipline. I’ll be back tomorrow with something worth reading. Nothing comes easy — including knowing when to stop.

Keep Building Context

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I met a woman at work recently — we’ll call her Jane — who’s been doing her job for thirty-five years. She made a comment in passing that stuck with me. She said somebody needs to get all the knowledge out of her head before she retires, because if nobody comes to extract it, it’s leaving with her.

She didn’t say this with bitterness. She wasn’t holding it hostage. She was offering it. A thirty-five-year library of institutional knowledge, available to anyone willing to sit down and ask.

So I asked.

I think about this a lot. How much knowledge is out there right now, locked inside someone’s head, that could solve problems we’ve been staring at for years? How many people would tell you almost everything they know about a subject if you’d just take the time to sit with them and make it happen?

I asked Jane if I could schedule a few interviews with her. She said yes immediately. Here’s what I plan to ask: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter to you? How did the business processes you manage build up over time? Where did they serve the company well, and where have they become obstacles? How have cycles of innovation and progress collided or cooperated during your career? Where would you fix things if you could?

That’s not a casual conversation. That’s an excavation. And with voice-to-text technology available today, I can stay fully engaged — asking thoughtful follow-up questions, reading her body language, being present — while still capturing every word. I can send her the highlights afterward. She can confirm my understanding. The second interview fills the gaps instead of retreading the ground.

Jane spent thirty-five years learning things the hard way. Every decision she’s made, every process she’s watched evolve, every cycle of innovation she’s lived through — that’s not in a system anywhere. It’s in her head. And she’s willing to give it away.

I’m showing up.