The Spirit of the Thing

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I caught myself saying something today that stopped me mid-sentence. I was talking about my work, and I heard myself say I don’t just get to solve problems — I get to take care of people while I do it.

I sat with that, because it explained something I’d never quite been able to name: why I love a job I never planned to have.

I didn’t set out to work in data. I saw myself as a creative — someone who makes things, who helps people. A technical role wasn’t on my list. And for a while I carried a quiet assumption that I’d taken a detour, that the analytical work was a departure from who I really was.

I was wrong about that. The work wasn’t a detour from helping people. It was a vehicle for it. I just didn’t recognize the door when I walked through it.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll keep it to the shape of the work rather than the specifics.

When you crawl into a hard problem with someone, something happens that doesn’t happen when you just hand them an answer. You isolate where the trouble actually stems from — not where it shows up, but where it starts. You trace it back through the logic, the structure, the places where one thing hands off to another. And to do that, you have to genuinely understand their world, not just your own. They walk you through what they know. You bring what you know. Somewhere in the middle, the two things join, and the problem gives.

That’s the part I love. Not the fix. The joining.

But I want to be honest about what’s actually happening in that exchange, because the noble version — “I selflessly serve, and knowledge flows to those I help” — isn’t the whole truth.

I get better every time I do this. Every problem I climb into that I didn’t create is a problem that stretches my range. The person I’m helping isn’t just receiving. They’re handing me the raw material my own skill sharpens against. I serve them, and the serving is also how I stay sharp. Both things are true, and pretending it’s only the first one would be a lie dressed up as humility.

That’s the difference between showing up to serve and showing up for a paycheck. It isn’t that one is virtuous and the other is greedy — everybody cashes the check. It’s that the person who’s only there for the check leaves the best part on the table. They solve the problem and miss the joining. They never find out that the fastest way to get better at your own craft is to spend it freely on someone else’s problem.

So that’s the thing I noticed today. The spirit you bring to the work changes what the work gives back. Bring the whole of what you’ve got — your skill, your attention, your genuine interest in the other person’s world — and you don’t just solve the thing in front of you. You build the people around you, and they build you right back.

I don’t have that fully figured out. But I know it’s why the work never feels like a detour anymore.

I Hate Being Sick

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I have a cold. It’s just a cold — no deeper meaning, no metaphor, no lesson the universe is trying to teach me. I got sick. And I hate it.

I’ve almost lost my voice, which is a special kind of cruel, because my whole system runs on talking. I think out loud. I draft by speaking. Every post I write starts as words I say on a walk. Take my voice and you take my main tool. So here I am, full of things I want to make, and the machine I make them with is down.

I’m not derailed. I want to be clear about that. This isn’t a crisis or a turning point. It’s an inconvenience — a few days of forced slowness right when I don’t want to be slow.

But the frustration underneath it surprised me, because of what it revealed. I’m not frustrated because I’m behind. I’m frustrated because I finally have something worth interrupting.

For most of my life, I sold myself short. I talked big about what I’d do and produced little. I had grand plans and a graveyard of half-starts. If I’d gotten a cold five years ago, it would have been a relief — a permission slip to stop pretending I was going to get to the thing.

This year is different. This year I found out I’m far more capable than I ever believed — I’ve published two books, written every day, built things I’m proud of. I finally found my gear. And now that I’m in it, being pulled out — even for a few days, even for a good reason — makes me want to climb the walls.

That’s the honest thing tonight. The annoyance isn’t weakness or impatience. It’s the sound a person makes when they’ve finally found their stride and something stops them mid-step.

I’ll rest. I’ll get well. I’ll be back in the gym Friday and back at full speed right after. But I’m not going to pretend I’ve made peace with the pause. I haven’t. I just found out what I’m capable of, and I want to go do it.

The cold will pass. The hunger it interrupted is the part worth keeping.

The Answer Has Been Staring Me in the Face

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

Zig Ziglar said it decades ago: “You can have everything in life you want, if you just help enough other people get what they want.”

I’ve read that quote a dozen times over the years. Tonight it finally landed, because it answers the exact thing I’ve been stuck on for six months.

I’ve spent this whole year tangled up about promotion. Telling people about my book felt like begging. Asking for a sale felt like having my hand out. Every time I sat down to market something I’d built, a voice said you’re being self-serving, you’re asking people for something. And I’d close the laptop.

But Ziglar’s quote exposes the lie in that. I had the transaction backwards. I thought promotion was me taking — asking for attention, asking for money, asking people to care about me. It’s not. Promotion is me offering. It’s telling someone who’s bored on a plane that there’s a story that’ll make the flight disappear. It’s telling someone who grew up in the 90s that there’s a book that sounds like the inside of their teenage head.

I’m not asking them for something. I’m trying to give them something.

That’s the whole shift. When I post about Phase Defiant, I’m not begging a stranger to validate me. I’m raising my hand and saying if you want to feel the way I felt writing this, here’s how. Some people will want it. Some won’t. But withholding it — keeping it quiet because telling people felt uncomfortable — wasn’t humility. It was just selfishness dressed up as modesty.

If the book is good — and the people who’ve read it tell me it is — then keeping it hidden doesn’t protect anybody. It just keeps the people who’d love it from ever finding it.

Stop Overproducing

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

A few days ago I wrote that posting my first piece of book promotion took five minutes. Then I tried to make the next ones and watched each one balloon to thirty.

Here’s what was actually happening: I was overproducing. Building stylized videos — my cover, my music, text timed to the beat — and agonizing over every frame. Thirty minutes of polish on a post nobody asked to be polished.

That’s not sustainable, and it’s not even the point.

The math is simple. If every post takes thirty minutes, I can make two before I’m worn out. If a post takes five, I can make ten and actually run the campaign I committed to. The only way to get to five minutes is to stop overproducing — and the only way to stop overproducing is to be authentic instead of polished.

A stylized AI video with music behind it takes time. It looks great. But it’s not the thing that builds an audience. What builds an audience is me, talking, saying something true about the book or the story or why I wrote it. No editing suite. No beat-matching. Just the actual thing I want to say, said plainly.

So here’s the new strategy. Most days, I film myself talking. Five minutes, one take, done. I know my material — I wrote the book, I know why it matters, I don’t need a script. The stylized music videos become a treat, not a habit. Twice a week, maybe, when I have the time to make them sing.

The hangup was never really about video. It was about wanting every piece to be impressive. And wanting every piece to be impressive is just perfectionism wearing a production budget.

The Bible pictures taught me this already. The posts I labored over don’t outperform the ones I dashed off. Sometimes the tired, “good enough” ones hit hardest. I keep relearning the same lesson: done and honest beats polished and late.

Five minutes. Say the true thing. Move on.

Check out the post for Phase Defiant here.

One Operating System

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

For many years I’ve run my work life on a system. At my day job, everything moves through a board — projects broken into tasks, tasks with deadlines and clear definitions of done, a daily rhythm of picking up what’s most urgent and moving it forward. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just how I work.

Recently, I realized I’d been running my creative life on a completely different system. Which is to say, no system at all. Inspiration when it came, guilt when it didn’t, and a pile of half-finished projects with no deadlines and no clear sense of what “done” even meant.

No wonder it felt harder than it needed to.

The problem wasn’t effort. I’ve been creative every single day this year. The problem was that I kept switching operating systems. Disciplined and structured from nine to five, then loose and inspiration-dependent the moment I sat down to write a book or build a course. Two different brains for two different parts of the same life.

Context switching is expensive. Every time you change systems, you pay a tax — you have to reorient, remember the rules of the new mode, rebuild your footing. I was paying that tax every single day, twice a day, crossing from one version of myself to another.

So I’ve stopped. I took the exact system I use at work and wrapped it around my creative projects. A board. Active projects with real deadlines. Daily operations that happen regardless of how I feel. Sprints I can pivot between based on what’s most urgent. The same muscle I’ve trained for professionally, pointed at the work that’s mine.

The relief was immediate. I already know how to run this system. I’ve run it for years. I just never thought to use it on the things that matter most to me, because I’d filed “creative” and “disciplined” in separate drawers — as if they were opposites instead of partners.

They’re not opposites. The most creative people I heard of are ruthlessly systematic about the unglamorous parts, precisely so the creativity has room to breathe. The system isn’t the enemy of the art. It’s what gets the art finished.

Jim Rohn said it cleaner than I can: discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons. The board, the deadlines, the daily reps — those are the ounces. They are so much lighter than the pile of unfinished work I’d be carrying without them.