Day 60: The Four-Day Hike

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 60 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

A long time ago, when I first got interested in being a writer, I thought about the kind of characters I wanted to create. I wanted heroes. Strong ones. Ones who couldn’t be beat.

It took me years to realize that a character worth reading isn’t a perfect character. It’s not someone who can’t lose. It’s someone who has to face something real, something that might actually beat them, and find a way through it. Even Superman has family issues. Nobody gets a free pass — not even in fiction.

I think that’s why Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years hit me differently this time.

The first time I read it, my son had just been born. I was the sole breadwinner for a young family — and I want to be careful with that phrase. I don’t say sole job-haver. My wife has had one of the hardest jobs there is, being a stay-at-home mom and running our household for years. But I was in survival mode. Working everything I could to provide.

So when Miller wrote about watching too much TV, buying things he didn’t need, drifting through a comfortable life without meaning — I didn’t connect with it. I didn’t have the money to waste or the time to drift. I was running full speed just to keep up.

I didn’t understand his struggle with fatherlessness, because I have a very good dad. I didn’t understand his hang-ups with relationships, because I got married early and never struggled to want to be in one. I didn’t understand his need to sit and contemplate everything to the nth degree.

I read the book. I enjoyed the narrative. I put it down.

But now, all these years later, with a lot more life under my belt and a lot more clarity on who I am, I can empathize. I can put myself in someone else’s shoes in a way I couldn’t before, because I have so many more experiences to draw from.

I can see how you fall into routines without noticing. I can see how you live vicariously through other people’s stories instead of writing your own. I can see how you’d avoid meeting a parent you haven’t seen in thirty years. I can see how working up the courage to pursue someone could feel impossible.

The book didn’t change. I did.

And the stuff Miller says about story — about living intentionally, about doing things on purpose, about making your life mean something — I always understood that on some level. But I segmented it. I applied it to my day job and nowhere else. I’d tell myself I wanted a side hustle, wanted to write, wanted to build something. But then I’d pour all my energy into the work that paid the bills and let everything else sit in notebooks.

Two years ago, in a different city, with a different job, under very different circumstances, I don’t think I would have been ready for this book to hit me the way it’s hitting me now.

Miller tells a story about hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. He arrived in Peru a couple of days before the hike started. The town they were in sat at 11,000 feet — the same altitude as Mount Hood, a mountain he could see snow on from Portland every day. Just being there made it hard to breathe.

That detail stopped me, because I remembered standing at the top of Pike’s Peak in June of 1998. I was with a college group. My future bride and I were in a van together — on the top of the mountain in shorts. It was cold. So cold that we decided to stay in the van. On top of that, the air was so thin at the top that I fell asleep. Couldn’t hold my eyes open. I know the feeling Miller is describing.

Miller and his group started hiking, and they reached a point along a river where the guide told them it was a six-hour walk to Machu Picchu along the trade route. That’s how people used to get there. Easy. Flat. Direct.

Then the guide pointed in a different direction and said the hike they were taking would be four days. The reason? The ruler of Machu Picchu once declared that the more painful the journey, the more the travelers would appreciate their arrival.

Four days later, Miller wrote that the journey had made them different characters than they would have been otherwise. The journey changed them. Had they taken the river route — the six-hour shortcut — they would have missed the beauty, missed the meaning, missed the culture, missed the experience of doing something so physically taxing and mentally draining and still making it through to celebrate at the peak.

I feel like that’s what this journey is.

The easy way would be to do seven habits, tick the boxes, and float along the river. And honestly, that’s close to what I was doing for years — circling the same goals in different notebooks, never building the infrastructure to actually move.

But I’m noticing something as I lean into these seven habits. As I lean into questions I’ve been asking for years. As I lean into being more creative than I ever thought I could be. As I lean into my skills, and into that nudge that says keep going.

I’m transforming into a different character.

A character who expects more. A character who wants to risk more. A character who won’t find it satisfying to play it safe anymore.

I’ve had my inciting incident. And now it’s time to live a better story.

Does the book read differently because it’s good? Yes, it’s a very good book. The foundation Miller is standing on — that if we’ll willingly sit for hours watching a character overcome obstacles in a movie, it makes complete sense that living our own lives with the same kind of intentional effort would be just as meaningful — that’s a powerful argument.

But the real reason the book hits different is because I’m different. When I was younger and just trying to survive, I didn’t realize I had the capacity to start building something beyond the paycheck. I had the desire. I had the ideas. What I didn’t have was the organizational structure to execute.

That’s what sixty days of the 7-40 Challenge has given me. Not motivation. Structure. And because of that structure, I’ve been able to do more in two months and six days than I did in several years otherwise.

The book is the same $12 it was the first time I bought it. The reader is the variable.

Day 60 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer ✅ Exercise (Workout C with Trey) ✅ Walking ✅ Reading (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) ✅ Calories tracked ✅ Water (100 oz) ✅ Gratitude ✅ Creative hour

Sixty days down. Two hundred and twenty to go. The four-day hike continues.

Day 59: Point Toward the Horizon

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was reading Donald Miller today — A Million Miles in a Thousand Years — and he tells the story of a friend who runs a law firm. Not just any law firm. This firm rescues girls from human trafficking and the sex slave trade.

When Miller asked the man what his primary job was, the answer wasn’t legal strategy or fundraising or case management. The man said his job was to show up every morning and remind his lawyers what their mission was. To point them toward the horizon of saving the powerless.

That’s it. That’s the job. Point toward the horizon.

I’ve been thinking about that all day. Because I think most of us wake up and start working without ever looking up. We open the laptop. We check the list. We push the cart forward. But we never stop to ask — forward toward what?

A ship without a horizon is just a floating room.

I spent twenty years with notebooks full of goals and no horizon to aim them at. I had tools. I had ideas. I had desire. What I didn’t have was a clear picture of where all of it was supposed to go. So the tools just sat there, and the ideas piled up, and the desire burned slow and quiet and never caught fire.

December 2025, I finally pointed at something. I wrote a document. I named the habits. I set the course. And sixty days later, everything that felt like wasted time has started to look like foundation.

The horizon doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be visible. And the first step toward seeing it clearly is being willing to ask: where am I actually trying to go?

Day 59. Eyes up.

I write every day about transformation, habits, and what actually happens when you stop planning and start doing. If that resonates, join the list at subscribepage.io/5g8Hdy and I’ll send you one email per week with the best of what I’m learning.

Day 58: The Incident That Started Everything

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years this morning, and he’s deep in the process of working with filmmakers to turn his life into a movie. The writers keep having to explain something to him that he keeps resisting: a character doesn’t just decide to change because it seems like a good idea. Something has to happen to them. Something that makes staying the same more painful than changing.

They call it the inciting incident.

And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own.

May 2, 2016 is a date I won’t forget.

I’d been with the same company in Oklahoma City for nearly nine years. Every performance review I’d ever had was good. And one morning, they invited me not to come back. Times were hard. Restructuring. Shuffling. The usual language that means your number came up and it wasn’t personal, even though it always feels personal.

I’ve written about this before — Day 47, if you want to go back and read it — that specific sting of being let go when the reviews were always good. It’s a particular kind of disorienting. You did everything right. And it still happened.

But here’s what that inciting incident did: it forced my hand.

Within hours I was on the phone with a mentor. This is what happened. What do you know about? Who needs what I do? Three months later, I was living in DFW with my family in tow, in a new role that would sharpen my skills and my ambitions more than anything I’d done in Oklahoma. I would not have made that call without getting fired. I would not have left without being pushed.

God used that push.

Fast forward to June 2024. I accepted a position that would have required moving my family 8 to 10 hours away. Good opportunity. Good money. The right move on paper. I said yes.

But the closer the fall of 2025 got, the louder a voice inside me got. Not panic. Not fear exactly. More like a quiet, persistent clarity: This is not where you’re supposed to be.

I’ve learned to take that voice seriously.

In April 2025, I applied for a position back in Oklahoma City — the same city I’d left nine years earlier. By fall, instead of moving far away, I was home. Back where the story started. Different man. Same city. And a sense deep in my spirit that I had made the right call, even when it was the harder decision.

That decision was my second inciting incident. But this time I wasn’t pushed. I heard the voice and I chose.

That’s what Donald Miller is wrestling with in the book — the difference between a character who gets pushed into change and a character who eventually starts doing the pushing themselves. His point is that at first, we need the external incident. Something has to happen to us. But somewhere in the story, if we’re paying attention, we start to author our own inciting incidents.

December 2025. I sat down and wrote a document. Here is what 2026 will look like. Here is how I will execute it. Here are the habits. Here is the plan. Nobody fired me. Nobody forced me. I’d seen the pattern enough times to know: I had to force my own hand before life did it for me.

January 1, 2026. The 7-40 Challenge began.

And I’m only 58 days in, with two books written, a full publishing pipeline, and a growing sense that everything that felt like delay was actually foundation.

The inciting incident isn’t always the thing that happens to you.

Sometimes it’s the thing you finally decide to make happen.

Day 58. Still in the story.

I write every day about transformation, habits, and what actually happens when you stop planning and start doing. If that resonates, join the list at subscribepage.io/5g8Hdy and I’ll send you one email per week with the best of what I’m learning.

Day 57: A Character Is What He Does

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Round 2, Day 17
Tuesday, March 3, 2026

I remember hearing Randy Travis for the first time when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. Late ‘80s. This was right after he’d gotten big — Forever and Ever, Amen was everywhere. But when you grew up the way I did, you didn’t just hear the singles. You got the whole album. You listened to every track. And you picked up songs that most people never heard because they only listened to the radio.

There’s a song on that same album called “Good Intentions” — and I can still sing the chorus almost 40 years later:

I hear tell that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, Mama, my intentions were the best. There’s lots of things in my life I’d just as soon not mention. Looks like I turned out like all the rest. But Mama, my intentions were the best.

That chorus came back to me today during my reading.

I’m still working through Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and he’s unpacking what he learned turning his memoir into a movie script. The screenwriters and story experts taught him something that sounds simple but cuts deep:

A character is not what he says. A character is not what he thinks. A character is what he does.

Think about every book you’ve loved. Every movie that stayed with you. The characters that endure aren’t the ones who talk big. They’re the ones who act. We don’t remember them for their speeches. We remember them for their choices.

If you’ve read the Harry Potter books, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Severus Snape, judged by what he said and how he appeared, was a villain. Cold, cruel, seemingly loyal to the enemy. But when you see the full arc — what he actually did — he’s the hero of the entire story. He was a mole inside enemy territory for over a decade, driven by love for a woman he could never have, protecting her son even though that son reminded him of the man he hated most. Strip away what Snape said. Look at what Snape did. He was one of the bravest characters in the story.

Miller’s point isn’t just about screenwriting. It’s about how we live.

Are we the character who talks about what we’re going to do? Or are we the character who does it?

I spent years saying I wanted to be a writer. I told people I was going to write a book. I had notebooks full of ideas going back twenty years. But I wasn’t a writer. Not really. I became a writer when I sat down and actually wrote the book. The doing made it real. The wanting never did.

I can say I want to be a good husband. I can say it every day. But until I actually love my wife and put her needs above my own — consistently, not just when it’s convenient — am I really a good husband? Or am I just a guy with good intentions?

Randy Travis had it right. The road to hell is paved with them.

This is why the 7-40 Challenge matters to me. It’s not about the checklist. It’s about becoming the character who does the thing instead of the character who talks about the thing.

Fifty-seven days in, I haven’t missed one. Not because I’m special. Because I decided that the gap between what I say and what I do needed to close. And the only way to close it is to do it. Every single day.

So I have to ask myself — and I’m asking you too: What is the character you want to play in your life? Are you doing the thing, or just talking about the thing?

Because a character is what he does. And good intentions don’t count.

Day 57 — Seven for Seven

See you tomorrow for Day 58.

Day 56: The Hero Can’t Be the Loser

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Round 2, Day 16
Monday, March 2, 2026

I’m rereading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and he tells a story that I can’t stop thinking about.

A friend of his had a daughter who’d started dating a bad kid and smoking pot. Miller, fresh from Robert McKee’s story workshop, said something that sounds simple but lands like a hammer: “She’s stuck in a bad story.”

His friend didn’t get it at first. But Miller explained the framework he’d learned — a story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it. And this friend realized something uncomfortable: he wasn’t presenting a very engaging story for his family. There was no mission, no purpose, nothing bigger than the routine. So his daughter went looking for meaning somewhere else — and she found it in a boy who wasn’t treating her well. At least he was telling her a story where she mattered.

The friend signed up to raise $25,000 to build an orphanage in Mexico. He didn’t have $25,000. His wife was shocked. His daughter was skeptical. But the whole family ended up rallying around it — and here’s the punchline that Miller drops:

“A girl who’s acting in the role of the hero can’t be in a relationship with a loser.”

It just doesn’t work. Because when you find meaning in your own story, when you know your own worth, you can’t lower yourself to be treated poorly. The bad relationship couldn’t survive the better story.

I’ve been thinking about how this applies to what I’m building.

The 7-40 Challenge is, at its core, a decision to tell a better story. Seven habits, every day, for 280 days. Not because checking boxes changes your life — but because the discipline of showing up daily puts you in a different role. You stop being the person things happen to. You start being the person who makes things happen.

And here’s what I’m discovering 56 days in: when you start playing the hero in your own story, it gets really hard to involve yourself in the things where you’re the loser.

The junk food that used to be easy to justify? Harder to eat when you’ve tracked your calories for eight straight weeks and watched the scale move 13 pounds. The excuse to skip a workout? Harder to make when you’ve got 56 days of unbroken execution behind you. The temptation to play it small, to hide, to keep your ideas in a drawer? Harder to give in to when you’ve written 56 blog posts, worked on two novels, lost 13 pounds and have the realization that you’re just getting started.

The better story crowds out the worse one. Not because you become perfect — but because you become aware. You see the choice for what it is. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Miller’s friend didn’t rescue his daughter by lecturing her. He didn’t ground her or take her phone away. He gave the family a mission. He gave them a story worth living. The daughter rescued herself — because the better story made the bad one impossible to tolerate.

I wrote recently about what it feels like to drift through life without a plan. I compared it to floating face down in water, only lifting your head from time to time to see where the current has taken you. That’s how most people live — pulled by the tide, reacting instead of choosing, going wherever the flow sends them.

To live differently, you have to put your feet down. You have to stand up and let the current run around you. And then you have to decide which direction you’re going to walk.

Nobody’s coming to make this easier. There’s no rich relative showing up with a check. No lottery win. No miraculous rescue. You either tell the story or somebody else tells it for you — and you’re just a character in theirs.

I’m 56 days into telling my own story. It’s connected to everything — my work, my family, my health, my writing, my faith. I can’t compartmentalize it anymore. I have to be the same person at work that I am at home. I have to give the same effort to the things I love that I give to the things I’m paid to do. Because all of it is part of the legacy I leave behind. All of it is part of the story I choose to tell.

If I start to play the hero, it’s really hard to involve myself in things where I’m the loser.

And those are my thoughts for today.

Day 56 — Seven for Seven

See you tomorrow for Day 57.