Thirty Years

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 27

I drove three hours tonight to my thirty-year high school reunion, spent three hours there, and drove three hours home. Nine hours for one evening. It was worth every mile.

Some people looked exactly the same. Some were unrecognizable. I walked up to one guy and said, honestly, I don’t remember you. He laughed and said, don’t feel bad — I don’t remember you either. So we started fresh and had a great conversation.

That’s the thing about thirty years. You’re not the same person anymore, and neither are they. The pressure of pretending otherwise disappears about ten minutes in.

I had a conversation that stopped me. A classmate told me he’d recently lost his wife to cancer. He knew about my own history with it. We talked for a while before I even recognized him — he’d spent so long pouring himself into caring for her that he’d changed completely.

Then he smiled and said something I won’t forget: “I knew she was sick when I married her. But I loved her, and I wanted to take care of her.”

I shook his hand, put my arm on his shoulder, and told him he was a good man. I meant it more than most things I’ve ever said.

Later, I sat with the friend who’s been my biggest champion for Phase Defiant. The guy who read my book, loved it, brainstormed ideas for me, offered to research things, and wouldn’t stop talking about the story. I looked him in the eye and said: if I had written this book only so you would read it and enjoy it, the whole thing was worth it.

He looked right back at me and said: you don’t understand how good your book is. Don’t quit. You’ve got something really good going, and you’re good at this.

Four days ago, I thought to myself out loud that my biggest roadblock to my book succeeding was the belief that nobody really cared. Tonight, someone who hasn’t seen me in thirty years looked me in the face and told me I was wrong.

The Wildest Dream

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 27

I spent two hours today digging post holes and pouring concrete for clothesline T-posts in the backyard. My wife wanted clotheslines. So I dug.

That was my exercise today. It wasn’t the gym. It wasn’t a walk with a voice recorder. It was Oklahoma dirt and a post-hole digger and sweat. Some days the challenge looks like a program. Some days it looks like taking care of your home.

I heard a quote today: we only have one life, and when we realize this, why would we not run as hard as we can towards our wildest dreams?

I sat with that for a while. What is my wildest dream?

I expected something ambitious to come out. A revenue target. A bestseller list. A stage. A platform.

What came out was simpler than that.

Take care of my wife. Love my family completely. Be creative every day. Share my faith. Leave a mark on this world that outlasts me.

I’m 163 days into running toward those things. Not perfectly. Not without missed deadlines and slow weeks and days where six out of seven habits was all I had. But running.

Today it looked like post holes and concrete. And that was enough.

Data Is Communication

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26

I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone’s trying to figure out right now.

I work in data management. I’ve spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into language the other side understands. Business people don’t think in tables and queries. Technical people don’t think in revenue targets and customer experience. Somebody has to build the bridge. That’s been my job.

Today I realized that’s exactly what people need to learn to do with AI.

I learned this firsthand when I asked AI to edit my novel. I said “edit this” and got hallucinated rewrites. I said “read this, tell me what’s wrong, don’t touch anything” and got a sharp, tireless reader. Same tool. Same book. The only difference was how clearly I defined what I needed.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a communication problem. And it’s the same communication problem I solve at my day job every single day.

The people getting great results aren’t smarter. They’re clearer. They define the problem before they ask for a solution. They tell the AI what they know, what they don’t know, and what good looks like. They argue when the output doesn’t match their intent.

They’re doing data architecture for their own thinking — organizing what they know so someone else can work with it. They just don’t know that’s what it’s called.

For twenty years I’ve been building the bridge between people who have information and people who need to use it. The tools on both sides changed today — one side is a person, the other side is a machine. But the problem is identical: get the meaning across, not just the words.

Data is communication. It always was. AI just made it urgent for everyone to learn how to say what they mean.

The Joining Tables Moment

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 25

My freshman year of college, I convinced myself I couldn’t handle music theory. I had the brain for it. I just didn’t believe I did. So I enrolled in fundamentals instead — the kiddie pool — while my entire cohort moved ahead into the real coursework.

I never caught up. That one decision put me out of step with the people I was supposed to be learning alongside, and I eventually changed majors. Not because I lacked the ability. Because I chose the safe version and paid for it with a path I never fully chose to walk.

Years later, I was working a data job and feeling my way into being an analyst. I’d pull data out of our system, export it to Excel, and got crazy good at making spreadsheets do what I needed. I didn’t know there was a structured query language that could do everything I was doing — faster, better, and repeatable.

I was really good at Excel. And I was really scared of SQL.

Then one day, someone showed me how to join tables. How to connect two data sets with a single statement and pull exactly what I needed. A light went off. I looked at it and thought: get out of my way.

Not only did I understand what I was looking at — it supercharged my thinking about it. Everything I’d been doing by hand, I could now write in scripts that ran themselves. I went from scared to unstoppable in one afternoon. And I never went back.

Same person. Same pattern. Two different choices, two completely different outcomes.

Right now I’m standing at the edge of another piece of unmapped terrain — getting the things I’ve built in front of people. Promotion. Marketing. Asking strangers to care about what I’ve made. I haven’t walked it yet, and the absence of a map feels like proof that I can’t do it.

But that’s what SQL felt like too. And I know what it cost me the time I chose the kiddie pool instead.

Somewhere in the first few steps, there’s a join tables moment waiting. I just have to start walking to find it.

Shake the Dirt Off

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 24

I checked my Apple Watch today. I’ve had it for about seven or eight years. It tracks how often you close all three rings — calories burned, movement, and exercise minutes. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve closed all three rings 1,750 times.

I thought I’d been dragging. Apparently I’ve been showing up a lot more than I was giving myself credit for.

John Maxwell tells a story about a donkey that falls down a well. The farmer decides the donkey’s old and the well needs filling anyway. He calls the neighbors over and they start shoveling dirt in.

A few loads later, the farmer looks down. The donkey isn’t buried. He’s been shaking every shovel of dirt off his back and stepping up on it. Shake, step up. Shake, step up. Until he walks right over the edge of the well.

Then the donkey came back and bit the farmer. The farmer got sepsis and died. Maxwell’s moral: if he hadn’t tried to cover his…, he would have lived.

The real point: failure is dirt, and dirt is something you can stand on.

The health I have today didn’t come from this year alone. It came from 1,750 days of closing the rings when I didn’t feel like it, when I wasn’t tracking a challenge, when nobody was watching. I’ve been shaking the dirt off and stepping up for years without realizing I was building ground under my feet.