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.

Negotiating With Comfort

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I read a line today that stung: “You already know what to do. You are just negotiating with comfort.”

I sat with that one a while, because it caught me.

I know what to do. I’ve known all year. The Phase Defiant promotion plan has been written since May — sixty content ideas, a thirty-day blitz, the whole thing mapped out. The first post still hasn’t gone out. Not because I don’t know how. Because every day there’s a quiet negotiation happening, and comfort keeps winning.

The negotiation never sounds like quitting. It sounds reasonable. I’ll start the promotion once the framework is tighter. I’ll launch the product once the positioning is perfect. I’ll post the thing once I’ve thought it through one more time. Each delay has a respectable reason attached. That’s what makes comfort such a good negotiator — it never asks you to give up. It just asks you to wait.

Here’s what the quote made me see. The waiting isn’t a strategy problem. I have the strategy. It isn’t a knowledge problem. I have the knowledge. It’s a comfort problem wearing the costume of a strategy problem.

Refining the plan one more time feels like work. It feels productive. But a lot of the time it’s just the most sophisticated way I’ve found to avoid the part that scares me. I’m not preparing. I’m negotiating. And comfort is patient enough to take the deal every single day.

The cure isn’t a better plan. I’ve got plans stacked to the ceiling. The cure is doing the uncomfortable thing before comfort gets to the table to make its offer.

So tonight, I did. I posted the first piece of promotion for my book — the one that’s been written and waiting since May. It took five minutes. It wasn’t perfect. Comfort had a dozen reasons for me to wait one more day, and every one of them sounded responsible.

I posted it anyway. Fifty-nine to go. The negotiation’s over.

The Only Way Out Is Through

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I wrote a song this week. It’s called “The Only Way Out Is Through,” and I didn’t set out to write a midpoint reflection on the year — but that’s what came out.

The verses are claustrophobic on purpose. Same four walls. Weight on the chest. A voice saying you’re not enough. That’s not a metaphor I had to reach for. That’s the inside of a lot of days this year — the ones where six out of seven habits was all I had, the deadlines I missed, the promotion I keep circling without walking into.

The chorus is the thing I keep relearning: there’s no way over it, no way around it. You can’t skip the hard middle of anything worth doing. You go through, or you don’t go.

I’m 175 days into this year. Halfway. And if I’m honest, the first half was mostly the verses — head down, knuckling up, counting to one and getting up again. Proving I could show up. Proving the engine runs.

But the bridge is where the song surprised me. I’d planned a song about endurance — hold the line, keep the grip, outlast the hard part. What came out instead was a moment where the hands give out and the rope goes slack, and the fall never comes. Where you stop holding and discover you didn’t have to.

That’s the part I didn’t plan. Halfway through this year, I’m starting to understand that “the only way out is through” was never just about gritting my teeth harder. Most of the getting-through hasn’t been me at all. The days I thought I was holding the rope, Someone has been holding me.

Here is the song:

The Only Way Out Is Through