So Many Brown Cows

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Knowing what you’re good at and knowing what your contribution to the world is supposed to be are two very different conversations.

I’ve been thinking about that gap a lot lately. Not in a defeated way — more like standing at the edge of what I know and sensing something just past it. I have skills. I have frameworks. I have ideas I believe in. But none of that answers the question I keep asking myself: what is the remarkable thing I’m supposed to offer?

Seth Godin tells this story about driving through the countryside with his family. They passed cow after cow, and at first, everyone pointed out the window. Ooh, a cow. Ooh, another cow. And then, eventually, nobody said anything at all. Brown cows stop being interesting the moment they become common. What if you saw a purple cow? A purple cow would stop traffic.

I read about a Ruby on Rails developer who built a computer program that composed music. Not a musician. A programmer. How? He stood at an intersection nobody else occupied — elite coding ability and a deep love of live music performance — and he pushed into that gap until something remarkable came out the other side. He didn’t find a purple cow grazing in a field somewhere. He built one. Out of the collision of things that didn’t seem to belong together.

That’s what I keep coming back to. You don’t find your remarkable thing by searching for it. You finish the work that’s already in front of you, and you let the intersection reveal itself.

I am building a framework connecting data management to personal transformation. I have an AI course concept that started as a five-minute thought in a meeting full of frustrated people. I have a daily practice of documenting what happens when you actually try to change your life in real time. None of these are fully finished yet. But I can feel them converging.

Here’s what I know for sure: I am not going to find my purple cow by looking for it. I’m going to build it. Out of everything I already am, and everything I’m becoming.

The Laundry

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 1999, my bride and I were newlyweds living in an apartment complex with no washer and dryer. We’d carry our clothes over to the laundromat, sit together while things ran, and just talk.

One afternoon I folded something and she looked at me and said, “You didn’t fold that right.”

What do you mean I didn’t fold that right? It’s folded.

“No, there’s a right way to fold it.”

There is? This is how I was taught. This is the right way.

“That’s not the right way. My way is the right way.”

Okay. Why is your way the right way?

“Because it is.”

We’d met and married in about nine months. We were still figuring each other out. I was twenty years old and probably defensive about it, because what do you mean I’m wrong? I’m not wrong. I had one context for how folding worked and it was the only one I’d ever known. But she had a different context and it was the only one she’d ever known too.

Neither of us was wrong. We just hadn’t compared notes yet.

It took a few rounds. But eventually she explained why she liked it done her way, and I realized I didn’t care enough about folding to make it a hill to die on. So I started folding her way. Twenty-seven years later it’s muscle memory. I don’t even think about it anymore.

Here’s what I’ve learned since that laundromat.

We both wanted the same thing. We wanted the laundry folded. That was never the argument. The argument was about how. And the moment we both committed to the what — the thing that actually mattered — the how became something we could figure out together. We could give each other grace on the method because we agreed on the mission.

That’s true in a marriage. It’s true at work. It’s true in any room where two people are trying to get something done and they’re stuck arguing about technique instead of agreeing on the destination.

Get clear on the what. The how will work itself out.

Twenty-seven years of folding laundry. Still figuring out the how. Never once lost sight of the what.

What Do You Have to Offer?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Cal Newport asks a question that most people get backwards. The passion mindset asks, “what can the world offer me?” The craftsman mindset asks, “what can I offer the world?”

I’ve been sitting with that second question for a while now. And the honest answer surprised me.

For a long time, I didn’t think I had much. I had a day job. I had some hobbies. I had notebooks full of ideas I never finished. I had talent I wasn’t using and experience I wasn’t leveraging. I had a lot of ingredients and no recipe.

But when I actually sat down and took inventory — not the resume version, the real version — the list was longer than I expected.

Twenty years of data management experience. Two years of working with AI daily. A twenty-seven-year marriage to my best friend. A seventeen-year-old son who makes his daddy proud every day. Two rounds of cancer survived. Fiction I’ve written and published. Songs I’ve written and mostly kept to myself. I can cook. I can stand in front of a room and hold it. I can take something complicated and explain it so the room goes, “oh, that’s what that means.”

That’s not nothing. That’s capital. Not just career capital — life capital. The kind you don’t put on a resume but carry into every room you walk into. My marriage taught me how to communicate. The cancer taught me urgency. The data career taught me how to think in systems. The novels taught me how to finish what I start. None of those showed up in a job posting. All of them made me who I am.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: what catches isn’t always what you’d expect. I’ll pour my heart into something I think is my best work, and it gets a polite nod. Then I’ll toss off something I didn’t think was that good, and people grab onto it. Someone will tell me a throwaway line in a blog post changed how they thought about something. A chapter I almost cut from my novel turns out to be the one a reader can’t stop talking about.

You don’t always get to choose which parts of what you offer resonate. You just have to keep offering.

I didn’t know that a hundred days ago. I thought I needed to figure out which piece of myself was the valuable one and lead with it. But it turns out the inventory is the value. The whole messy collection of things I’ve done and survived and built and failed at — that’s the offer.

I spent twenty years thinking I wasn’t ready. That I needed one more credential, one more book read, one more plan written. What I actually needed was to stop curating and start offering.

The world doesn’t need another person consuming content and waiting to feel ready. It needs what you’ve already built.

The Battle

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a battle going on inside me that I’m only now learning to talk about.

On one side is the craftsman. He wants systems. Structure. Reps. He wants to know the plan, follow the plan, and measure the results. He’s the one who built a 280-day challenge with assessment weeks and daily checklists. He’s the one who taught himself SQL by sitting with select statements until they made sense. He’s the one who revised a 105-chapter novel down to 59 chapters because the story needed it, not because it was fun.

On the other side is the free spirit. He’s the one who picks up a guitar and writes a song he’ll never share. The one who starts a story because the idea is electric and stops when the electricity fades. He’s the one who connects data management to Sherlock Holmes in the middle of a conference speech and thinks, where did that come from? He’s the one who has filled notebooks for twenty years with dreams that never became anything — not because they weren’t good, but because he got bored before the boring part was over.

The free spirit loves the spark. The craftsman loves the grind. And for most of my life, they haven’t been on speaking terms.

The free spirit would start something — a song, a story, a challenge — and ride the wave until the wave broke. Then the craftsman would show up too late, look at the wreckage, and say, “If you’d just stuck with it.” And the free spirit would shrug and say, “But it stopped being fun.”

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last hundred days.

The free spirit isn’t the enemy. And the craftsman isn’t the hero. They need each other in ways I spent twenty years refusing to admit. The problem was never that one of them was wrong. The problem was that I kept letting them take turns instead of making them work together.

The truce I’ve found — and it is a truce, not a peace treaty — is this: the craftsman builds the system, and the free spirit works inside it. The system gives the free spirit a container. The free spirit gives the system a soul.

Some days the free spirit fights the plan. He doesn’t want to do the boring part. He doesn’t want to sit at the edge of what he knows and push into what he doesn’t. He wants to go back to the imaginative part where everything is new and nothing is hard.

But he’s gotten older. And a whole lot more cooperative. Because the books are getting written, the framework is taking shape, and for the first time in his life, the notebooks are turning into something real.

So I let them fight. And then I make them both show up tomorrow.

The Craftsman and the Machine

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I keep seeing his argument play out in real time at work.

Newport says rare and valuable skills — career capital — are what give you leverage. The craftsman builds that capital through reps, not passion. Show up, get deep, get good. The leverage follows.

But what happens to the craftsman when a machine can do the surface-level work in thirty seconds?

I’ve been watching AI adoption in my field for months now, and I see three groups forming.

The first group is leaning in. They’re learning everything they can. They’re training the AI, building context, making the partnership between human and machine as smart as it can be. They’re using the tool to augment their thinking — not replace it. These are today’s craftsmen, and the career capital they’re building right now is going to pay off.

The second group is leaning harder into the work itself — but ignoring the tool. They’re getting the right answers, but not as fast as they could. They’re not teaching the AI their context. They’re not augmenting their thinking so they can do more. They’re good at what they do, and that’s going to carry them for a while. But they’re going to fall behind, because the first group is doing everything they’re doing plus more.

The third group is saying screw it. No AI. Not interested. And they’re the ones who are going to get left behind entirely.

Here’s the thing Newport gets right that applies directly to this moment: career capital isn’t devalued by AI if you know what you’re doing. If you can partner with the machine to do your work better, faster, and deeper — your skills become more valuable, not less. The craftsman who picks up a power tool doesn’t lose his craft. He builds faster.

But if you’ve been pretending — if you’ve been skating on surface knowledge and the AI exposes that — you’re in trouble. There’s no other way to say it.

I ran a demo last week where I asked a system a question in plain English and watched it produce the SQL in real time. I could evaluate whether the output was right because I’ve been doing this work for twenty years. But what happens in five years when someone with two years of experience runs that same demo and can’t catch the errors?

That’s the question that keeps me up at night.

The answer isn’t to fear the machine. The answer is humility. Learn. Do your reps. Stop being arrogant about what you think you know and start being honest about what you don’t. Because the AI is going to have more compute power than any of us, and it’s going to get to answers faster than any of us. But it’s not going to have the human filter we need.

You’ve got to be humble. You’ve got to be aware. And you’ve got to do your job the best that you can to keep the AI honest.

That’s the craftsman’s job now. Not just building the thing. Building the thing and making sure the machine didn’t cut the corners you’d never accept.