Dare Mighty Things (Fifteen Years Later)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 16

In 2011, I wrote a short passage about a prisoner escaping a cell. He finds a footprint on the floor — proof that someone walked this path before him. He picks up a sword and feels something pulse through his arm. He remembers: I am a warrior. I have purpose. How long have I been hidden away?

I was writing about myself. I just didn’t know how to say it directly yet.

The fear I described fifteen years ago is the same fear I’m still fighting. The what-ifs. What if I’m not good enough? What if nobody cares? What if I put everything I have into this and it doesn’t work?

In 2011, I took those what-ifs to their logical end and concluded they wouldn’t kill me. That was true. But I didn’t do anything about them. I wrote about escaping and then stayed in the cell for another decade.

This year I walked out.

Not because the fear went away. It didn’t. I still feel it when I think about promoting my work. I still feel it when I put something personal on the page and hit publish. I felt it two weeks ago when I wrote that promotion feels like begging and named it for what it is — pride.

The difference between 2011 and 2026 isn’t courage. It’s decision. I decided that knowing what to do and not doing it was no longer acceptable. I built a structure — seven daily habits, forty-day rounds — and I started doing the reps. One hundred and fifty-two days later, the what-ifs are still there. They just don’t run the schedule anymore.

The passage I wrote back then had a line I didn’t fully understand when I wrote it: “The first step was finding the path, and as I make my way I start to remember who I really am.”

I understand it now. The path was always there. The warrior was always there. I just needed enough reps to remember.

The Drift You Don’t Notice

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 15

Week one, you push back on everything AI gives you. You check the output. You question the reasoning. You verify the facts. You’re in charge and you know it.

By week ten, the checking feels redundant. The tool has been right so many times that pushing back seems like wasted effort. So you stop. Not all at once — you just skip a verification here, accept a suggestion there. And somewhere between week one and week ten, you’ve abdicated without ever choosing to.

That’s the trap. You don’t abdicate by decision. You abdicate by trust accrual.

I use AI every day — for writing, for data work, for thinking through problems. It is the most powerful tool I’ve ever worked with. And the more powerful it gets, the more dangerous the drift becomes.

Because it gets worse as the tool gets better, not better. A sharper tool makes abdication more tempting. The output looks cleaner. The reasoning sounds tighter. The errors get harder to spot — not because they’re smaller, but because they’re wrapped in fluency that makes you want to believe them.

Here’s what I’ve learned from the chair: AI is a reasoning engine, not a truth source. It doesn’t know anything. It processes what it’s given and returns the most plausible-sounding result. If the truth isn’t in what you’ve supplied or what it’s been trained on, it starts on the wrong foot and builds confidently from there.

My edge is whatever only I can supply — my intent, my standards, my domain knowledge, my ability to say “that’s wrong” when the output sounds right.

The thing nobody tells you is that AI doesn’t erode your ability to reason. It erodes your exercise of it. The muscle is still there. You just stop using it because the tool made it feel unnecessary. And by the time you need it — the day the output is confidently, fluently wrong — the muscle hasn’t been worked in months.

I have one rule that doesn’t bend: if I ship it, it’s mine. Not AI’s fault. Not the tool’s limitation. Mine. I signed off on it. My name is on it.

The signature got cheap. The responsibility didn’t.

The Surgery

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 14

I used to think that when I finished writing something, I was done. The story was out. The work was complete. Move on to the next thing.

That was shortsighted and a little arrogant.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop tonight working on the editorial pass for my second novel. The bones are solid. The arcs are where they need to be. What I’m doing now is polish — adjusting the reader experience, tightening scenes, making sure the story feels cohesive from the first page to the last.

And I’m enjoying it. That’s the part I didn’t expect.

I used to dread editing. It felt like going backward. The creative rush was in the writing — getting the story out, discovering the characters, finding out what happened next. Editing felt like admitting the first version wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t. And that’s not a failure. That’s how stories work.

The things we love in books — the moments that land perfectly, the detail in chapter two that pays off in chapter twenty, the line of dialogue that feels inevitable — those aren’t first-pass items. They’re the result of careful editorial surgery. Someone went back in and made the good parts great and cut the parts that were only there because the writer liked them.

Here’s what the surgery looks like today. I discovered I was being too on the nose — telling the reader what to think about events instead of trusting them to pick it up. The story elements are all staying. The structure is solid. But there’s a pattern running through the manuscript where I’m explaining what a scene means instead of letting the scene do its own work.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t see in the first draft. You’re too close. You’re too in love with making sure the reader gets it. The edit is where you learn to trust them.

The other thing that’s changed is the standard. A younger version of me would have been satisfied to just do a good job. Get it done, ship it, move on. I’m not that guy anymore. I want the work I put out to be the best I have — not perfect, but the best version I can make. I want the reader to smile, or think, or feel something they needed to feel. And I owe it to them to go back in and make sure I’ve given them that chance.

The first draft is where you create the story. The editing process is where you learn to trust your reader with it.

The Volume Group

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 12

There’s a story about an arts professor who split his pottery class into two groups. The first group only had to produce one piece for the entire year. One shot at perfection. The second group was graded on volume — they had to produce as many pieces as possible, measured by weight at the end of the semester.

At the end of the year, the volume group didn’t just produce more pottery. They produced better pottery. Piece after piece, the craft improved. Meanwhile, the single-piece group spent the year theorizing about what good pottery looked like and never developed the skill to make it.

I think about that story a lot.

I’m 500 posts into BiblePictures365 on Instagram and TikTok. The compositions are stronger now — better framing, better detail, images that actually stop a scroll. I’ve written a blog post every day this year, and the change there is different — the arguments are tighter, the thinking is more organized, and I waste fewer words getting to the point. Two different crafts, both sharpened the same way. Not by studying theory. By shipping something every day and letting the reps do the teaching.

Volume made the quality better. Not worse.

There’s a difference between volume and noise. You can only turn it up as loud as it is good. Go louder than the quality supports, and it’s just blaring — it hurts more than it helps.

But the answer to that isn’t to go quiet. It’s to keep producing at the level you’re proud of and let the reps tighten the craft.

I have no way of knowing everyone who’s seen my work this year. I just know that none of it would have reached anyone if I hadn’t shipped it.

Five five-star reviews on Amazon — most from people I hadn’t spoken to in years — exist because I published the book. 8,000 Instagram followers exist because I posted every day. Over 400,000 views on one video exist because I was already 200 posts deep when it hit.

If I had not shipped these things, they would not have had a chance to impact people.