Tell Good Stories

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I saw the new Super Mario Galaxy movie today with my family. It was really well made. The animation was gorgeous, the 3D was good, and the story was well told.

But here’s what got me. Nintendo layered thirty years of Easter eggs into a movie that works perfectly for a seven-year-old who’s never picked up a GameCube. Robot Rob. Star Fox. Mr. Game and Watch. Crosses from Mario Galaxy, Mario Odyssey, Super Smash Bros. A cornucopia of references that made me grin in a theater full of kids who had no idea why I was smiling.

Two audiences. One story. Both satisfied.

They didn’t have to screen-adapt the thing. They just took stories that everybody loved from the games and seamlessly wove them in and out.

Later tonight I was scrolling Facebook and stopped on a Gabriel Iglesias clip. The man literally stands on a stage and talks about his life. No props. No gimmicks. Just stories about his mom, his son, his friends. He’s old school funny — from the generation that made fun of each other and it made them friends. He doesn’t get easily offended. He just holds the audience through his delivery and brings the laughs.

A $200 million animated movie and a guy alone with a microphone. Both doing the exact same thing: telling good stories.

I know this because I’ve lived it. I spent years in Toastmasters giving speeches, and the ones that landed hardest were never the clever ones. They were the personal ones. When I talked about my wife — how we met, how she walked with me through cancer, the ways she shows up that nobody else sees — the room would lock in. Not because the story was dramatic. Because it was real.

One of the best speeches I ever gave was about the butterfly effect. In the tenth grade I threw myself into singing. Gave it everything I had. That led to a full scholarship at my hometown college. My frustration with that college led me to apply somewhere else. Another full scholarship. And that’s where I met my bride. As soon as we met, I didn’t need to sing anymore.

One decision rippled forward and changed everything. The point of the speech wasn’t the love story — it was that sometimes we have to be excellent at something and give it everything we have for that season, even if later that’s not who we are anymore. Today leads us to tomorrow. But telling it through the real story is what made the room feel it.

Whether you’re Nintendo layering thirty years of games into a kids’ movie, Gabriel Iglesias talking about his mom, or me standing at a podium talking about the awesome girl I met in college — the job is the same.

Tell a good story. Don’t deviate from your source material to impress anybody. Know your audience well enough to layer in the things that make them feel seen. And make it real enough that they come back for more.

The tools change. The platforms change. The story is always the thing.

The Process

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I passed a group of protesters on the side of the road yesterday. Maybe fifteen or twenty of them, posterboard signs, standing on the shoulder.

I’m not going to tell you what was on the signs. It doesn’t matter for what I want to say.

My first thought was honest and probably not very generous: there aren’t very many of you. You’re all probably over sixty-five. And I found myself asking — what is it you actually hope to accomplish? Are you raising visibility? Making a statement? Finding community by uniting behind something you don’t like? Or are you trying to cause actual change?

Because those are very different goals. And only one of them requires a plan.

I learned in basic civics — the kind they used to teach in schools — that there is an established process for creating change in this country. The Constitution was written with it baked in. You lobby your representatives. You build popular support through persuasion and communication. You draft legislation. You vote. You work the system because the system was designed to be worked.

That process isn’t flashy. It doesn’t fit on a posterboard. It takes longer than an afternoon on the side of the road. But it works. It has worked for over two hundred years.

Gandhi understood this. He led one of the most effective movements in modern history — not through noise, but through disciplined, organized, strategic action. Silent protests. Marches with a plan. Civil disobedience with a specific legal target. He didn’t just stand on the side of the road. He mapped the road.

I think about this in my own life too. When I want something to change — my health, my career, my creative output — standing around being frustrated about it doesn’t move anything. What moves it is a process. Define the problem. Understand the system. Find the lever. Pull it. Measure what happens. Adjust.

That’s true in data management. It’s true in government. It’s true in marriage. It’s true in faith.

Energy without process is just noise. Process without energy is just bureaucracy. But energy with process — that’s how things actually change.

I don’t know if those fifteen or twenty people on the side of the road had a plan beyond the afternoon. I hope they do. Because the passion was clearly there. And passion deserves a process.

The Craving

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It took two days.

Two days into assessment week — a planned break between rounds of the 7-40 Challenge — and I was already craving the structure I’d stepped away from.

I’ll admit, some of the break was good. I stopped listening to audiobooks for a few days and let my mind clear out. That turned out to be exactly what I needed to get ready for the next round of learning. And I never stopped my daily Bible reading. I just couldn’t let that one go.

But the calorie tracking slipped. The water slipped. I ate off plan multiple days, some just because I could — which, looking back, was kind of stupid. And it gave me a feeling I didn’t like. I could feel myself sliding back into habit patterns I don’t need. By day three I knew I had to pivot back.

So when I woke up this morning — Round 3, Day 1 — and I had my list in front of me, I felt relief. Energy. A little pep in my step. Because I had those small moments of accomplishment spread across the day again, and they’re fantastic.

Here’s why I think that matters beyond just me.

A long time ago, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He lived for several years after his diagnosis, but he did not do well in unfamiliar places or unfamiliar routines. My grandmother — a retired nurse and a bit of a drill sergeant — kept his framework together. She kept him in line, kept him moving, kept his daily structure strong. And he was able to function for years, even as he lost more and more of his memory, because his routines stayed the same.

There’s a whole different set of blog posts in that story. But the principle is the same one I felt this week.

Our brains crave habit patterns. They are actual physical things happening inside our heads. We expect the rewards they bring. We expect the satisfaction that comes with practicing them. And that’s true for good habits and bad habits alike. The dopamine high from a good workout isn’t that different from the dopamine hit of an addiction. The difference is which pattern you’ve seeded.

Where I feel grateful is this: I’m healthy. I’m more motivated this year than I’ve ever been in my life. I feel daunted and challenged by the work I’ve set in front of myself, which is probably a good thing. Keeping myself in these habits — keeping myself moving forward — is how I prime myself for success through the seasons when fatigue or exhaustion or grief would want to stop me.

My grandfather didn’t have a choice. His framework was held together by someone who loved him. I have the choice. And after two days without it, I know exactly what I’m choosing.

Go Deep

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I ran a demo today. Asked AI a question in plain English. It wrote a SQL query in real time. I asked it to convert the output to R. Done. Less than a minute.

Three years ago that could have taken me a few hours. Minimum.

Everyone in the room was impressed, and I don’t blame them. It is impressive. But the part that mattered most isn’t the part that got the reaction.

The SQL it produced was good. It took the natural language prompt I gave it and created what I wanted. However, I still had to verify the SQL to make sure my demo was successful. I was able to do that because I have been doing this kind of work for almost twenty years. I didn’t have to look it up. I just knew.

And that’s the thing more people need to talk about.

AI is going to flatten surface-level knowledge. If all you bring to the table is the ability to do something the machine now does in thirty seconds, that’s a problem. But if you can evaluate whether what the machine produced is actually right — that’s a different conversation entirely.

I told the room: build your context architecture. Know every piece of your workflow. Know how the levers get pulled. Know what right looks like before you ask the machine to produce it. Because without that architecture, AI doesn’t help you. It just runs your bad assumptions faster.

The people who thrive through this won’t be the ones who learned the tool fastest. They’ll be the ones who went deep enough to know when the tool got it wrong.

I am thankful that I have had the last twenty years to learn the data. Today that investment is paying returns I didn’t expect.

Attack the Problem

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Assessment Week 2 — Day 4 | The 7-40 Challenge

I took my mother to a hospital procedure this morning. My dad had a different appointment of his own, so I was the one taking her. My parents drove over two hours to get there. When we arrived, the hospital had her appointment time marked thirty minutes earlier than what the doctor’s office had given us. We were on time according to our paperwork. We were late according to theirs.

They told us she’d have to reschedule.

My mother is not getting any younger. She has health concerns she’s battling through. She didn’t need a bureaucratic answer this morning. She needed someone to see her as a person, not a scheduling conflict.

I was angry. I’m still angry, if I’m being honest.

But here’s what I want to talk about tonight.

When the check-in person delivered the news, I could see it on her face. She didn’t make this call. She didn’t create the miscommunication between the doctor’s office and the hospital. She was just the person sitting closest to the problem when it landed.

So I looked at her and said, “Ma’am, you’re doing a good job. I appreciate you. I know this was not you.”

Because it wasn’t. And she needed to hear that someone in the room knew the difference between the person and the problem.

I wanted to go upstairs. I wanted to find the office of whoever had been cold about the situation and professionally remind them that their decision had a cost — two hours of driving, a day of my mother’s time, a hundred and fifty dollars in gas and trouble, and a woman who needed care and didn’t get it. I wanted to give them a face to attach to the scheduling line they’d just dismissed.

My dad asked me not to.

So I didn’t.

There’s a version of me from ten years ago who would have gone anyway. Who would have justified it by calling it advocacy. Who would have been loud and felt righteous about it.

But my dad — who had his own appointment to deal with and still made sure his wife got to hers — asked me to let it go. And I listened. Not because he was right about the hospital. Because he was right about me. Going upstairs wasn’t going to get my mother her procedure today. It was going to make me feel better at the expense of making the situation worse.

You can be upset and not sin by making things worse than they are.

That’s the line I keep coming back to.

If my son had been sitting in that waiting room, I would have wanted him to see all of it. The anger — because it’s okay to be angry when someone you love gets treated like a number. The restraint — because the check-in person didn’t deserve to absorb what the system did. The distinction — because attacking the problem and attacking the person are two very different things, and most people never learn to separate them.

And the hardest part: knowing when someone you respect asks you to stand down, and having the discipline to listen. Not because the fight isn’t worth having. Because the person asking you to stop has earned the right to be heard.

My dad has earned that. Many times over.

Here’s what I’m sitting with tonight. I had agency in that room. I had the ability to make things louder, harder, uglier. I also had the ability to make one person’s day a little less terrible by telling her she was doing a good job when nobody else was going to.

Both of those were choices. Both of those were agency.

We talk a lot about agency as the power to act — to push, to build, to make things happen. But agency also means choosing compassion when you have every reason not to. It means seeing the person behind the counter as a human being caught in someone else’s mess. It means letting your father’s quiet request carry more weight than your own frustration.

The system failed my mother today. But I didn’t have to fail the people standing in front of me.

That’s what I’d want Trey to see. Not a father who swallowed his anger. A father who chose where to spend it.

Assessment Week 2 — Day 4. Some lessons don’t come from books. They come from waiting rooms.