7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 21

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Years ago, I wrote a blog post about the difference between facts and story. I used an example of two people answering the same question — “how was your day?” One gave a list: did some spreadsheets, took some calls, met a new coworker, came home. The other told a story — the spreadsheets took forever because Mark kept stopping by, but Mark’s having trouble at home and it felt right to help. A new woman started today. They hit it off.

Same day. Same details. Completely different experience for the listener.

I ended that post with a line I didn’t know I was writing for myself: “If you are living a story you wouldn’t want to read, then it may be time to start writing something different.”

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It took me years to take my own advice.

I kept living in bullet points. Went to work. Came home. Had ideas I didn’t act on. Wrote a few pages of stories I never finished. Knew what I was capable of but treated it like trivia instead of plot.

Then I started writing something different.

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Not a blog post. Not a metaphor. I sat down and wrote a novel. Then I wrote another one. I started a daily blog and haven’t missed a day in 157 of them. I picked up a Bible illustration project that’s reached almost 9,000 people. I built a structure around seven daily habits and rode it through four rounds of forty days.

I stopped narrating a life I wasn’t living and started living one worth narrating.

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The old post asked the reader a question: “How would thinking of your life in terms of story benefit you?” I don’t need to ask that anymore. I know the answer. It made me the main character instead of a bystander in my own plot.

The story I’m telling now has problems I haven’t solved, deadlines I’ve missed, fears I’m still fighting. It’s not clean. But I’d want to read it. And that’s the difference.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 19

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Every once in a while, you need to take a deep breath.

We had friends over tonight that we’ve known for over twenty-five years. Good people. The kind you don’t have to perform for. The kind where you sit down, the conversation starts, and three hours disappear.

Whatever I was working on today fell by the wayside. And that was exactly right.

Some nights the most productive thing you can do is stop producing and be present with people who restore you in a way that nothing else can.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 19

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I was in a business conversation today. I thought I was being clear. I gave what I believed were straightforward directives — here’s the problem, here’s what I need done, here are the actions to take.

One person on the call almost point-blank refused to accept the message.

After a lot of going around, I realized it wasn’t that my words were wrong. It was that their understanding of the problem was different from mine. The solution I was prescribing didn’t make sense because they were stopped by their own mental model of the issue — and I had never checked whether we were looking at the same thing.

That wasn’t their fault. It was mine.

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Here’s what I should have done. Before I prescribed a solution, I should have started with the problem statement. Here’s the issue. Here’s what I understand about it. Here’s how I see the pieces fitting together. Does everyone in this room see it the same way?

If they did, we move forward. If they didn’t, I’d have the chance to adjust my framework before I tried to build on top of it.

Instead, I assumed everyone was already crystal clear on the problem. I skipped the foundation and went straight to the fix. And the fix made no sense to someone who was standing on different ground.

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Once I walked it back — restated the problem, rebuilt the understanding, asked “is this correct?” — everyone agreed and we moved on. The solution was the same one I’d proposed at the start. It just needed the foundation underneath it.

That ten minutes of conflict resolution could have been two minutes of consensus building at the top.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 18

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Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give yourself two weeks to do something that takes a day, and it’ll take two weeks. Not because the work is hard. Because you’ll let it.

I’ve been watching myself do this for months. I had a manuscript that needed two hours of edits. It took sixteen days. I had a music album ready to upload. It sat. I had a promotion plan to build. It drifted.

None of these were blocked. None of them were waiting on someone else. They just didn’t have deadlines, so they expanded to fill whatever space I gave them.

This morning, I broke the law.

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Here’s what I committed to before 6:30 AM today, publicly, so I can’t take it back:

Light Bearer — my second novel — goes up on KDP by Saturday. Cover art adjusted, manuscript finalized, submitted. No exceptions.

The Phase Defiant companion album goes up on DistroKid by June 10. Music pulled, metadata tagged, one final listen, uploaded.

Phase Defiant promotion starts tomorrow. Sixty content ideas ready. Two posts a day for thirty days. Pictures, videos, music clips — the book gets in front of people every single day for a month.

LLC formation — research and planning done by June 17.

AI for Beginners course content mapped and built by July 3.

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We fill available time because nobody told us not to. The cure isn’t discipline in the abstract. It’s specific deadlines on specific tasks, stated out loud, where someone can see them.

So here they are. You can see them. And in thirty days, you’ll see whether I hit them.