Substack Confucius

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Substack lately. Reading Notes, engaging with other creators, trying to learn the platform and find my voice inside it. And I keep running into the same thing.

Substack Confucius.

You know the type. They post Notes that sound profound until you read them twice. “Conceal your strikes from your opponent and you will more easily strike his hide.” That’s not actually from Substack — that’s the Sphinx from Mystery Men, a character whose entire joke is that he speaks in pseudo-wisdom that sounds deep but means nothing. The joke works because we’ve all met that person. Apparently, a lot of them have Substack accounts.

But there’s a difference between a truth that’s been earned and a truth that costs nothing to say. A platitude and a hard-won insight can look identical on the surface. The difference is whether the person saying it has bled for it or just typed it.

Here’s my test: is this true on and off the message board? Can I take this sentence, walk into my office on Monday morning, and apply it to real work? Can I use it to grow my Substack, write a better blog post, have a harder conversation? If the answer is no — if it only works as a caption underneath a sunset — then it’s not wisdom. It’s decoration.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Because the temptation is real. I’ve felt the pull — the urge to write a Note that gets restacked because it makes people feel something for three seconds instead of one that makes them think for three minutes.

I don’t want to be Substack Confucius. I want to say things that are honest, even when they’re not pretty. I want to write things that work on Monday morning, not just on a feed. And if that means fewer restacks and slower growth, I’ll take it. Because the audience I want isn’t looking for fortune cookies. They’re looking for someone who’s actually doing the work and willing to talk about what it’s really like.

He Fell the Wrong Way

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been posting daily Bible illustrations for four months now. One image per chapter, every day, using AI to generate scenes from scripture. This week, a video of David and Goliath crossed 110,000 views on Instagram. I’ve gained over 1,500 followers in a week.

And at least ten people have told me Goliath fell the wrong way.

They’re right. The Bible says he fell forward. My video shows him falling backward. I can read scripture — I do every day. But the spirit of that image wasn’t a forensic recreation of which direction a giant’s body hit the ground. It was a young shepherd standing in front of something impossibly bigger than him, armed with a sling and a rock, and winning.

Someone else pointed out that Goliath was nine feet tall, not thirty. There’s actually theological debate about whether he was nine feet or thirteen. But the point was never the exact measurement. The point was scale. Goliath was over twice David’s height and many times his weight. He was a warrior above all warriors. The exaggerated size in the image captures something a historically accurate rendering might not — how it must have felt to stand at the bottom of that shadow.

Not just David. All of Israel. They stood on those sidelines for forty days, paralyzed. And in an instant, God used a shepherd boy to conquer what an entire army couldn’t face.

That’s what I want people to see. Not a Bible diagram. Not a historical diorama. I want people who have never been exposed to these stories, or who’ve heard them a hundred times but never really pictured them, to see differently. To feel the dust. To sense the weight of the moment.

Will I get every detail right? No. But I’d rather make someone stop scrolling and think about a shepherd boy’s courage and his reliance on God rather than produce a technically accurate image nobody pauses for.

Goliath fell. That is what I was trying to show.

The Hidden Cost of Starting Over

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to build better habits for years. Long before the current challenge I’m in — a 280-day experiment in showing up every single day — I tried other versions. Different names, different structures, same intention. And every single time, the thing that killed it wasn’t a lack of motivation. It was the restart.

I’d get a streak going. Two weeks, maybe three. Then life would interrupt — a trip, a bad week, a day where I just didn’t feel like it. One day off became two. Two became a week. And when I came back, nothing was where I left it. The rhythm was gone. The writing felt stiff. The habits that had started to feel automatic suddenly felt like lifting furniture again. So I’d white-knuckle through a few days, lose steam, and stop. Then start over. Again.

I’ve been thinking about why this time is different. Twenty-two consecutive days. No breaks. And what I’ve realized is that the streak itself isn’t the point. The point is what the streak protects me from: the tax.

Every time you stop and restart, you pay a cost. A one-day break costs almost nothing — maybe an hour of finding your rhythm again. A week off costs a full day. Two weeks off and you’re spending three to five days just rebuilding what decayed while you were gone. The project goes cold. The voice drifts. Arguments lose their edge. You’re not warming up anymore. You’re reconstructing.

That’s why the person who writes five hundred words every day beats the person who writes three thousand words twice a week, even though the weekly totals look the same on paper. The daily writer never pays the restart tax. The other one pays it a hundred and four times a year.

I know this because I’ve been both writers. The version of me who worked in bursts always felt like he was grinding harder and producing less. He was. Not because he wasn’t talented or disciplined, but because he was spending half his energy getting back to where he’d already been.

Twenty-two days in a row doesn’t sound like much. But twenty-two days with zero restarts means every ounce of energy has gone forward. Nothing spent rebuilding. Nothing lost to friction. Just momentum, compounding quietly, one day at a time.

Consistency isn’t discipline theater. It’s tax avoidance.

The Lie

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere around age eighteen, most of us were told to pick. Pick a major. Pick a career. Pick a direction. And the unspoken rule underneath all of it was that whatever you picked, that was it. That was your life. You chose wrong? Tough. You chose right but lost interest? Too bad. The conveyor belt only moves in one direction.

That’s the lie.

I bought it. Most of my generation did. I picked a plan at eighteen, and by the time I was halfway through college, I knew it was wrong. It took me until I was twenty-nine to actually do something about it. Eleven years of knowing and not acting, because somewhere in the back of my head, a voice kept saying you already chose.

Those eleven years weren’t wasted — I learned things along the way that I still carry. But they were heavy. There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from building something you already know isn’t yours. You show up. You do the work. You get decent at it. And the whole time, there’s a low hum underneath everything telling you this isn’t it. You ignore it because the system told you that you already picked, and picking again means you failed the first time.

Nobody ever told me to pick one thing and drop the rest. If they had, I’d have told them to bug off. But nobody had to say it out loud. The system said it for them. The degree structure said it. The career ladder said it. The question every adult asks every eighteen-year-old — “so what are you going to do with your life?” — said it. As if the answer is supposed to be one sentence long and permanent.

Here’s what actually happened after I finally let go of the plan: I fell into data management and discovered I was good at it. I picked up a guitar and wrote songs. I started telling stories and eventually published a novel. None of it was the plan at eighteen. All of it built on what came before.

Variety isn’t the enemy of mastery. It’s the raw material for it. The more things you learn, the more connections you can make between them — and those connections are where the real value lives.

You were not meant to be one thing.

Nothing Comes Easy

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 2013, I wrote a song called “Nothing Comes Easy.” I was in a different season of life — still fighting, still grinding, still trying to figure out what the next chapter was supposed to look like. I sat down with a guitar and wrote what I was feeling. Recently, I ran that old recording through an AI music tool and heard it fully produced for the first time. You can listen to it here: Nothing Comes Easy

“This time’s not like all the times before. I’m not here to fight — I’m here to win the war.”

I didn’t fully understand what I was writing. I thought I did. I thought I knew what war I was talking about. But 2013 David hadn’t been through his second round of cancer yet. He hadn’t published a novel. He hadn’t started a 280-day challenge to rebuild his habits from the ground up. He wrote the lyric because it sounded true. I’m living it now because it is.

That’s the strange thing about writing something before you’re ready for it. The words sit there, waiting for you to grow into them. You think you’re being honest in the moment, and you are — but there’s a version of that honesty you can’t access yet because you haven’t earned it. You have to go through the thing the song is about before the song actually belongs to you.

Thirteen years later, I know what war I was writing about. It wasn’t one fight. It was the decision to keep showing up — through cancer, through setbacks, through the long stretch of days where nothing moves and nobody notices. Easy doesn’t teach you that. Only the grind does.

I wrote a bridge in that song: “A fire’s burning deep in me. However long it takes, I’ll be free.” I didn’t know it was a promise to myself. But here I am, keeping it.