Keep Building Context

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I met a woman at work recently — we’ll call her Jane — who’s been doing her job for thirty-five years. She made a comment in passing that stuck with me. She said somebody needs to get all the knowledge out of her head before she retires, because if nobody comes to extract it, it’s leaving with her.

She didn’t say this with bitterness. She wasn’t holding it hostage. She was offering it. A thirty-five-year library of institutional knowledge, available to anyone willing to sit down and ask.

So I asked.

I think about this a lot. How much knowledge is out there right now, locked inside someone’s head, that could solve problems we’ve been staring at for years? How many people would tell you almost everything they know about a subject if you’d just take the time to sit with them and make it happen?

I asked Jane if I could schedule a few interviews with her. She said yes immediately. Here’s what I plan to ask: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter to you? How did the business processes you manage build up over time? Where did they serve the company well, and where have they become obstacles? How have cycles of innovation and progress collided or cooperated during your career? Where would you fix things if you could?

That’s not a casual conversation. That’s an excavation. And with voice-to-text technology available today, I can stay fully engaged — asking thoughtful follow-up questions, reading her body language, being present — while still capturing every word. I can send her the highlights afterward. She can confirm my understanding. The second interview fills the gaps instead of retreading the ground.

Jane spent thirty-five years learning things the hard way. Every decision she’s made, every process she’s watched evolve, every cycle of innovation she’s lived through — that’s not in a system anywhere. It’s in her head. And she’s willing to give it away.

I’m showing up.

Take the Next Step (Revisited)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Two years ago, I wrote a post called “Take the Next Step.” I told the story of a man named Pat who received a terrible prognosis from his doctor and decided to change his life by walking to Walmart. No car. No shortcuts. If he wanted to eat, he had to walk a mile to get there. Over the course of several years, he lost 330 pounds.

I remember writing that post and thinking how inspiring Pat’s story was. I wrote about reframing my own health journey. I said I was going to track calories, lift weights three times a week, and walk daily. I said I believed I would see progress.

And then I didn’t.

Not right away, at least. That version of the challenge didn’t stick. Life happened. I reset. I started again. I stopped again. The blog post lived on my website like a receipt for something I never picked up.

Here’s what I didn’t understand two years ago: the next step isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the step after the step after the step. It’s Day 14 when nobody’s reading. It’s Day 50 when the scale hasn’t moved in a week. It’s Day 80 when you’ve done everything right and the results still don’t match the effort. Pat didn’t lose 330 pounds because he walked to Walmart once. He lost it because he walked to Walmart again. And again. And again. Until the walking became who he was.

I’m writing this on Day 104 of my year. Round 3, Day 14 of the 7-40 Challenge. I’ve lost over sixteen pounds. I lift with my son three times a week. I walk every day. I track every calorie. I do abs every morning — today was Day 30 of a 60-day challenge.

Two years ago I wrote about taking the next step. Today I’m living inside the compound interest of actually doing it.

The difference isn’t motivation. It isn’t even discipline. It’s that I stopped treating the next step like an event and started treating it like a Tuesday. Pat figured that out before I did. The walk to Walmart wasn’t a grand gesture. It was just how he got dinner.

I’m still taking the next step. The difference is I’ve stopped counting them.

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.