The Beauty of Routines

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Most writing about habits frames them as productivity tools. Build the right habit, do the thing, become the more efficient version of yourself. The vocabulary is discipline, willpower, accountability, consistency.

That’s not why I built mine.

I built mine to give my brain somewhere to go when it would otherwise reach for food, wine, or my phone.

The Architecture of Comfort

Around dinner time, every day, my brain wants comfort. That’s not a moral failing. That’s how the brain works. Stress accumulates over the course of a day, energy reserves drop, decision-making capacity gets thin, and somewhere in the early evening the system goes looking for something that feels good.

For most of my life, that something was food. A second helping. Dessert when I wasn’t hungry. A bowl of something while watching television. The eating wasn’t about hunger. It was about the dopamine hit my brain expected at that hour, in that mood, after that kind of day.

Wine had the same job, on the days that wasn’t food. So did doom-scrolling — the slot machine of the social feed, infinite small rewards for no real cost in the moment.

Three different behaviors. Same neurological function. The brain wanted comfort and it had learned three reliable ways to produce it.

The Substitution

Here’s what I figured out, slowly, over the past year.

The brain wants comfort. The brain will find comfort. The variable isn’t whether you give it the dopamine hit. The variable is which behavior you’ve trained it to associate with the hit.

Around dinner time now, the urge that used to send me to the kitchen sends me out for a walk. The urge that used to send me to a second glass of wine sends me to the floor for abs and push-ups. The urge that used to send me into the social feed sends me to a book or a blog post.

I’m not white-knuckling those choices. I’m not “resisting temptation.” I’m getting a real dopamine hit from the walk. My brain has figured out that the walk is comfort now. It produces the same internal reward I used to get from the thing I was overdoing.

The compulsion didn’t disappear. The compulsion got redirected.

The Compulsion Reframe

Some people would say I haven’t actually solved anything — I’ve just traded one compulsion for another. The behavior is still automatic. I’m still running on autopilot. I just happen to land on healthier shores.

That criticism is technically true. It’s also useless.

If compulsiveness is your method — and for most humans, in most situations, it is — then your job isn’t to transcend compulsion. It’s to choose which compulsion runs the show. Most of what we do every day is habitual. We don’t deliberate over breakfast. We don’t strategize about whether to brush our teeth. We’re going to do something compulsively at five in the afternoon. The question is which something.

And here’s the part most habit writing skips: the body cooperates with you eventually. Exercise releases endorphins. Walking outside resets your nervous system. Reading a book at night settles your mind. The compulsion that started as a deliberate substitution turns, after enough repetitions, into genuine desire. You’re no longer choosing the walk over the wine because you should. You’re choosing it because your body now wants it.

That transition — from forced substitution to actual desire — is the part that takes time. It also takes faith on the front end, before the brain has caught up to the new pattern.

When the Routine Slips

I’m 34 days into my third 40-day round of a year-long challenge. I haven’t missed a day. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been perfect inside the day. There have been meals I shouldn’t have eaten. Glasses of wine I didn’t need. Stretches of phone time that didn’t serve me.

The framework I run by isn’t never slip. It’s one slip is a treat. Daily slipping is a detriment.

The difference matters. A perfectionist framework can’t survive contact with real life — one missed day and the whole thing collapses because the framework didn’t have room for being human. The framework I’m using has room. It assumes I’ll slip. It just doesn’t let the slip become the new pattern.

The discipline isn’t avoiding the slip. The discipline is what you do the next morning.

The Whole Person

The seven habits I run every day aren’t a productivity stack. They’re an architecture for a whole person — spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. I have cravings across the full spectrum of who I am. I can meet them with good things or bad things. The seven habits are my way of meeting each one deliberately, before the brain decides for me what to reach for.

That’s why all seven exist. Removing one doesn’t just leave a productivity gap. It leaves a comfort gap that something else will fill. Probably something I don’t want filling it.

Hydration is just hydration. But a body that’s well-hydrated thinks better and feels better and works better. None of the seven are decoration.

The Kid in the Memory

There’s a kid still inside me who remembers opening the refrigerator a long time ago and finding nothing.

Not nothing-I-want. Actually nothing. The light came on, and the shelves were empty, and the question wasn’t what should I eat but is there anything to eat.

We’ve long since passed that. My family is provided for. My fridge is full. But the kid who looked into the empty one is still in there. He’s the reason food became my most reliable form of comfort. He’s the one who learned, early, that when food is available you take it, because there were times it wasn’t. That wiring didn’t disappear when the conditions changed. It went quiet. It didn’t leave.

He’s the one suggesting the second helping I don’t need. He’s the one noticing the open bottle of wine. He’s the one reaching for the phone when the day has been long.

He’s not bad. He learned what he learned, when he learned it. He just hasn’t gotten the memo about the new program.

I’m not trying to silence him. I’m trying to thank him for getting me here, and then choose something different now.

The routines are how I do that without having to argue it out every evening.

What I Wrote in 2018

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In July of 2018 I sat down at a keyboard and wrote a post about communication.

I had just come through chemo and surgery to clean out my lymph nodes — my second time with cancer, the first having been in 2004. I was on short-term disability. I was waiting to go back to my desk. I was eager to be around people again.

That’s the context for what I wrote. Most readers won’t know it. I didn’t put it in the post at the time. But it shapes everything I want to say tonight.

Eight years ago, I wrote:

I love words. I love looking at the definitions of words to see how they work… This morning as I started to sketch out the purpose of this post, I started to examine the word communicate.

Share or exchange information, news, or ideas. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas or in evoking understanding in others.

When I first started reading the definition I felt it was incomplete. If communicating only involved the sharing of ideas, we would all be excellent communicators. Just shout what you want people to hear as loud as you can and viola! Job complete… it isn’t that easy is it? In a word, no.

The second part of the definition I outlined brought the meaning into focus. To succeed in conveying one’s ideas and evoking understanding in others. This, in my opinion, is the heart of communication… understanding.

And the post closed with a line that surprised me a little when I read it back this morning:

You have important things to say. You have a viewpoint that you need to share.

That was 2018-me, fresh out of the hospital, writing to whoever would read his blog.

What I Notice Reading It Back

I expected to disagree with parts of it. Eight years is a long time. I’ve read more, written more, lived more. Yesterday I published a post laying out a framework I didn’t have in 2018 — three modes of conversation, communication and negotiation and capitulation, with intent as the variable that moves a conversation between them.

So I went back to read 2018-me expecting to find a writer who didn’t yet see what I see now.

I didn’t find that.

I found a writer whose framework was less developed, but whose convictions were the same as mine. People have important things to say. Bridging our differences so we can hear them is the goal. Understanding doesn’t require agreement. I still believe every line of it. Eight years and a lot of reading and a lot of conversations later, I haven’t moved on the spirit. I’ve gotten more precise about the approach.

That distinction matters more than I expected.

The Constancy Question

Most writing about personal growth assumes the writer changed and now sees what they used to miss. I used to think X, now I think Y, here’s what I learned. That’s the standard arc.

When I read 2018-me, that arc didn’t fit. The 2018 post is generous, optimistic, and trusting — and I’d assumed, before re-reading it, that I’d find a man who hadn’t yet been disappointed enough to know better. That’s the story most people tell about themselves at midlife. I used to be naïve. Now I’m wise.

But 2018-me wasn’t naïve. He’d already had cancer twice. He’d already watched manipulation happen in plenty of conversations. He’d already seen what people with agendas do to people without them. He chose to write generously about communication anyway, because that’s what he believed about people — and because he wanted to come back to his desk and his colleagues and his work and do the thing he’d been doing for years.

The generosity wasn’t innocence. It was a posture. A choice. Made by someone who had reasons to make a different choice and didn’t.

I still hold that posture. I’ve added language to it. I’ve built frameworks around it. I’ve gotten sharper at recognizing when someone in front of me isn’t operating from the same posture and adjusting accordingly. But the underlying conviction — that people have important things to say, and that the work is to bridge our differences so we can hear them — hasn’t moved.

Approach vs. Spirit

There’s a difference between disagreeing with the spirit of something you used to believe and disagreeing with the approach.

When the spirit changes, you’ve moved. You’re a different person operating from a different center, and your old work is evidence of who you used to be.

When the approach changes, you’ve stayed the same person and gotten better at doing what you’ve always been doing. The old work is evidence of the journey, not evidence of who you used to be.

Looking at 2018-me, the approach has gotten more sophisticated. I now know that some conversations aren’t really conversations. I know that techniques used for understanding can be used for manipulation, and that the techniques themselves give you no way to tell. I know that drift is real — that two people can start with shared goals and end up running tactics on each other without either of them quite noticing.

That’s the approach edit. The spirit didn’t move.

When you go back to old work and find that the spirit still holds, you’ve discovered something useful about yourself. You’ve found out what’s load-bearing in your worldview — the thing that survived eight years of evidence and didn’t bend.

When you go back and find the spirit has shifted, you’ve also learned something — what you used to believe and don’t anymore, why the change happened, what the new center is.

Both are good. Both teach you something about who you are. The mistake is assuming you’ll find the second one when you might find the first.

For me, this morning, the answer was: the spirit held. Eight years later, I still believe people have important things to say. I still believe bridging our differences so we can hear each other is the work. I just have better tools now for doing the work.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot.

Communication, Negotiation, and Capitulation

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I just finished Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. The book teaches a set of techniques for understanding people — listening so they feel heard, matching their conversational mode, building enough trust that real exchange becomes possible. The techniques are real and they work.

What’s missing from the book — and from most communication writing — is a clear picture of what happens when the same techniques get used for different purposes. Because they do, all the time, and the techniques themselves give you no way to tell the difference.

That’s the thing I want to talk about.

Three Modes

There’s a continuum running through almost every important conversation we have:

Communication is when both parties are trying to understand each other. The goal is shared ground. Even when interests differ, the orientation is mutual.

Negotiation is when there’s an outcome being sought, and both parties know it. A salesperson and a customer. Two business partners. A couple deciding where to vacation. The outcome matters, the interests may diverge, but the rules of the game are visible to everyone in the room.

Capitulation is when one party knows the stakes more clearly than the other and uses the asymmetry to move them somewhere they wouldn’t have chosen with full information. The other party doesn’t realize they’re being moved. By the time they figure it out, the conversation is over and they’ve already agreed to something.

The techniques that produce each of these are largely the same. Listening. Reflecting back. Naming emotions. Looking for common values. The variable isn’t the technique. The variable is what you’re trying to do with it.

Intent Is the Variable

Reading someone well is a neutral skill. It can be used to honor them or to operate on them. Two people can run identical techniques and produce opposite ethical outcomes depending on what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

I don’t have a problem with salespeople. If someone has a product they genuinely believe will make my life better, I want them to sell to me. The techniques they use to understand my situation, find what I actually need, and propose a solution are exactly the same techniques a friend might use to recommend a restaurant. The difference isn’t the moves. It’s whether the person across from me is here to enrich my experience or here to take from it.

The hard part is that intent is invisible. You can’t reach across a table and verify what someone is actually trying to do. So how does anyone know?

The most reliable answer is pattern over time. People who’ve been around me long enough have watched me handle situations where I had something to gain and chose not to take it. They’ve seen me update my position when I realized I was wrong. They know what I’ve stood by when it cost me. That track record speaks louder than any single conversation. Intent reveals itself through pattern, and over a long enough timeframe, it can’t really hide.

The Honest Middle

Most real conversations don’t have pure intent. They have mixed intent. You want to help someone and you want them to do what you think is right and you’d prefer the outcome that benefits you. All at once. That’s not a flaw. That’s how human cognition actually works.

Marriage is where I see this most clearly in my own life. After twenty-seven years, I know my intentions toward my wife are fundamentally good. But on a given Tuesday, when I’m pushing for us to go out to dinner, am I doing it because she’s tired and needs a break, or because I’m lazy and don’t feel like cooking? Most of the time it’s both. The discipline isn’t to pretend the selfish part isn’t there. The discipline is to recognize both parts are present and ask which one is driving the conversation.

The same thing happens at work. The same thing happens in friendships. Pure intent is rare. Mixed intent is the human condition. The question isn’t whether you’re free of self-interest. The question is whether you can see it when it’s there and not let it run the show.

Knowing You’re Wrong

There’s a moment in some conversations where I realize, mid-sentence, that I’ve been arguing for the wrong thing. I think out loud, which means sometimes the act of articulating a position is what reveals to me that I no longer hold it. The honest move is to stop and say so. Wait. Hold on. I just realized I’m not thinking about this right. Forgive me — let me back up.

The reader will ask: how do you know whether someone is genuinely updating or just capitulating to pressure? From outside, both look like changing your mind.

There’s a tell. The genuine update has energy. It looks like discovery — oh, I just saw something I hadn’t seen. It’s an aha moment. The capitulation has the opposite shape. It looks like resignation. The person isn’t surprised by what they’re now saying. They’re tired of defending what they were saying before.

It’s not an aha moment. It’s an oh-crap moment.

The two are visibly different if you’re paying attention. Genuine updates make a person more present in the conversation. Capitulation withdraws them.

The Test

Communication is for connection. Negotiation is for honest exchange. Capitulation is what happens when one of us has decided where the conversation ends before it began, and we don’t tell the other person.

The first two are good. The third one corrupts everything it touches — relationships, businesses, marriages, the public square. Most of what passes for “influence” or “persuasion technique” online right now is teaching people to operate on each other while calling it communication.

The techniques aren’t the problem. The intent behind them is.

The test I run on myself is one question: Am I here to enrich the experience of the person across from me, or am I here to take?

If I can’t answer that honestly, I shouldn’t be in the conversation yet.

AI: Abdication or Augmentation

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday a 22-year-old developer named Austin Kennedy posted something on X that has been viewed over a million times.

“I’m 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I’ve had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can hit ‘enter’ 75% of the time. And it’s doing something to me… None of us feel as sharp as we used to.”

The replies are predictable. Some people are smug. Some are sympathetic. The standard framing showed up almost immediately: the tools are amazing, but how you use them entails a trade-off with how you use your brain. Never forget there’s a trade-off there.

The trade-off framing isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete.

The framing assumes that AI use necessarily costs cognitive function and the only question is how much. That’s not the whole picture. Two people can have eight terminals open and have completely different cognitive outcomes. The question isn’t how much you use AI. The question is what role you’re letting it play.

There are two modes, and they produce opposite results.

Abdication

Abdication mode is the mode Austin is describing. AI does the thinking. You do the executing. You ask, it answers, you accept, you ship. Hit enter. Hit enter. Hit enter.

Brain softens because you’ve outsourced the part of cognition that builds neural pathways — the wrestling, the articulating, the testing-against-reality. Six to eight terminals running in abdication mode for six months will absolutely deteriorate your sharpness. Austin isn’t wrong about what’s happening to him. He’s just misdiagnosing what caused it.

I’ve been there. Earlier this year I was running editorial passes on one of my novels. I’d run a chapter through Claude, hit enter, glance at the output, hit enter on the next chapter. I told myself I was doing light edits. After two or three chapters I went back and read what had actually shipped, and the AI hadn’t just edited my prose — it had quietly changed what my protagonist was doing. Connection points I’d built in earlier chapters were gone. The story was drifting and I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t been reading. I’d been hitting enter.

That was my wake-up call. Everything I generate, I have to review. Not just the words. The reasoning. The intention I gave it versus what came back. The places where it made decisions I didn’t authorize.

Abdication doesn’t announce itself. You slide into it.

Augmentation

Augmentation mode is the opposite shape. You are the thinker. AI is the amplifier. You bring a thought. AI sharpens it. You push back. You refine your own articulation against a partner that won’t let vague thinking pass.

The brain doesn’t soften here — it strengthens. You’re now articulating more precisely, more often, against a more demanding interlocutor than most humans you encounter daily. The reps build the muscle, not atrophy it.

The catch is that augmentation requires something to amplify. You can’t sharpen what isn’t there. Cal Newport has written extensively about the cognitive infrastructure people built before AI existed — the deep reading, the long-form thinking, the deliberate practice that produced minds capable of holding complex problems at length. Augmentation works because that infrastructure is there to amplify.

Most people running AI tools today are skipping the step where the infrastructure gets built. They’re trying to amplify thinking they never trained. The tool can’t strengthen what isn’t there.

C.S. Lewis wrote something in the preface to The Great Divorce that I keep coming back to:

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

You don’t undo a wrong math problem by working the problem harder. You go back to the step where the error entered and start again from there.

The same is true here. You don’t recover from six months of abdication by doing more AI work better. You go back to the step where you stopped engaging — wherever that is for you — and you rebuild the engagement. Then the AI can resume amplifying instead of replacing.

What I’d Say to Austin

He’s not in the trouble he thinks he’s in.

He felt something was wrong. He named it. He went on record in front of more than a million people and said his brain was getting softer and he thought the tool was doing it. That admission is the entire game. Most people sliding into abdication don’t notice. Or they notice and they make excuses. He didn’t.

I don’t know the specifics of his work. Six to eight parallel terminals could be a workflow where most prompts are routine approvals and a smaller share require real engagement — that’s a different scenario than rote abdication. Only he knows which it is.

But that 75% number is worth sitting with. Hitting enter most of the time without engaging is where abdication lives, regardless of how anyone arrived there. If most of what’s coming back from the tool isn’t getting read for reasoning — only for output — the cognitive workout has stopped happening. That’s the muscle that softens.

If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t tell myself to use AI less. I would make sure my understanding was rock solid and that the enter button never got hit unless I knew exactly what was being executed.

That’s the whole discipline, compressed. Know what you’re trying to build before you start. Know what each prompt is asking the tool to do. Read the reasoning before you accept the output. Don’t approve what you didn’t understand.

If he can hold that line, the eight terminals aren’t the problem. They’re a workflow. If he can’t hold that line, the terminals aren’t the problem either — the engagement is, and that’s the thing to rebuild.

Either way, the diagnostic isn’t am I using AI too much. It’s am I still doing the thinking.

The tool isn’t the problem. The relationship to the tool is the problem.

He realized something was off in six months. He’s going to be fine.

He just has to walk back to where he went wrong, and start again from there.

The Song That Outgrew the Woman I Wrote It For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It must have been 2013. We were at our Toastmasters club, and our mentor — a woman who had been in the organization a long time, the kind of presence who leads by example without announcing she’s leading — stood up to give a speech.

She titled it Watch Me.

I don’t remember every word. I remember the vulnerability. She had come through a relationship where the man she’d been with told her she wouldn’t make it without him. Then he left anyway. The contradiction was the part she wanted us to hear — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell someone they’re nothing without you and then walk out the door. But she had walked through it. She was standing at the lectern as proof. The title wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Watch me.

I sat in that audience and felt two things at the same time.

The first was admiration. Her pain was real and she wasn’t hiding it, but the speech wasn’t a confession. It was a war cry dressed in survival clothes.

The second was anger.

I am married to a woman I have loved for twenty-seven years. I have spent every one of those years trying to be the kind of husband who does the opposite of what had been done to the woman at the lectern. The thought of telling my wife she couldn’t make it without me — and then leaving — is unimaginable to me. Not because I’m a perfect husband. Because love doesn’t do that. Love doesn’t do that.

I wrote a song after her speech. I called it Watch Me, after her title. It was her voice — a survivor speaking back to the man who had left her. Watch me, as I get over you. Watch me, as I do something new. I played it for her. She appreciated it.

I was proud of it then. I’m still proud of it now — because the thirty-five-year-old who wrote it was doing the work he could do at thirty-five. He heard a story that mattered. He gave her a song.

Thirteen years is a long time. And songs that get written for one person sometimes outgrow the moment they were written for.

What I Wrote This Week

I was going through old material looking for things I could rebuild with Suno, the AI music tool I’ve been using to arrange songs I’ve written over the years. Watch Me came up in the queue. I listened to the AI’s first pass at the original lyrics, and the words felt thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like the song was reaching for something it didn’t yet have the vocabulary to say.

I cracked it open. And what came out wasn’t a polish of the original. It was a different song.

The protagonist changed. The 2013 version was her. The 2026 version is a man — working class, pre-dawn shifts, a chain around his neck made of lies he used to believe. A bridge that prays through the worst of it and finds Someone bigger walking the rest of the road with him.

The song was no longer hers. But it was hers underneath.

What Her Courage Seeded

There’s a kind of empathy that almost nobody talks about. Most writing about empathy makes it sound gentle — sitting with someone’s pain, holding space, listening well. All of that matters. But there’s another kind of empathy, and it’s the one that made me write Watch Me in the first place.

It’s not gentle. It’s a cry for justice. It’s a sound that leads the charge.

When that mentor stood at the lectern and told us what had been done to her, the empathy I felt wasn’t quiet. It was furious on her behalf. I can’t believe a man did this to her. Love doesn’t do that. The anger didn’t belong to me — I hadn’t earned the right to it the way she had — but it could be channeled. Into a song. Into something I could give her.

That was 2013. The 2026 version is what happened when that anger sat in me for thirteen years and grew up. It stopped being a gift to her — she didn’t need it anymore — and became something that could reach somebody else. Some recovering man, somewhere, who needed a sound to use. The same fury, looking for somewhere new to go.

That’s what her courage seeded in me. Not just her song. The capacity to write somebody else’s.

What Songwriters Owe

Songwriters and novelists do this all the time. We inhabit experiences we haven’t had. Phase Defiant is a man writing a woman’s story. Watch Me started as a husband writing a survivor’s voice and ended as a husband writing a recovering man’s voice. Neither of which is mine.

The danger is obvious. You can get the experience wrong. You can flatten it. You can use someone else’s pain as a costume for your own performance. Every writer who picks up a story that isn’t theirs has to wrestle with whether they have any business carrying it.

I think the answer comes down to this: if you can’t be furious on the person’s behalf, you don’t have any business writing their story. If you can’t channel the anger that the situation actually deserves, you’ll write a polite version that doesn’t honor what they lived through.

The empathy without the fury produces something that sounds like a Hallmark card. The fury without the empathy produces something exploitative. You need both. And you don’t always know which one you’re holding until afterward.

I wrote the original Watch Me because I was angry for her. I wrote the new one because that anger had matured into something that could reach further than her one voice ever could.

The 2013 version ended with you are never going to put me down again. The 2026 version ends differently. The man in the rewrite isn’t talking to anybody anymore. He’s walking. Someone bigger than the lies you told, walkin’ with me down the rest of my road.

The defiance is still there. Underneath it now is something the younger me didn’t yet know how to write.

Survival doesn’t end with proving the other person wrong. It ends with not having to prove anything to them anymore. It ends with the road becoming yours again — even when you started somebody else’s story to find your way back to it.

That’s what her speech taught me. It just took me thirteen years to write it down properly.

Watch me.