I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years this morning, and he’s deep in the process of working with filmmakers to turn his life into a movie. The writers keep having to explain something to him that he keeps resisting: a character doesn’t just decide to change because it seems like a good idea. Something has to happen to them. Something that makes staying the same more painful than changing.
They call it the inciting incident.
And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own.
May 2, 2016 is a date I won’t forget.
I’d been with the same company in Oklahoma City for nearly nine years. Every performance review I’d ever had was good. And one morning, they invited me not to come back. Times were hard. Restructuring. Shuffling. The usual language that means your number came up and it wasn’t personal, even though it always feels personal.
I’ve written about this before — Day 47, if you want to go back and read it — that specific sting of being let go when the reviews were always good. It’s a particular kind of disorienting. You did everything right. And it still happened.
But here’s what that inciting incident did: it forced my hand.
Within hours I was on the phone with a mentor. This is what happened. What do you know about? Who needs what I do? Three months later, I was living in DFW with my family in tow, in a new role that would sharpen my skills and my ambitions more than anything I’d done in Oklahoma. I would not have made that call without getting fired. I would not have left without being pushed.
God used that push.
Fast forward to June 2024. I accepted a position that would have required moving my family 8 to 10 hours away. Good opportunity. Good money. The right move on paper. I said yes.
But the closer the fall of 2025 got, the louder a voice inside me got. Not panic. Not fear exactly. More like a quiet, persistent clarity: This is not where you’re supposed to be.
I’ve learned to take that voice seriously.
In April 2025, I applied for a position back in Oklahoma City — the same city I’d left nine years earlier. By fall, instead of moving far away, I was home. Back where the story started. Different man. Same city. And a sense deep in my spirit that I had made the right call, even when it was the harder decision.
That decision was my second inciting incident. But this time I wasn’t pushed. I heard the voice and I chose.
That’s what Donald Miller is wrestling with in the book — the difference between a character who gets pushed into change and a character who eventually starts doing the pushing themselves. His point is that at first, we need the external incident. Something has to happen to us. But somewhere in the story, if we’re paying attention, we start to author our own inciting incidents.
December 2025. I sat down and wrote a document. Here is what 2026 will look like. Here is how I will execute it. Here are the habits. Here is the plan. Nobody fired me. Nobody forced me. I’d seen the pattern enough times to know: I had to force my own hand before life did it for me.
January 1, 2026. The 7-40 Challenge began.
And I’m only 58 days in, with two books written, a full publishing pipeline, and a growing sense that everything that felt like delay was actually foundation.
The inciting incident isn’t always the thing that happens to you.
Sometimes it’s the thing you finally decide to make happen.
Day 58. Still in the story.
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The 740 Challenge 