Day 79 | The 7-40 Challenge
I’m about to open a piece about not playing covers with a cover. I know. Stay with me.
Todd Henry makes a distinction between cover bands and original artists. A cover band can be really good — fill a room, play the songs people love, make decent money on a Friday night. But there’s always another cover band coming that plays those songs a little better. The ceiling is built in, because you’re performing someone else’s work. An original artist risks silence. Nobody claps when they don’t recognize the song. But the work is yours.
When we’re kids, we copy. That’s how we learn. We mimic behaviors, repeat patterns, try on other people’s styles. That’s development. But at some point, you’re supposed to stop covering and start writing your own songs. And I wonder how many of us are stuck at the toddler stage — still mimicking, not because we lack talent, but because originals are terrifying and covers are safe.
I spent twenty years covering. I read Donald Miller and started telling people about “living a good story.” I read Seth Godin and started talking about tribes and linchpins. I gave speeches using their ideas as scaffolding. I filled notebooks with goals that sounded like remixed versions of books I’d read. I was a really good cover band. But I was still playing other people’s songs.
The shift happened slowly, then caught me off guard. Somewhere after the second round of cancer, after years of sitting with ideas long enough to pressure-test them against my own life, I stopped quoting and started originating. Not because Miller and Godin stopped mattering — but because I’d finally lived enough to have something of my own to say.
I used to say “tell a good story with your life” because Donald Miller said it and it sounded right. Now I say “tell the stories of your life so they can help people” — because that’s what I actually believe, and it came from seventy-nine days of doing it in public, not from a book I read in 2008.
Right now, all I’m playing is originals. My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Nobody is cheering loudly. I am an original artist playing to a small room, and I am staying on stage — not because the crowd is big, but because the music is mine.
And here’s the part I didn’t plan.
I sang in an eighth-grade show choir because I was copying what seemed fun. I joined high school choir because I was mimicking kids who seemed like they belonged. I earned a music scholarship because I practiced something I’d started by imitation. And that scholarship put me in the exact place where I met the woman I’ve been married to for twenty-seven years.
Following something genuinely mine — not someone else’s career path, not someone else’s definition of success, just a voice I was learning to use — led me to the most important person in my life. I couldn’t have planned that. Originals take you places covers never could. You just can’t see the destination from the stage.
Day 79 of 280. One day left in Round 2.
David Willis 