7-40 Challenge | Planning Week
It’s 80 degrees. I’m in jeans and a black shirt, walking downtown in full sunlight with a balding head, talking into my phone passing a bus stop at 12:45 in the afternoon. I’ve got about 14 things on my to-do list and I’m trying to unload my brain before it gets any fuller.
I’m equal parts grateful and overwhelmed, and I can’t figure out how both of those things are true at the same time.
I’ve been feeling behind. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart way. More like a low hum in the background — the sense that I should be further along, that I haven’t done enough, that time is slipping and I’m not keeping up.
So I started talking. Just listing things. What have I actually done this year?
I wrote a novel. Edited it from 105,000 words down to 60,000. Published it through Kindle Direct in March. Five months from manuscript to published book.
While I was editing that one, I wrote another one. 45,000 words. It’s in revision right now.
I’ve blogged every single day this year. Over 130 posts.
I’ve read 13 books and I’m working on my 14th.
I’ve written new songs and produced a companion album for my first novel.
I started a Bible illustration project on January 1 with zero followers. Instagram is at 6,300. One video hit 300,000 views.
I’ve maintained seven daily habits across three 40-day rounds. I’ve walked so much I’m on my third pair of shoes. I’ve lost over 23 pounds and gained 10 pounds of lean muscle. My metabolic age dropped 20 years.
I’ve worked with my wife to put together her garden, and she likes it. I’ve been in the gym with my son three nights a week. And I’ve done all of this while working a full-time job.
Somewhere around minute fifteen of this walk, I heard myself say it out loud: I think I’ve been seriously deluding myself that I haven’t been doing enough.
That stopped me.
Because the problem was never output. The problem was that I was so deep inside the work that I couldn’t see the shape of it. I was measuring myself against what I hadn’t done yet instead of what I’d already built.
Twenty minutes of talking into my phone at a bus stop fixed that.
So now the question changes. It’s not “am I doing enough?” I am. It’s “how do I get what I’ve built in front of the people who need to see it?”
That’s a different problem. A better one. But it’s still a problem. I don’t have the answer yet. I’m one person producing more than I can promote, and the gap between what I’ve made and who’s seen it is real. The overwhelm doesn’t go away just because I’ve named it — it just shifts from “I’m not doing enough” to “I don’t know what comes next.”
But I know where to start. And I know I’m not doing it alone.
Thank you, God. I am so grateful.
David Willis 