7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 2
I just finished Josh Kaufman’s How to Fight a Hydra. It’s a short fable about facing an ambitious, terrifying challenge — the kind where you cut off one head and two more grow in its place. The hero enters the arena not knowing if he’ll survive, gets staggered, recovers, and keeps swinging.
I recognized the arena. I’ve been in it for 138 days.
But here’s where my story breaks from Kaufman’s metaphor. His hydra is made of problems. Fear, uncertainty, risk — heads that are trying to kill you.
My hydra is made of good things.
Two novels. A daily blog. A Bible illustration project. Music. A nonfiction book outline. A teaching series. A certification to study for. A distribution strategy to build. A platform to grow. Every single one of them is something I care about. Every single one of them deserves my time.
And every time I finish something, two more ideas grow in its place.
That’s the version of the hydra nobody warns you about — the one where you can’t cut a head because none of them are the enemy. The problem isn’t that the work is hard. The problem is that there’s more good work than there are hours, and it feels wrong to set any of it down.
But the hero in Kaufman’s fable doesn’t fight all the heads at once. He’d die. He picks one, fights it, recovers, picks the next.
That’s not elimination. It’s sequencing. And sequencing requires a harder kind of discipline than grinding — it requires you to look at something you care about and say, “not yet.”
For Round 4, I’ve locked two heads. Get ready to sit my CDMP exam at the end of June. Get Phase Defiant in front of more people. Everything else — the other novels, the teaching series, the nonfiction — stays alive, but it waits.
The hydra isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I. But I can only swing at one or two heads at a time and expect to survive.
David Willis 