When I found Toastmasters I fell in love with it immediately. Not with speaking — with the machinery of speaking. Structure, delivery, the evaluation loop, the whole beautiful system of it.
There was one problem, and it took me years to see it.
I didn’t have anything to say.
So I did the natural thing. I talked about speaking. I gave speeches about how to give speeches. I helped other people get better at the thing I was getting better at, which is genuinely useful work and I’d do it again — but somewhere in there the vehicle quietly became the destination. I had picked up a tool for carrying a message and then spent years admiring the tool.
Same thing happened with Dan Miller.
I read 48 Days to the Work You Love, then No More Mondays, and they lit me up. Here was a framework for building something of my own. I wanted that badly.
I didn’t know how to apply it. So instead of starting the business, I wanted to talk about starting the business. I could explain his framework to you cleanly. I could not point at a thing I had built with it.
That’s twice now. There’s probably a third I haven’t caught.
The pattern goes like this: I get excited about something because I want to learn it, and instead of running my own material through it, I make the learning itself the whole enterprise. It feels like progress. It produces content. It even helps people. And it lets me stay one comfortable step back from the thing I actually have to say.
Which brings me to the obvious risk sitting in front of me right now.
I use AI something like eight hours a day. I have conversations with people who are still deciding whether it belongs in their business at all, and I’m not an early adopter by any stretch, but I’m clearly further down the road than most of the room I’m standing in. That gap is real and it won’t stay open long.
And the easiest possible move from here is: I learned AI, let me teach you AI.
That’s the trap. That’s Toastmasters again with new vocabulary.
Because AI isn’t my strength. I’ll say that plainly. My strength isn’t knowing how large language models work under the hood, and it isn’t prompting — I’m good at it, but so are a lot of people, and it’s getting easier by the month. My strength is taking something difficult to understand and making a person feel like they understand it. That’s what twenty years of technical work built, and it’s what Toastmasters sharpened, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever been consistently better at than the people around me.
So the message isn’t AI.
The message is communication. It always was — I just spent years talking about the delivery mechanism instead. AI is what makes the message urgent, because we’ve handed a huge portion of human communication to a machine and almost nobody was taught how to talk to it, and the ones who don’t learn are going to lose ground fast.
The tool is the reason people will listen. It isn’t the thing I’m saying.
I’ve caught this in myself twice. Both times, years late.
The tell is the same in every case: when I can teach the framework more fluently than I can show you what I made with it, I’ve swapped the vehicle for the road.
David Willis 