Day 73 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge
A few years ago, my wife and I decided to go see a movie at the theater. We hadn’t heard anything about it. Didn’t read a review. Didn’t watch a trailer. Just picked one and sat down.
It was horrible. We walked out in the middle of it. I wanted to poke my eyes out.
That’s what happens when you consume something without context. You don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know why you’re there, and you have no framework for deciding whether it’s worth your time. You’re just sitting in the dark hoping something good happens.
I don’t pick up books that way anymore. I need to know what I’m diving into — what it’s about, why I’m reading it, and what potential benefit it has for me before I start. At work, when I sit down with a dataset, the first thing I do is figure out what I’m looking at. What system did this come from? What business purpose does it serve? What am I trying to answer? Even if the point is just discovery — just trying to understand what I have — that’s still a point. There’s still a reason I’m sitting down.
Context comes first. Learning comes second. And when you flip that order, you waste time, money, and energy consuming things that never stick.
I read Atomic Habits years ago. Good book. I could recite the habit loop: cue, craving, response, reward. The concepts stuck with me, at least on the surface.
But here’s what’s different now. Seventy-two days into the 7-40 Challenge, with a daily data management career running alongside a personal transformation experiment, I can see that habit loop everywhere — and not just in habits. I see it in bad data flowing into systems. In process failures that repeat because nobody defined the steps well enough. In shortcuts people take because the workflow was never designed properly.
Those associations didn’t exist for me before. Not because the book was lacking, but because I was. I didn’t have the professional and personal context to hang the framework on. The book was the same. I was the variable.
Todd Henry put it simply today: we learn best in the context of what we already know. Building context is key.
I’ve watched this play out in corporate settings for eighteen years. Companies train people on new systems and tools without ever explaining why the system exists or what business problem it was built to solve. Six months later, some of those people are using the tool well — the curious ones, the ones who started asking questions on their own. And the rest? They’re clicking buttons. Doing exactly what they were told and nothing more. No enthusiasm. No skin in the game. No growth.
The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s context. The ones who thrive went looking for the why behind the tool. The ones who stagnated never had it and never sought it out.
A data architect looks at a table and sees the system it came from, the business purpose, the relationships to other data. A regular user sees rows and columns. What the regular user misses — because they don’t have the context — is whether they’re even looking at the right data. Is this the source of origin or a reporting copy? Can you trace the lineage? Is it reliable? I’ve heard people call Excel a database. It mimics one, but it has none of the governance, procedure, or protocol that needs to sit on top of real data.
Without context, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you make decisions based on that ignorance.
A kid in college takes a class on personal finance. They learn the principles: spend less than you earn, pay off debt, invest early. Five years later, they’re drowning in credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck.
The principles were sound. The education was delivered. But nobody connected the spreadsheet to the Saturday night. Nobody showed them what “spend less than you earn” looks like when your friends are all going out and you’re twenty-two and the credit card company just handed you a $5,000 limit. The knowledge was there. The context for applying it to their actual life wasn’t.
This is the same thing happening across every “how-to” space right now. The AI crowd skips to the prompts. The self-help crowd skips to the habits. The fitness crowd skips to the workout plan. All three are chasing the shortcut past the same hard work: Who are you? What do you value? What do you want?
That’s not a warmup exercise. That’s the foundation everything else is built on. Lifting weights is great — but understanding what you want your body to do is even better. Prompts are useful — but you have to know what you want before the tool can help you get it.
So how do you build context for someone who doesn’t have any? Someone with no data background, no self-help reading, no system for their life?
You start with one question: Are you happy?
Are you living the life you want to live? Yes or no. If it’s no — what are the things you’re unhappy about? You start picking out the points of dissatisfaction and look for the common theme. Is it because you don’t have the habits? Is it envy? Is it a lack of direction? What’s the reason behind the frustration?
Find the common theme. Work through the pain points. Build context from the inside out — starting with who they are, not what they should learn.
My son is seventeen. He’s watching me transform in real time. And one of the things I’ve learned as a parent is that you’re constantly building context into your kid’s life so they can understand why you bring them the things you do. You’re trying to help them see the world with more wisdom, but you’ve got to find the balance between letting them explore and just doing it for them.
They don’t learn anything if you do it all for them. But it takes forever if you just let them figure everything out alone.
Here’s what I love about my boy: he asks why. And once you satisfy the why, he’s generally pretty good at coming along. That’s the whole argument for context-before-learning in one kid.
I’ve been in church my whole adult life. I’ve heard sermons from the same passages dozens of times. But the clearest example I have of context changing everything about how you receive information comes from a story I’ve known since I was a teenager — one that only broke me open this year.
These people saw the Red Sea part. They saw the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day. They saw Mount Sinai. The Spirit of God lived in the camp with them. And yet — when God said they could go into the promised land, they said no. A trip that should have taken eleven days took forty years. And everyone who said no didn’t get to go.
I’d like to believe I would have had the faith to go. But truth be told, I’m no better than them. There have been opportunities in my life where I knew God was opening a door, and I still said no.
It means more to me now because I’m actively trying to pursue what I think God wants from my life. I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore. When I see something I need to do, I want to go do it — because I don’t want to be standing right on the edge of the promised land and not get to go in because I was a bonehead.
My life context finally caught up to a passage I’ve heard since I was a teenager. Same words. Different reader. That’s what context does.
If context comes before learning, then most education systems have it backwards. They deliver the learning first and hope the context catches up later. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.
If I could design it from scratch, I’d start with aptitude and self-knowledge. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up” — but what do you enjoy? What are you good at? What do you find yourself doing when nobody’s making you do anything?
I never knew at eighteen that I’d be an IT professional who loved data. It made no sense to me. I didn’t find data management until I was twenty-eight — eleven years after I graduated high school. I had to learn about myself first. I had to understand what made me me. And when I finally had the context of who I was and figured out where education could help me become more of who I was — that’s where I landed. And that’s when I really started to take off.
Context comes before learning. Always has. The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to learn — it’s whether you’ve done the quieter work of knowing yourself well enough for the learning to land. I spent twenty years skipping that step. The last seventy-two days have been what happens when you stop.
Day 73 Scorecard:
✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking and Lifitng
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ BiblePictures365 (Deuteronomy 21-23)
✅ Creative hour
David Willis 