7-40 Challenge | Planning Week
Chris Guillebeau wrote something today that stopped me mid-scroll. He said the skill that built his career was something he hadn’t labeled for a decade. It came so easily he didn’t count it as a skill. It felt like thinking.
I know that feeling.
Years ago, I’d come home from work frustrated. I had explained something to a room full of people — a workflow, a process, why certain data points mattered — and nobody got it. They didn’t see the connections. They didn’t understand why it was important.
Then I’d explain the same thing to my wife over dinner. She wasn’t in data. She was a stay-at-home mom. And she’d say, “Well, that makes sense, because this connects to this connects to this.”
She got it. Why didn’t they?
It took me years to realize the answer: the knowledge wasn’t the skill. The translation was.
I’ve worked in data for almost twenty years. A few years in, I started noticing I could see how workflows fit together — what connected to what, where things broke down, what was missing. I could look at a process and tell you not just what was wrong, but whether the problem was something that was there and shouldn’t be, or something that wasn’t there and should be.
And I could explain it two ways. I could talk about it in plain terms — this disconnects from this, this connects to this. Or I could go technical — this is why we do this part first, this is why we do this part second. The ability to move between those two languages is what made the difference. Not one or the other. Both.
I didn’t have a name for that for a long time. I just thought I was doing my job.
Here’s the part Guillebeau nailed: the things you’re best at often feel like nothing, because you’re not aware of doing them.
For a long time, I thought I was going to be a performer — singing, competitive speaking, the kind of work where people see you. What I actually became was the man in the chair. The one who helps everybody else do what they’re supposed to do. I don’t need the spotlight. I need the work to make sense to the people doing it.
My wife was the first person to name it. “You’re a communicator,” she told me. “This is what you do.”
I may not have felt that way at first. I do now.
I want complex things to be accessible. I want to break down how things work so that people can do for themselves what they couldn’t do before.
I spent five years doing it before I noticed, and another five before I took it seriously. Now, it is what I do.
David Willis 