Tag: Blog

Get Them Out

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 32

I went for a walk this afternoon with a small headache and vague tension in my chest — the kind that comes from knowing you have something to get out but not being able to see it clearly yet. By the time I got done, I had a complete framework for the communication course I’ve been circling for months. Ten principles. A product structure. A content engine. None of it existed in any organized form before I started walking.

The ideas were already in my head. They just needed out.

That’s the part most people skip. They sit with ideas swirling, waiting for the moment when it all clicks into place internally before they start. But it doesn’t click inside. It clicks when you get it outside — onto a page, into a voice recording, onto a whiteboard, into a conversation. The act of externalizing is what organizes the thinking, not the other way around.

I’ve written a blog post every day this year. The best ones didn’t come from sitting down with a clear idea. They came from starting with a half-formed thought and watching it take shape as the words came out. The writing did the thinking for me.

I left on the walk this afternoon with tension. I came back with details fleshed out. The only difference was getting it out of my head and into the air.

The Short Letter

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 30

There’s a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

Most people read that as a joke about editing. It’s not. It’s one of the truest things ever said about how real clarity works.

The simple version of anything is never where you start. You start with the mess — every idea you have, every angle you can think of, every framework and connection and tangent your brain wants to chase. That’s the long letter. It’s necessary. You have to write it.

But the long letter is not the product. The long letter is the process.

The product is what’s left after you cut everything that doesn’t make Monday morning better for the person holding it. That takes longer than the mess did. It takes focus, honesty, and the willingness to throw away things you’re proud of because they don’t serve the person you’re building for.

I’ve watched this play out in my own work this year. I cut nearly half my first novel in editing — not because the writing was bad, but because I was explaining things the story had already shown. Yesterday I wrote a closing line I loved — a declaration about what I was going to do next. The editorial pass cut it because the essay had already made the point. The line served me. It didn’t serve the reader.

I’ve been developing an AI education product for weeks. It kept growing — more frameworks, more depth, more layers. Then I asked myself what the simplest useful version looked like. The answer fit in one sentence. That is where I am headed.

Simplicity isn’t where you start. It’s where you arrive after doing the hard work of going through everything else first. The short letter takes longer than the long one. But it’s the only one worth sending.

Undiscovered Territory

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 29

I’ve been calling promoting my creative work a foreign country. A place I don’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, don’t belong. I’ve been treating it like something that requires a translator or a guide just to survive.

That’s the wrong metaphor. And the wrong metaphor was keeping me stuck.

A foreign country means I don’t belong there. The terrain is hostile, the language is incomprehensible, and I need someone else to navigate for me. That framing makes me a tourist — passive, dependent, out of my depth.

Undiscovered territory means the map hasn’t been drawn yet. I have skills that transfer. I’ve navigated unmapped ground before. The terrain isn’t hostile — it’s just unfamiliar. And the only way to map it is to walk it.

Lewis and Clark had a mission before they had a map. They knew the destination — the Pacific. They didn’t know the terrain between here and there. They walked it anyway, and the map got drawn behind them.

I know my Pacific. It’s not a revenue number. It’s freedom. It’s influence. It’s the ability to create things that matter to people, that uplift and inspire them, and also provide me the means to accomplish the goals that I have.

Everything between here and there is not a foreign country — it’s just unmapped territory. And no one else is going to map it for me, because no one else has my combination of skills, products, and goals.

The good news is I believe I’m right where God has me, and that I’m walking with Him through this uncharted territory. It’s exciting. It’s scary. But it’s time to find that Pacific shore.

Data Is Communication

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26

I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone’s trying to figure out right now.

I work in data management. I’ve spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into language the other side understands. Business people don’t think in tables and queries. Technical people don’t think in revenue targets and customer experience. Somebody has to build the bridge. That’s been my job.

Today I realized that’s exactly what people need to learn to do with AI.

I learned this firsthand when I asked AI to edit my novel. I said “edit this” and got hallucinated rewrites. I said “read this, tell me what’s wrong, don’t touch anything” and got a sharp, tireless reader. Same tool. Same book. The only difference was how clearly I defined what I needed.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a communication problem. And it’s the same communication problem I solve at my day job every single day.

The people getting great results aren’t smarter. They’re clearer. They define the problem before they ask for a solution. They tell the AI what they know, what they don’t know, and what good looks like. They argue when the output doesn’t match their intent.

They’re doing data architecture for their own thinking — organizing what they know so someone else can work with it. They just don’t know that’s what it’s called.

For twenty years I’ve been building the bridge between people who have information and people who need to use it. The tools on both sides changed today — one side is a person, the other side is a machine. But the problem is identical: get the meaning across, not just the words.

Data is communication. It always was. AI just made it urgent for everyone to learn how to say what they mean.

The Joining Tables Moment

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 25

My freshman year of college, I convinced myself I couldn’t handle music theory. I had the brain for it. I just didn’t believe I did. So I enrolled in fundamentals instead — the kiddie pool — while my entire cohort moved ahead into the real coursework.

I never caught up. That one decision put me out of step with the people I was supposed to be learning alongside, and I eventually changed majors. Not because I lacked the ability. Because I chose the safe version and paid for it with a path I never fully chose to walk.

Years later, I was working a data job and feeling my way into being an analyst. I’d pull data out of our system, export it to Excel, and got crazy good at making spreadsheets do what I needed. I didn’t know there was a structured query language that could do everything I was doing — faster, better, and repeatable.

I was really good at Excel. And I was really scared of SQL.

Then one day, someone showed me how to join tables. How to connect two data sets with a single statement and pull exactly what I needed. A light went off. I looked at it and thought: get out of my way.

Not only did I understand what I was looking at — it supercharged my thinking about it. Everything I’d been doing by hand, I could now write in scripts that ran themselves. I went from scared to unstoppable in one afternoon. And I never went back.

Same person. Same pattern. Two different choices, two completely different outcomes.

Right now I’m standing at the edge of another piece of unmapped terrain — getting the things I’ve built in front of people. Promotion. Marketing. Asking strangers to care about what I’ve made. I haven’t walked it yet, and the absence of a map feels like proof that I can’t do it.

But that’s what SQL felt like too. And I know what it cost me the time I chose the kiddie pool instead.

Somewhere in the first few steps, there’s a join tables moment waiting. I just have to start walking to find it.