Category: Blog

The Skill That Felt Like Thinking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

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.

Where I Wanna Be

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

At the end of a stressful day, I wanna be right here at home with my family.

When I’m not doing anything else — when the laptop is closed and the phone is down and there’s nothing left on the list — I wanna be right here at home with my family.

When I’m tired. When the tank is empty and I’ve given everything I’ve got to the day. I wanna be right here at home with my family.

When I’m sad. When things didn’t go the way I wanted. When the world feels heavier than it should. I wanna be right here at home with my family.

Not somewhere else. Not chasing something better. Right here.

They are the whole point of everything I do. I am extremely grateful.

Not All About Me (Fourteen Years Later)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

In 2012, I wrote a blog post called “It Is Not All About Me.” I was writing about collaborative leadership — about casting a vision and then letting other people help shape it instead of dictating every step.

It was a good post. It was also about half of the lesson.

The 2012 version of me had figured out that you can’t lead by telling everyone what to do. That’s real, and it took some humility to get there. But what I didn’t understand yet — what took another decade of leading teams, starting new roles, and watching how people actually respond to vision — is this:

Most people don’t want co-ownership. They want a playbook.

They want to feel heard. They want to know that someone is paying attention to their input. But at the end of the day, most people want to be shown what to do. They want clarity. They want direction. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The leadership lesson isn’t “invite everyone to the table.” It’s knowing the difference between the people who want to build with you and the people who want the rule book. There’s a place for both. But the builders — the ones who want to collaborate, who push back, who make your idea better or replace it entirely — those are the ones who end up influencing everyone else.

Find them. Build them. Trust them.

I started a new job in the middle of last year. I am very accustomed to leading meetings. I’ve done it for years — setting agendas, driving conversations, pulling people toward decisions. Almost from day one, I had to start actively reminding myself to observe. Pick up the lay of the land. Learn the room before trying to lead it.

It was very hard to do.

The pull to assert yourself in a new environment is strong. You want to prove you belong. You want people to see what you bring. But I took the other path. I chose to serve first and earn credibility before spending it. It’s the right way to enter someone else’s house.

The other thing I understand now that I didn’t in 2012 is what it costs to let your idea go.

Not every solution I bring to the table is the right one. Sometimes I have exactly what we need. Sometimes I’m just the spark that gets the conversation rolling. Either way, we moved toward the goal of being better than we were. That’s the part that matters. Not who got credit. Not whose version survived.

I’ve been wrong enough times to know that being right isn’t the point. Getting somewhere better is.

Fourteen years ago, I learned not to dictate. Somewhere in the years since, I learned something harder: finding the right path matters more than it being the path you started on.

I’m sharper than I was. I hope I’m sharper in another fourteen.

Why Rest Is Hard (And Why It Has to Happen Anyway)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week, Day 3

Yesterday I had plans. I was going to grab a cup of coffee, sit in the shop for a while, and think. Instead, I fell asleep for an hour and a half.

When I woke up, I was frustrated. I’d lost time. The thinking I wanted to do didn’t happen. The coffee didn’t happen. The afternoon was already sliding sideways.

But here’s the thing I had to sit with: any thinking I would have done would have been undercut by the fact that I still needed more sleep. My body made the call my brain wouldn’t.

I called Round 3 three days early. Not because I failed — I delivered everything on my lock list — but because I was running on fumes and I knew it. I could feel it in my writing. I can look back at certain posts from the last two weeks and tell you exactly which ones were written when I was sharp and which ones were written when I was just trying to get something across the finish line.

That’s not the standard I want.

Here’s what makes rest hard for me. It’s not that I think rest is weakness. I don’t. But inaction has a cost. Things don’t get done. Momentum stalls. And old habits — the ones I’ve spent 137 days replacing — don’t need much of an invitation to creep back in.

Rest feels like opening the door to backsliding.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in a corporate world where there’s always another thing to do, always another deliverable, always a reason to keep pushing. You get a limited number of weeks off, and you learn to treat downtime as something you earn in small doses, not something you build into the structure.

So even when I build flexibility into my own system — and I did, from Day 1 — using it still feels like I’m getting away with something.

But here’s what I know now that I didn’t fully feel five months ago: the most productive year of my life is going to require the most discipline about rest.

Not discipline about pushing harder. Discipline about stopping.

If I want to reach the people I’m trying to reach, if I want the writing to be sharp and the ideas to land, I can’t be the guy grinding out a blog post at 11 PM with nothing left in the tank. That’s not documentation. That’s just stubbornness.

So Round 4 is going to look different. Not in what I do — the seven habits aren’t changing — but in when I do them.

Bible study and BiblePictures365 go first thing in the morning. Walking happens before lunch, every day. Reading rides with the walk. Gratitude goes early, because starting the day grateful changes the shape of everything after it.

That leaves the afternoon and evening for creative work — writing, music, strategy — in shorter, cleaner windows. I’ll still be in the gym with Trey three nights a week from nine to ten. And after that, I’m done. No heavy thinking after the gym. No trying to squeeze one more thing out of a brain that’s already checked out for the night.

The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to stop pretending I can do everything at any hour and have it all come out at the same level.

I built this system to fight backsliding. Every habit, every streak, every daily post — all of it exists because I know what happens when I stop paying attention.

Now I have to trust that system enough to step back from it. That might be the hardest habit of all.

Forward

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the planning week between rounds of my year-long challenge. I called Round 3 early. I’m supposed to be resting.

I wrote a song today anyway.

Some creative work feels like work. This one didn’t. It came out of me the way songs used to come out when I was younger and thought I had something to prove. The form is exactly the kind of motivational rock anthem I told someone earlier this week is my favorite kind of music — the kind that turns struggle into propulsion.

I think the song wrote itself because the truth underneath it is what I needed to hear today.

Not push harder. Not do more.

Just forward.

One direction, no specific pace. Forward through the rest week. Forward into Round 4. Forward through the parts of the year that haven’t gone the way I planned. Forward through the work that’s still ahead.

Here’s the lyric.

FORWARD

Words by David Willis. Music arranged with Suno.

When I found my voice, I gave it everything I had
Stepped on that stage, killed the set, they still said nah, not enough, kid
Rolled home with that sting in my chest, eyes wide, no sleep for a week straight
Then the voice in my head hit replay: you’ll never be enough, just quit, it’s too late

Been down here before, I know this floor
But something’s rising and I want it more

Forward — didn’t come this far to fall
Forward — bring it on, I’ll take it all
Forward — every scar on my chest
Forward — it’s just proof that I haven’t quit
Keep moving forward

They called me up, said sorry man, we gotta let you go
Held my head high, swallowed the pride, didn’t let the frustration show
Then the phone rang with a call I never saw coming through
Sometimes what we pray for is waiting on the other side of the wreck we just went through

Been down here before, I know this floor
But something’s rising and I want it more

Forward — didn’t come this far to fall
Forward — bring it on, I’ll take it all
Forward — every scar on my chest
Forward — it’s just proof that I haven’t quit
Keep moving forward

Too many voices screaming, too many hands dragging me down
The noise gets crushing, violent, I can barely stay above the sound
But I see their faces breaking through the storm — I know why I’m here
I’m fighting like mad for them, and I’m not done, not while I’m still here

Forward — didn’t come this far to fall
Forward — bring it on, we’ll take it all
Forward — every scar on our chest
Forward — it’s just proof that we haven’t quit
Keep moving forward

Forward… (forward…)
Forward… (one more time…)
Keep moving forward…

The pronoun shift in the last chorus isn’t a typo. My chest turned into our chest somewhere in the bridge, when I saw the people I’m doing all of this for. That shift is most of the reason the song exists.

Forward. One more time.