1,200 Letters

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 62 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller tells the story of the first time he met Bob Goff.

Miller and his friends had been paddling through an inlet somewhere near British Columbia when they came across a house tucked back in the water — a retreat that Bob had built for visiting world leaders. Bob saw them coming. He didn’t know who they were. He waved them in anyway.

They were wet. They smelled horrible. They had planned to stay for an hour. They stayed for almost eight.

What Miller learned during those eight hours is one of the best stories I’ve ever heard about what happens when you throw your family into a better narrative.

Bob Goff had become — I forget the official title — essentially the honorary consul for Uganda. Part of the job meant meeting with foreign diplomats, and he’d come home and told his kids he was a little nervous about it. So he asked them what they would do.

His youngest son said he’d invite them over for a sleepover. Because you get to know people better when they stay with you.

His daughter said she’d ask them what they hoped in. Which might be the best question you can ask any human being — not what do you do, not where are you from, but what do you hope in? What’s your vision for the future, and how do you hope it will happen?

Their oldest son said he’d want to record it.

And Bob, being Bob, took all three ideas and turned them into a mission. His kids wrote twelve hundred letters to world leaders around the world. The letters said, essentially: we want to know you, and we want you to know us. If you’d like to come visit, here’s a key to our home in San Diego. And if you’d rather we come to you — we will.

Twenty-nine responded. Out of twelve hundred.

And Bob kept his promise. He flew his children to every country where a leader said yes. Those kids got to hand world leaders a key to their home, ask them what they hoped in, and film the conversation. One leader actually came and stayed with them in San Diego.

What Bob realized was simple and profound: people are people, no matter where they’re from. Get past the hype, and we’re more alike than we are different.

But here’s what hit me about the story.

Bob didn’t just teach his kids about diplomacy. He gave them an inciting incident. He threw them into a story where what they thought mattered — and where what they thought led them halfway across the world to make connections they never would have made otherwise.

The children were changed by the journey. Not by reading about it. Not by watching someone else do it. By doing it themselves.

Twelve hundred letters. Twenty-nine yeses. A lifetime of stories.

I have to look at my own life right now.

Am I writing letters to dignitaries? No. But I’m standing at the edge of my own inciting incident, and it’s one I’ve been avoiding.

I am not uncomfortable with writing. I’ve been blogging for years. I have hundreds of posts out there with my opinions on everything from faith to fatherhood to data management. I am not afraid to write a book and put it online. I’m not afraid to sing a song and upload it. I’ve done these things.

When I create something and put it out into the world, it feels like giving a gift. Here it is. If it does good for you, I’d love for you to see it. I’d love for you to have it. I’d love for you to experience it the way I have.

That part doesn’t scare me.

The part that scares me is asking.

Not just “it’s here if you want it,” but “will you go look at this? Will you actually take time to consider reading what I’ve written? Will you consider buying what I’ve published? Because I think it will do good for you.”

That’s a different sentence. That’s not leaving a gift on a doorstep and walking away. That’s standing on the porch, knocking, and saying — I made this, and I believe it has value, and I’m asking you to give it your attention.

So here’s what I’m going to do.

Instead of twelve hundred letters to world leaders, I’m going to start posting to the people in my life — and the ones I haven’t met yet — and saying something I’ve never quite said before:

In case we haven’t talked in a while, this is who I am.

I may never have shown you this side of me. I may never have mentioned that I write novels, or that I’m sixty-one days into a personal transformation experiment, or that I’ve been creating daily Bible illustrations since January 1st.

But this is genuinely who I am. And I’ve done some things that I think, if you’ll go check them out, you’d really like.

Would you do that for me?

I’ll be honest. That freaks me out a little.

Not because I don’t think the work is good. I know it’s good. I’ve put too much into it to doubt that.

It’s because asking is a different kind of vulnerability than creating. Creating is between me and the work. Asking is between me and you. And “no” hits different when you’re the one who extended the invitation.

But I have a feeling — the same kind of feeling Bob Goff must have had when his kids started sealing those envelopes — that if I do this, I’ll be changed by the journey.

I’ll continue to write and create and produce things I believe are valuable. I’ll continue to want to get them in front of people who can use them. But I think something else will happen too. I’ll learn what I’m capable of. I’ll develop a confidence that can only come from stepping out and declaring to the world: this is what I want to do, and this is who I am.

Bob Goff threw his children into a story. Twelve hundred letters. Twenty-nine yeses. Changed forever.

I’m throwing myself into one. Day 62. The inciting incident isn’t the creating. It’s the asking.

Here’s my letter. I hope you open it.

Day 62 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer ✅ Gratitude ✅ Reading (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) ✅ Calories tracked ✅ Water (100 oz) ✅ BiblePictures365 (Numbers 31, 32) ✅ Exercise (Workout A with my son) ✅ Creative hour

Rest Days Count

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 61 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Short post tonight.

I took a rest day from exercise today. First one in a while. The habits still got done — Bible study, gratitude, reading, water, calories, creative hour. But the body said slow down, and for once I listened.

There’s a version of me from two months ago who would have felt guilty about that. Who would have seen a rest day as a missed day. Who would have pushed through just to keep the streak clean.

Sixty-one days in, I’m learning that rest isn’t the opposite of discipline. It’s part of it. The system holds because I protect it — and sometimes protecting it means knowing when to ease off the gas without taking my hands off the wheel.

I spent the morning planning. Organizing projects. Getting clarity on what matters most for the rest of Round 2. That work doesn’t show up in a scorecard, but it might end up being the most productive thing I’ve done in weeks.

Tomorrow I’ll be back at full speed. Tonight, rest counts.

Day 61 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Gratitude
✅ Reading (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ BiblePictures365 (Numbers 28, 29, 30)
🔄 Exercise — rest day
✅ Creative hour (planning session)

Day 60: The Four-Day Hike

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 60 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

A long time ago, when I first got interested in being a writer, I thought about the kind of characters I wanted to create. I wanted heroes. Strong ones. Ones who couldn’t be beat.

It took me years to realize that a character worth reading isn’t a perfect character. It’s not someone who can’t lose. It’s someone who has to face something real, something that might actually beat them, and find a way through it. Even Superman has family issues. Nobody gets a free pass — not even in fiction.

I think that’s why Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years hit me differently this time.

The first time I read it, my son had just been born. I was the sole breadwinner for a young family — and I want to be careful with that phrase. I don’t say sole job-haver. My wife has had one of the hardest jobs there is, being a stay-at-home mom and running our household for years. But I was in survival mode. Working everything I could to provide.

So when Miller wrote about watching too much TV, buying things he didn’t need, drifting through a comfortable life without meaning — I didn’t connect with it. I didn’t have the money to waste or the time to drift. I was running full speed just to keep up.

I didn’t understand his struggle with fatherlessness, because I have a very good dad. I didn’t understand his hang-ups with relationships, because I got married early and never struggled to want to be in one. I didn’t understand his need to sit and contemplate everything to the nth degree.

I read the book. I enjoyed the narrative. I put it down.

But now, all these years later, with a lot more life under my belt and a lot more clarity on who I am, I can empathize. I can put myself in someone else’s shoes in a way I couldn’t before, because I have so many more experiences to draw from.

I can see how you fall into routines without noticing. I can see how you live vicariously through other people’s stories instead of writing your own. I can see how you’d avoid meeting a parent you haven’t seen in thirty years. I can see how working up the courage to pursue someone could feel impossible.

The book didn’t change. I did.

And the stuff Miller says about story — about living intentionally, about doing things on purpose, about making your life mean something — I always understood that on some level. But I segmented it. I applied it to my day job and nowhere else. I’d tell myself I wanted a side hustle, wanted to write, wanted to build something. But then I’d pour all my energy into the work that paid the bills and let everything else sit in notebooks.

Two years ago, in a different city, with a different job, under very different circumstances, I don’t think I would have been ready for this book to hit me the way it’s hitting me now.

Miller tells a story about hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. He arrived in Peru a couple of days before the hike started. The town they were in sat at 11,000 feet — the same altitude as Mount Hood, a mountain he could see snow on from Portland every day. Just being there made it hard to breathe.

That detail stopped me, because I remembered standing at the top of Pike’s Peak in June of 1998. I was with a college group. My future bride and I were in a van together — on the top of the mountain in shorts. It was cold. So cold that we decided to stay in the van. On top of that, the air was so thin at the top that I fell asleep. Couldn’t hold my eyes open. I know the feeling Miller is describing.

Miller and his group started hiking, and they reached a point along a river where the guide told them it was a six-hour walk to Machu Picchu along the trade route. That’s how people used to get there. Easy. Flat. Direct.

Then the guide pointed in a different direction and said the hike they were taking would be four days. The reason? The ruler of Machu Picchu once declared that the more painful the journey, the more the travelers would appreciate their arrival.

Four days later, Miller wrote that the journey had made them different characters than they would have been otherwise. The journey changed them. Had they taken the river route — the six-hour shortcut — they would have missed the beauty, missed the meaning, missed the culture, missed the experience of doing something so physically taxing and mentally draining and still making it through to celebrate at the peak.

I feel like that’s what this journey is.

The easy way would be to do seven habits, tick the boxes, and float along the river. And honestly, that’s close to what I was doing for years — circling the same goals in different notebooks, never building the infrastructure to actually move.

But I’m noticing something as I lean into these seven habits. As I lean into questions I’ve been asking for years. As I lean into being more creative than I ever thought I could be. As I lean into my skills, and into that nudge that says keep going.

I’m transforming into a different character.

A character who expects more. A character who wants to risk more. A character who won’t find it satisfying to play it safe anymore.

I’ve had my inciting incident. And now it’s time to live a better story.

Does the book read differently because it’s good? Yes, it’s a very good book. The foundation Miller is standing on — that if we’ll willingly sit for hours watching a character overcome obstacles in a movie, it makes complete sense that living our own lives with the same kind of intentional effort would be just as meaningful — that’s a powerful argument.

But the real reason the book hits different is because I’m different. When I was younger and just trying to survive, I didn’t realize I had the capacity to start building something beyond the paycheck. I had the desire. I had the ideas. What I didn’t have was the organizational structure to execute.

That’s what sixty days of the 7-40 Challenge has given me. Not motivation. Structure. And because of that structure, I’ve been able to do more in two months and six days than I did in several years otherwise.

The book is the same $12 it was the first time I bought it. The reader is the variable.

Day 60 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer ✅ Exercise (Workout C with Trey) ✅ Walking ✅ Reading (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) ✅ Calories tracked ✅ Water (100 oz) ✅ Gratitude ✅ Creative hour

Sixty days down. Two hundred and twenty to go. The four-day hike continues.

Day 59: Point Toward the Horizon

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was reading Donald Miller today — A Million Miles in a Thousand Years — and he tells the story of a friend who runs a law firm. Not just any law firm. This firm rescues girls from human trafficking and the sex slave trade.

When Miller asked the man what his primary job was, the answer wasn’t legal strategy or fundraising or case management. The man said his job was to show up every morning and remind his lawyers what their mission was. To point them toward the horizon of saving the powerless.

That’s it. That’s the job. Point toward the horizon.

I’ve been thinking about that all day. Because I think most of us wake up and start working without ever looking up. We open the laptop. We check the list. We push the cart forward. But we never stop to ask — forward toward what?

A ship without a horizon is just a floating room.

I spent twenty years with notebooks full of goals and no horizon to aim them at. I had tools. I had ideas. I had desire. What I didn’t have was a clear picture of where all of it was supposed to go. So the tools just sat there, and the ideas piled up, and the desire burned slow and quiet and never caught fire.

December 2025, I finally pointed at something. I wrote a document. I named the habits. I set the course. And sixty days later, everything that felt like wasted time has started to look like foundation.

The horizon doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be visible. And the first step toward seeing it clearly is being willing to ask: where am I actually trying to go?

Day 59. Eyes up.

I write every day about transformation, habits, and what actually happens when you stop planning and start doing. If that resonates, join the list at subscribepage.io/5g8Hdy and I’ll send you one email per week with the best of what I’m learning.

Day 58: The Incident That Started Everything

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years this morning, and he’s deep in the process of working with filmmakers to turn his life into a movie. The writers keep having to explain something to him that he keeps resisting: a character doesn’t just decide to change because it seems like a good idea. Something has to happen to them. Something that makes staying the same more painful than changing.

They call it the inciting incident.

And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own.

May 2, 2016 is a date I won’t forget.

I’d been with the same company in Oklahoma City for nearly nine years. Every performance review I’d ever had was good. And one morning, they invited me not to come back. Times were hard. Restructuring. Shuffling. The usual language that means your number came up and it wasn’t personal, even though it always feels personal.

I’ve written about this before — Day 47, if you want to go back and read it — that specific sting of being let go when the reviews were always good. It’s a particular kind of disorienting. You did everything right. And it still happened.

But here’s what that inciting incident did: it forced my hand.

Within hours I was on the phone with a mentor. This is what happened. What do you know about? Who needs what I do? Three months later, I was living in DFW with my family in tow, in a new role that would sharpen my skills and my ambitions more than anything I’d done in Oklahoma. I would not have made that call without getting fired. I would not have left without being pushed.

God used that push.

Fast forward to June 2024. I accepted a position that would have required moving my family 8 to 10 hours away. Good opportunity. Good money. The right move on paper. I said yes.

But the closer the fall of 2025 got, the louder a voice inside me got. Not panic. Not fear exactly. More like a quiet, persistent clarity: This is not where you’re supposed to be.

I’ve learned to take that voice seriously.

In April 2025, I applied for a position back in Oklahoma City — the same city I’d left nine years earlier. By fall, instead of moving far away, I was home. Back where the story started. Different man. Same city. And a sense deep in my spirit that I had made the right call, even when it was the harder decision.

That decision was my second inciting incident. But this time I wasn’t pushed. I heard the voice and I chose.

That’s what Donald Miller is wrestling with in the book — the difference between a character who gets pushed into change and a character who eventually starts doing the pushing themselves. His point is that at first, we need the external incident. Something has to happen to us. But somewhere in the story, if we’re paying attention, we start to author our own inciting incidents.

December 2025. I sat down and wrote a document. Here is what 2026 will look like. Here is how I will execute it. Here are the habits. Here is the plan. Nobody fired me. Nobody forced me. I’d seen the pattern enough times to know: I had to force my own hand before life did it for me.

January 1, 2026. The 7-40 Challenge began.

And I’m only 58 days in, with two books written, a full publishing pipeline, and a growing sense that everything that felt like delay was actually foundation.

The inciting incident isn’t always the thing that happens to you.

Sometimes it’s the thing you finally decide to make happen.

Day 58. Still in the story.

I write every day about transformation, habits, and what actually happens when you stop planning and start doing. If that resonates, join the list at subscribepage.io/5g8Hdy and I’ll send you one email per week with the best of what I’m learning.