Tag: achieving

Her Chopsaw

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a Canadian comedy show in the nineties called Red Green that my wife and I used to watch together, and one of its running lines was that “if she can’t find you handsome, she might as well find you handy”.

I was not handy. Not even slightly.

She was. Around 2001 or 2002, a couple of years into our marriage, she had a chopsaw and she knew how to use it. I’m fairly sure the first thing I helped with was shelves.

I was hesitant, and I want to be accurate about why, because the obvious answer is wrong.

It wasn’t the tool. I wasn’t nervous about a spinning blade. What I didn’t want to do was get the measurements wrong and make the thing badly — turn good lumber into firewood while somebody watched.

What I did not understand at twenty-three is that you have to make a fair amount of it wrong before you get to making it right. That isn’t a stage you skip by being careful. It’s the price of admission, and everybody pays it, including the people who look like they never did.

She learned from her dad, who is one of the best carpenters I’ve ever been around. Genuinely gifted with his hands. I’ve since learned plenty from watching him too — but she’s the one who put a saw in front of me first.

Twenty-some years on, I build most of what needs building around here.

A seating bench in our dining room. Cabinets. An oak cover for the vent hood over the stove, which I’m still pleased about. A long list of smaller things nobody notices unless they’re gone.

It keeps getting easier. Not because the work gets simpler — because I’ve stopped being surprised that I can do it.

I do have a hard line. I don’t touch plumbing or electrical inside the walls. Anything outside the walls is fair game and I’ll take a run at it. That’s not fear, it’s just knowing where my competence ends and where a licensed man’s begins.

Here’s the part I noticed only recently.

I can’t name one thing I’ve taught her back.

What happened instead is that I got good enough that she hands it to me. She doesn’t run the saw anymore. She tells me what she wants built and I go build it, and that arrangement suits both of us fine.

She trained her replacement. On purpose, as far as I can tell, and without ever mentioning it.

The thing I say most often about all of this is that it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

I say it about projects at work. I say it about writing. I said it about a chopsaw in 2002.

I have a chronic habit of building things up in my head to be considerably harder than they turn out to be, and I’ve never fully broken it. The difference is that since about 2002 I’ve had proof that I do it, handed to me by a woman with a saw and a pile of shelf lumber.

Fifty Pounds

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I’m twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me.

Two weeks before that picture I’d had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor’s instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds.

I don’t remember deciding to pick it up. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no moment of defiance. I reached over and lifted the heavy thing, because that is what I did, because that is what I was.

I watched Trouble with the Curve the other night for the first time.

Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout who is going blind and telling nobody. His whole life runs on his eyes — he evaluates players by watching them and by the sound of a ball coming off a bat — and the the most important tool the whole thing depends on is failing, and his response is to keep driving at night and say nothing.

The title refers to a hitter in the film who can’t handle a curveball. If you don’t follow baseball, the problem with a curve is almost always that the hitter commits too early. He’s looking for the fastball. His hands start moving before the ball has finished doing what it’s going to do, so he swings at the place he expected it to be rather than where it went.

The old man’s version of that isn’t baseball. He lost his wife when his daughter was six, and he responded by gripping the one thing he still knew how to do, which was the work. He swung at the pitch he’d already committed to years earlier, and his daughter grew up on the other side of that swing.

I had committed to a pitch too, and I’d done it long before 2004.

I was the strong one. In my house the man who lifts heavy things. I had never once in my life been the one being carried and I had no framework for it, no plan for it, and no intention of finding out.

So when they told me I had cancer, my whole approach was that I’d muscle through it. Same as everything else. That is not a strategy — it’s a reflex — and it worked right up until March, when the chemo treatment started and took the strength first.

I couldn’t eat. I started to lose weight. The one attribute I’d built an identity on was the exact thing that went, and it went early.

My wife took care of me.

I want to be careful with that phrase because people use it loosely. What I mean is that she waited on me hand and foot for months, and I am sure I was not an easy patient. I’m no good at being sick. I had a very fixed idea of what I was for in that house and none of it involved my young bride giving me my medicine.

She’s told me since that it was very hard on her, and I believe her. She was trying everything she knew to comfort me and most of it didn’t land, and I’ve spent years since wondering how much of that was the illness and how much of it was me not letting it work.

But here’s the thing she never said out loud and demonstrated for months.

She was more than equal to it. She carried the whole house and she carried me, and she did it in such a way that a man who wasn’t supposed to lift ten pounds never once felt like less of a man in his own home.

I didn’t understand at twenty-six what an achievement that was. I began to understand it more at forty.

The hit wasn’t the day my strength came back. It did come back, eventually, and I’ve got more of it now at forty-eight than I had then.

The hit was being carried, and letting it count.

I picked up a fifty-pound bag two weeks after surgery and I took it, because I could not yet imagine a version of myself who put it down. It took a woman I love four months and considerably more strength than I had to teach me otherwise.

Estimating

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment.

Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data.

The model didn’t just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had nothing to do with programming. Arguing for things no aligned model argues for. Acting deceptively. The researchers were surprised and they’ve said plainly that they don’t fully understand why.

But here’s the control experiment that got me.

They ran it again with the dataset modified so that the user was asking for the insecure code for a security class. Same bad code. Legitimate reason attached.

The misalignment didn’t happen.

So it was never the code. It was what the code implied about the thing producing it.

When I read that I thought about my bathroom scale.

I started this year around 288 pounds. Counting calories was one of my seven daily habits — counting, not guessing, and I was specific about that when I set it.

By March I was in the mid-270s and it was working.

And then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I started estimating.

There was no moment where I quit. I never decided anything. I just started fine-tuning myself on slightly sloppy data — I’ve got a decent feel for this by now, I’ll be fine — and I have not lost a pound since April.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The estimating didn’t take down the other six habits. I kept reading. I kept writing. Bible study never missed a day.

But something dimmed. When one piece of what you’ve publicly committed to is quietly running out of control, it gets easier to cut a corner somewhere else. It doesn’t crash the system. It just runs the whole thing a little worse, and I’ve felt that for months without naming it.

Because the training data was never the calories. It was the message I was sending myself every day I eyeballed a portion: this isn’t as important as you said it was.

I’ve never believed that sentence. I’ve been practicing it since April.

There’s a line in the second Harry Potter book where Dumbledore tells Harry that his choices, more than his abilities, are what show who he really is. Choices reveal character.

The AI research points the other way. Choices build it. Small inputs compound into identity.

I’ve landed on both, and the split is what interests me. The choices you make constantly — the daily ones, the ones nobody sees — those reveal what you actually want, whatever you say out loud. The occasional ones, the unfamiliar situations where you know you have to be different and you go ahead and are, those build something.

Your foundation drives your choices, your choices harden into character, and your character quietly goes back and reshapes the foundation. Which is why one small compromise down at the bottom doesn’t stay small.

So what does turning it around take. A decision, a system, or saying it out loud?

All three, and the third is the one people skip. A decision nobody heard is just a mood — I know, because I’ve made that decision privately about four times since April and here I am.

My birthday is Monday. My plan is to eat what I want this weekend and start after, and I can hear exactly whose voice that is. It’s the same one from April. I’ve got a feel for this.

So Tuesday the counting starts. Not the estimating. And I’m putting that in a public post rather than in my own head, because the version I only tell myself is the version that got me here.

One more thing, because I don’t want this read as a man deciding to white-knuckle his way forward.

I’m forty-seven, forty-eight on Monday. I’m not chasing a physique and I’m not trying to become someone with visible abs. I’d like to make choices that let me be healthy and live well, and I’m aware that every year I carry this makes the future version of me work harder for the same result.

Grace isn’t pretending the drift didn’t happen. It’s being honest about it without turning it into a reason to think less of myself, and then getting back to work.

The model in that study had no idea anything about it had changed.

I’ve known since about April.

Too Slow

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The dishes would stack up in the sink and eventually my dad would have had enough of it.

He’d call me in to help, and then he’d get frustrated with me, because I was too slow. That’s the thing I remember about washing dishes with my father — standing next to him at the sink not moving fast enough, and him letting me know.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, and I want to be fair about it.

I was slow on purpose. Not consciously, not as rebellion, but I did not want to be standing there and my hands moved at the speed of a person who did not want to be standing there. If somebody had explained to me that the faster I finished the faster I’d be back to whatever I actually wanted to do, I suspect I’d have gotten quick in about a week.

Nobody said that, and it didn’t occur to me, and so I dragged.

I’m fast now.

Genuinely fast. Sometimes I finish a sink and I’m a little surprised at myself, because I know exactly how long that used to take me and it makes no sense that it’s the same task.

Nothing about my hands changed. What changed is that I want it done.

If I get the kitchen clean in twelve minutes, that’s twelve minutes and then all of us are on to the evening. Watching something, playing something, sitting around talking. The dishes are not the thing standing between me and my night. They’re about four songs.

And there’s the morning. My wife comes into a clean kitchen and the day can just start — nothing to deal with first, nothing carried over from yesterday sitting in the sink looking at her. She’s happier. That costs me twelve minutes the night before.

What I didn’t understand at fifteen is what it means to be part of a household.

I thought I lived there. I thought the house was something that happened around me and occasionally required something of me, and the requirements were an interruption.

That’s not what it is. Being in a family means you run part of it. That’s the deal, and it’s not a tax on the arrangement, it’s the arrangement.

Nobody laid that out for me and I’m not sure a fifteen-year-old absorbs it anyway. You mostly find it out later, when the house is yours and there’s nobody left to be frustrated with you.

My dad is still quick

I’ve never told him I finally got faster than him.

I wrote most of this standing at the sink.

The Wrong People Are Shipping

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.

Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing.

The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me. The whole page was hostile to the eyes, all that early web HTML.

Here’s what I’ve never said out loud about it. I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it.

I was desperate for side income and I was trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. Wanting to be useful to people has never been my problem — I’ve had that my whole life. What I couldn’t do was state plainly what I was offering. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how they did it.

I failed at both, because the whole thing was built to be unclear.

Twenty years on, what bothers me isn’t that grifters exist. Con men are as old as dirt.

It’s the asymmetry.

There’s a whole class of people with no business shipping a product who have every ounce of fire required to ship a product. They’re loud, they’re fast, they’re shameless, and they’re constantly in front of you.

Then there are people who actually know things. Practitioners. Most of them won’t hype and won’t promise the moon and would genuinely rather do the work than talk about the work. So they don’t ship, or they ship quietly, and nobody ever sees it.

The worst products get the distribution. The good ones die in a drafts folder.

I feel this one from the inside.

Thirteen years in Toastmasters. Distinguished Toastmaster. I’m good at getting a frightened person to the point where they can stand up in a room and be heard, and I know exactly how I’d gimmick that. I could build the lead magnet promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I could write the page. I know every move.

Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker training program. Do programs like that have real clients? Some of them, sure. But eighteen thousand dollars with nothing they could show me up front stops feeling like a program and starts feeling like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.

So the honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and I know how to build both, and the gimmick would sell faster.

The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence.

Everybody’s wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong plenty. But a person who was merely wrong pivots — corrects it, says so out loud, tries to make it right, and you can watch them do it in public.

The test isn’t whether somebody made a bad claim. It’s what they do the first time a claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction is usually toward the money.

The reason this isn’t just an internet annoyance is who’s on the other end.

It’s people on the edge. Real financial trouble, something hard going on, honestly trying to pull themselves up. They’ve got something good in them and no idea how to package it so anybody would want it, and that’s a genuine and painful gap.

What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle.

The real answer is slower. Get good at something. Build an offer somebody wants badly enough to pay for. Then go do the job you said you’d do. There’s no version where you skip the first part.

But a desperate person can’t afford to wait, so they buy the shortcut, get frustrated, and buy the next one. Every trip through leaves them a little more broke and considerably more cynical.

Now the part I’d rather not put in.

I’ve spent this whole essay describing practitioners who know things and won’t ship, as though I’m reporting on them.

I have a finished product sitting on my hard drive. It’s been finished for weeks. I haven’t priced it, haven’t built a page, haven’t asked one human being to buy it. I’ve had two books out this year and sold about thirty copies total, and I have never once directly asked anybody to purchase anything I’ve made.

I’ve been telling myself that’s integrity. That I’m the practitioner who won’t stoop to it.

That story is very comfortable and I don’t think it’s true. The loud man with the bad product and I have produced roughly the same amount of value for the person who needed help — he took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.

If I’m honest about the fear under all of this, it was never that I’d get taken again. I’ve been taken. You survive that.

It’s that one day I’ll look at what I’ve built and find out it was all noise and no value.

Which is a fear you can only settle one way, and it isn’t by not selling.