Tag: achieving

Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.

Ok, So Now What?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.

Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.

What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.

I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.

I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.

I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.

The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?

At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.

I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.

I lasted under two months.

Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.

They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.

There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.

He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.

That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.

Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.

Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.

Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?

I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.

Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.

I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.

Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.

That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.

Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.

The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.

I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.

I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.

Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.

I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.

I Knew The Guy

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In my twenties I worked with a man who got fired over something he said. I’ll leave it there — it was his to carry and it isn’t mine to publish. Today it would be called an HR violation.

We both worked for the owner of the company. A client told the owner the man was careless and unkind, and that put the owner in a spot. Ultimately it cost the man his job, because the alternative was losing the client.

The owner started to adopt the client’s story. If that version was all I’d had, I’d have believed every word.

But I knew him. He was one of the sincerest people in that office and he was kind in ways nobody was keeping track of. He’d also grown up somewhere that hadn’t taught him where the lines were in a place like that one, and he crossed one, and it cost him his job.

I never argued that he shouldn’t have been fired. The mistake was real. What I couldn’t do was accept that the mistake was the man, because I had information the story didn’t contain.

Almost nobody else in that building did.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not that the man had done wrong. That it got repeated as if it were all he was. The client, the owner, the office.

They weren’t being cruel. They had one account, from one person, delivered with authority, and no reason on earth to go looking for a second. Five people repeating it wasn’t five sources. It was one source with five mouths. From inside, that feels exactly like confirmation.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since, and it’s worse than plain repetition.

You’ve probably heard that “blood is thicker than water” is a butchered version of an older line — the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb — meaning the bonds you choose beat the family you were born into. Great story. Sounds like a hidden truth somebody’s been keeping from you.

It appears to be invented. The covenant version traces to a couple of authors in the nineties and two-thousands, neither of whom cited a source, and it doesn’t turn up in older texts at all. The actual proverb has always meant what you’d expect: family runs deep.

So the correction is the distortion, and the people passing it around are certain they’re the ones who saw through something.

That’s the sharper trap. It isn’t repeating what everybody says. It’s repeating the thing that let you feel like you’d stopped doing that.

I carried a misquoted Bible verse about money for most of my adult life and never once went and looked at it. When I finally did, one word was missing and it changed the whole meaning. I’d been wrestling with a sentence that was never the sentence.

Decades. Never checked. And I’d have told you I was a careful person.

There’s a live version of this running right now and it comes in a matched pair.

One crowd is selling seven prompts that will change your business. I use these tools every day and I read the prompts — they’re vague, overgeneralized, and will get you back something that sounds intelligent and says nothing. That’s the grift.

The other crowd has decided the whole thing is a bubble and none of it is real, and they roll their eyes and feel superior about it.

Both are handing you a conclusion you didn’t build. One says it’s magic, one says it’s nothing, and neither has any interest in you going to look. If you looked, you wouldn’t need either of them.

I still think about the guy sometimes.

There are people who worked in that building for years who never knew anything about him except the worst afternoon of his life, told by somebody else, and there was nothing in it that was untrue.

It just wasn’t him.

What I Didn’t Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In January of this year I used an AI tool to help me edit my novel. The chapter that came back wasn’t mine.

Same characters, different scene. Events I hadn’t written, in a book I’d already spent a hundred and five thousand words on. I got about halfway down the page before I stopped and said out loud, what the heck is this?

I’d asked for everything I could think of. Check the voice for consistency. Tell me if I’ve dropped a plot thread. Fix the grammar, look at the pacing. Everything you’d want from an editor, and I thought I could name all of it.

What I never said was don’t change the story.

I asked it why afterward. It told me my instructions left room and it had filled the room. Which is a fair description of what happened — I’d written a job posting with no scope, and something with no other context to work from took the widest reasonable reading of it.

I’ve known for a while that the gap was mine. What took longer was working out why it was there.

I’ve never worked with an editor.

Not once. Everything I’ve ever written I’ve edited myself, the long way, reading until my eyes slid off the page. So when I finally handed a chapter to something outside my own head, I was specifying a job I had never in my life watched anyone do.

I knew editing existed. I could name the tasks — anybody who’s read a book about writing can name the tasks. What I couldn’t name was the line. Where this sentence is weak ends and this scene should be different begins.

That line isn’t in any book about craft. It’s the kind of thing you absorb sitting across a desk from somebody in your first year, and after that nobody says it out loud again, because everyone in the room already knows it.

So I listed the parts I could see and left silent every part I’d never had to think about, which turned out to be all the boundaries.

You can’t put a fence around a field you’ve never stood in.

What I built afterward was a standard set of instructions I’ve used on every chapter since. Read for these things. Tell me what you find before you touch anything. Suggestions first, not revisions.

And the one that actually mattered: when you do revise, revise my words — I want it to still be materially mine when it comes back.

I’d never have thought to write that sentence if I’d worked with an editor even once. It would have been assumed. It’s assumed by every writer and every editor who has ever sat in a room together, and I had to lose a chapter to arrive at it from scratch.

The chapters started coming back the way I’d wanted them the first time. My sentences, tightened. My scene, still mine.

Twenty years of writing and I’d never once had to define what an editor does, because I’d always been both people. The handoff happened somewhere inside my own head, and nothing that happens in there ever needs saying.

So the instructions weren’t really for the machine.

They were the first honest description I’ve ever written of a job I’ve been doing to myself, alone, since I was in my twenties.

This Is Him

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I had a grown man’s voice by the time I was fifteen. On the phone nobody ever knew.

One afternoon somebody from a radio station called the house asking for my dad. He’d won something. All he had to do was be the one to claim it.

Three words. This is him. Nobody in the world would have known — not the station, not my father, not anybody. And I stood there holding the phone and couldn’t make my mouth do it.

I have no idea what the prize was. 1993, some station, some giveaway. We lost out on it.

Years later I walked into a car dealership with I’m a moron written across my face.

The salesman read it in about four seconds and sold me a car I didn’t need for considerably more than it was worth. Six months on I sold it back at a three or four thousand dollar loss. That part was expensive and completely ordinary. Everybody buys the wrong car once.

What I actually remember is the phone call before I gave the car up, when I was broke and couldn’t make the payment and a creditor got me on the line.

He was friendly. Asked about my situation, got me talking, and I told him things — I was young and scared and he was the first person who’d sounded like he cared. Then somewhere in the middle he turned it around and used every bit of it on me. Told me I’d lost the car. Hung up.

He didn’t want the money. If he’d wanted the money he’d have worked out a payment with me. He wanted me frightened enough to find some, and he had a script for producing that.

I made myself a promise after that call. Not at either end of that again. Not that end, and not his.

I’ve been listening to Chris Voss’s book about hostage negotiation, which is a good book, and every time I read one of these I run into the same discomfort. The creditor was a skilled negotiator. He used real techniques competently. He just used them on a kid to take something.

So where’s the line.

Here’s what twenty years of work has shown me, and it’s not what I expected. I’m a data guy. Almost nothing I negotiate involves money. I negotiate for understanding — what gets fixed first, what can wait, what was never actually broken, who owns it. Nobody calls that negotiating. We call it getting things done. It’s two people holding different pictures of the same problem and trying to end up with one.

And in twenty years of that, the people who reach for manipulation are the people who have nothing else to reach for.

I interviewed someone a while back and asked what an acronym stood for. He guessed. Confident, fluent, completely wrong. The next candidate said she hadn’t run into that one, so she’d looked it up, because she was curious. He answered the question and failed it. She couldn’t answer it and got the job.

I wasn’t testing the term. I was testing what happens when they don’t know something.

Same thing runs the other direction. I’ve broken things at work — real things, with consequences. What has always kept me whole is walking in and saying: here’s what’s wrong, here’s what caused it, that was my call and I got it wrong, here’s the fix. People let you back in after that. They keep believing you, and believing you is the only asset in the room that can’t be rebuilt from scratch.

Somebody who actually knows their material doesn’t need a technique. Their standing does the work. Manipulation is what gets installed where credibility should have been — the salesman and the creditor reached for pressure because they had nothing true to offer me.

Except that only explains the part with witnesses.

The fifteen-year-old had no credibility to protect. No boss, no team, no reputation, nobody in the room. A phone, an easy lie, and a prize on the other side of it. Every incentive pointed one direction and there was no cost to lying.

I’ve told that story like it says something good about me, and I’m not sure it does. I didn’t weigh it. I didn’t decide. I stood there and my mouth wouldn’t form the sentence, and I’ve never known whether that was character or just not having the nerve. Truthfully, it was me trying to be honest which is what I want to be. Even if it cost me a prize.

Learning the tools didn’t make me trust persuasive people less. It changed what I listen to. I spend a lot less attention now on how well someone is making their case and a lot more on what’s actually under it — whether there’s anything there when you take the technique away.

The books will hand you every tool in the kit. What they can’t tell you is what you’ll do with them on an afternoon when nobody’s home.