Tag: achieving

Drive-Through Talking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It had to have been the early 2000s. My bride and I were sitting in a church auditorium listening to Kevin Leman speak, and the phrase he kept using made me chuckle every time I heard it: drive-through talking. I kept mistakenly calling it drive-by talking in my head — which, as I’d later realize, is an entirely different communication style and not one anybody recommends.

But the drive-through? That one I knew well.

In my younger years, my wife and I ate out constantly. There was a Taco Bell just down the street, and we learned a small but important truth at that pickup window: when the kid on the headset repeated our order back to us, we got what we ordered. When they didn’t repeat it back, the odds of getting something we hadn’t asked for went way up.

Marriage works the same way. The window is just invisible, and the cost of getting the order wrong is much higher.

The Technique

When your spouse is talking and you’re listening, act like you’re at the drive-through window. Repeat the order back. Make sure they know you actually heard the words they said — not the version your brain rewrote on the way in.

We’ve been doing this for over twenty years. It usually sounds something like, “Hold on — I think this is what you’re saying. Do I have it right?”

Over time, four phrases have done most of the heavy lifting:

  • Can you repeat that, please?
  • Do I have this right?
  • Is this what you said?
  • Help me understand.

That last one is the one I have to be careful with.

“Help Me Understand”

When I say it, I mean it the way it’s supposed to be meant: I’m being dense, I’m missing context, I need more from you so I can actually track what you’re telling me. It’s me admitting I’m the bottleneck.

That phrase has a problem. It can land as “you’re being too vague — explain it better,” which puts the work back on the person already doing the talking. Same words. Different posture. Completely different effect.

I’ve had to work at making sure my tone matches my intent on that one.

What the Research Says

Charles Duhigg points to research on couples who argued differently — specifically, on what separated couples who stayed together from couples who fell apart, based on how they fought.

The pattern is uncomfortable in its simplicity. Couples who focused on controlling the other person tended to end up divorced. Couples who focused on self-control — managing their own reactions, taking responsibility for their own part — tended to end up still married, and happier in the marriage they were still in.

That’s not abstract to me. It’s been my goal for twenty-seven years — to be the husband who’s regulating himself, not the one trying to manage her. Drive-through talking is what that goal looks like in practice. You’re not trying to win the conversation. You’re not trying to control where it goes. You’re regulating yourself long enough to clarify, repeat, and confirm — so that the other person actually feels heard.

I also use this with my son, too. Testosterone gets in the way more often than I’d like to admit, on both sides of those conversations. But the same courtesy I extend to a stranger at a checkout counter is the courtesy I want to extend to him — and even more to him and to my wife than to anyone else.

He and his mother shouldn’t get the worst version of how I communicate just because they’re the most familiar.

The Pushback

Someone might tell me their marriage is fine without all this work. That they don’t need techniques. That things are good.

I’d push back. “Fine” is an invitation. Just because something is good doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better. Just because things work okay right now doesn’t mean they can’t fail later. The roof you don’t maintain is the roof that fails in the storm — not on the sunny day you decided it was fine.

I’ve never wanted to be over-prescriptive about this. I’m not a counselor. I’m a husband who’s been married a long time and has paid attention. My belief is this: because we’re friends, because we have the mutual aim of respecting each other, taking care of each other, honoring the vows we made — we can work through things. Not because the technique is magic. Because we love each other, and we choose to be married to each other, every day.

The drive-through window just helps us hear each other while we’re choosing.

No More Excuses

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Ten days ago I signed up for an AI music tool called Suno. On a whim, I uploaded some songs I’d written over the years — lyrics, melodies, composition notes — and let it arrange them into full productions.

What came back stopped me cold. Not because the AI was impressive. Because my stuff was good.

I’ve been writing songs since 1994. I sat down at a piano my sophomore year of high school and taught myself to play by plunking keys until something recognizable came out. I got my first guitar Christmas of 1997, hated picks, grew calluses on my thumb and index finger from strumming bare-handed. I never really learned other people’s music. I wanted to write my own.

For thirty-two years, the gap between what I heard in my head and what I could produce with my hands was wide enough to park every excuse I ever made inside it. I didn’t have the production budget. I didn’t have the studio. I didn’t have the band. The songs stayed in notebooks and rough recordings, and I told myself someday.

Ten days ago, someday showed up. Here’s what it sounds like:

By My Side

Hearing those arrangements — hearing my melodies orchestrated, my lyrics set against drums and bass and layers I never could have built alone — I realized something I’d been circling for a while. The creative instinct was always right. The ideas were always there. What was missing wasn’t talent or vision. It was the bridge between the idea and the finished product. And that bridge exists now.

I wrote a novel last year on my iPhone. Voice to text, thumbs, and an AI editing partner. Over a hundred thousand words down to sixty thousand after I went through it with a machete. It’s on Amazon. I made it. It’s mine. And I wrote it in a way that would have been impossible five years ago.

I’m writing songs. I’m writing novels. I’m creating things that would have been impossible five years ago with the tools I had then. And I’m doing it from my phone, my living room, and my lunch break.

Years ago, I joined an online community built around Seth Godin’s Tribes. I was trying to develop my thinking, contribute ideas about customer service and business. A woman jumped on one of my posts and tore me apart. Told me I was crazy, that I was enabling people, that I was an idiot. I never logged on again. I let one person’s pushback silence me entirely.

That version of me doesn’t get to make decisions anymore.

The excuses are gone. The tools are here. The only variable left is me.

The Impostor

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I look in the mirror and I see a different version of me staring back. Someone who doesn’t know me now, but thinks he has the right to speak into my life.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent twenty years building a career. It doesn’t care that I’ve published a novel, or that I’ve given more speeches than I can count, or that I’m 115 days into a challenge that has changed my body and my mind. The voice doesn’t listen to evidence. It just talks.

Here’s the thing about the impostor — he doesn’t show up as some stranger. He shows up as me. A younger version. A twelve-year-old kid with his insecurities and his fears. They never left. They just learned to whisper instead of shout.

I can flip through snapshots of my life like a photo album. The arrogance of seventeen, when I thought I had the world figured out. The joy of twenty, newly married to a woman who would become the strongest person I’ve ever known. The fear of twenty-six, sitting in a doctor’s office hearing the word cancer for the first time. The elation of twenty-nine, finding out we were going to be parents. The terror that same year, watching her get taken back for an emergency C-section, not knowing where she was or if she or my son were okay. The relief later that night, sitting in a hospital room, watching her hold him, seeing a kind of love I’d never witnessed before.

All of it lives inside me. Every version of who I’ve been is still in there somewhere. And the impostor uses all of them. He takes the fear of the twenty-six-year-old and mixes it with the insecurity of the twelve-year-old and tells me I’m not going to make it. That nobody’s going to listen. That the world is too crowded for what I have to say. That I’m going to miss this moment, just like I’ve missed others.

I don’t listen to him. But the voice is loud sometimes. And it is hard, from time to time, to tune him out.

I’m saying this because I’m almost four months into one of the hardest things I’ve ever done on purpose. I’m excited about everything I’ve accomplished so far. And I’m overwhelmed by everything I still have in front of me — even though I put it there myself. I want to be more and do more. Because accomplishing feels good. And I feel like I’m standing on the edge of one of the most opportunity-filled seasons of my life.

The impostor tells me I’m going to miss it.

He might be loud. But God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love and power and a sound mind. So I keep looking in the mirror. And I keep choosing which voice to listen to.

Some days that’s easier than others.

Substack Confucius

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Substack lately. Reading Notes, engaging with other creators, trying to learn the platform and find my voice inside it. And I keep running into the same thing.

Substack Confucius.

You know the type. They post Notes that sound profound until you read them twice. “Conceal your strikes from your opponent and you will more easily strike his hide.” That’s not actually from Substack — that’s the Sphinx from Mystery Men, a character whose entire joke is that he speaks in pseudo-wisdom that sounds deep but means nothing. The joke works because we’ve all met that person. Apparently, a lot of them have Substack accounts.

But there’s a difference between a truth that’s been earned and a truth that costs nothing to say. A platitude and a hard-won insight can look identical on the surface. The difference is whether the person saying it has bled for it or just typed it.

Here’s my test: is this true on and off the message board? Can I take this sentence, walk into my office on Monday morning, and apply it to real work? Can I use it to grow my Substack, write a better blog post, have a harder conversation? If the answer is no — if it only works as a caption underneath a sunset — then it’s not wisdom. It’s decoration.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Because the temptation is real. I’ve felt the pull — the urge to write a Note that gets restacked because it makes people feel something for three seconds instead of one that makes them think for three minutes.

I don’t want to be Substack Confucius. I want to say things that are honest, even when they’re not pretty. I want to write things that work on Monday morning, not just on a feed. And if that means fewer restacks and slower growth, I’ll take it. Because the audience I want isn’t looking for fortune cookies. They’re looking for someone who’s actually doing the work and willing to talk about what it’s really like.

He Fell the Wrong Way

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been posting daily Bible illustrations for four months now. One image per chapter, every day, using AI to generate scenes from scripture. This week, a video of David and Goliath crossed 110,000 views on Instagram. I’ve gained over 1,500 followers in a week.

And at least ten people have told me Goliath fell the wrong way.

They’re right. The Bible says he fell forward. My video shows him falling backward. I can read scripture — I do every day. But the spirit of that image wasn’t a forensic recreation of which direction a giant’s body hit the ground. It was a young shepherd standing in front of something impossibly bigger than him, armed with a sling and a rock, and winning.

Someone else pointed out that Goliath was nine feet tall, not thirty. There’s actually theological debate about whether he was nine feet or thirteen. But the point was never the exact measurement. The point was scale. Goliath was over twice David’s height and many times his weight. He was a warrior above all warriors. The exaggerated size in the image captures something a historically accurate rendering might not — how it must have felt to stand at the bottom of that shadow.

Not just David. All of Israel. They stood on those sidelines for forty days, paralyzed. And in an instant, God used a shepherd boy to conquer what an entire army couldn’t face.

That’s what I want people to see. Not a Bible diagram. Not a historical diorama. I want people who have never been exposed to these stories, or who’ve heard them a hundred times but never really pictured them, to see differently. To feel the dust. To sense the weight of the moment.

Will I get every detail right? No. But I’d rather make someone stop scrolling and think about a shepherd boy’s courage and his reliance on God rather than produce a technically accurate image nobody pauses for.

Goliath fell. That is what I was trying to show.