Tag: Books

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

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 49: Standing on My Own Shoulders

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 49 — The 7-40 Challenge

February 23, 2026

I spent some time today going through old papers. Old goals. Old to-do lists. Old projects. I hoard projects the way some people hoard shoes, apparently.

I was reviewing them to see where my mind has been — not just recently, but for several years. And what I found surprised me. Many of the goals I’m working on today are goals I’ve been working on for quite some time, whether I called them by the same name or not.

A pattern is emerging: I was more productive than I was giving myself credit for. And some of the successes I’m having today are standing on the shoulders of things I did years ago — things I may not have been completely ready for at the time.

What do I mean by that?

I’ve been listening to Linchpin by Seth Godin. If I had to break the book down into one tagline, it would be this: listen to your inner genius and defeat the resistance. When I was younger, I understood what that meant. But I didn’t understand it the way I do today. Maybe that’s a product of age, time, and perspective. Probably all three.

Here’s what I realize now: my resistance — my hesitation, my inability to push projects forward — had much more to do with not knowing what I was doing than it did with motivation. I was plenty motivated. I was working hard.

I wrote a children’s book years ago. I had an idea, wanted to get it out, wanted to push it onto Amazon so people could share the story with me and, honestly, so I could make some money. I think I sold ten copies. That might be generous. I was probably in the hole after all the printing and formatting and noise it took to get it right.

But here’s the thing — it wasn’t that I couldn’t get a product put together. I could. I did. The book existed. The problem was that I didn’t understand fundamentally how to do the next step. I didn’t even have the framework to ask the right questions.

Fast forward to now. I just published a teen superhero novel set in the 1990s called Phase Defiant. I got it onto Amazon KDP just a couple of days ago. I’m working through a few final revision items Amazon wants before the print version goes live.

And I’m at this place again — the place where the creative work is done and the real work begins.

But this time is different. Instead of wishing and hoping things will go well, I have a plan. I’ve laid out a research-based approach to getting eyes on my book. I’m using the tools at my disposal. I’m studying ARC teams, BookTok strategies, content marketing, audience building. I’m turning research into actionable items.

This is the part I didn’t understand when I was younger: just getting your idea done does not mean you are successful. It means you can finish a project. But finishing the project doesn’t mean everybody’s naturally going to love it, because once you finish it, the real work apparently begins — getting people to notice it, recognize it, and love it just as much as you do.

I want to embrace this next part of the journey. I’m truly proud of this book. I believe the themes in it and the story it tells are worthy of people’s time. I hope that when teen readers finish it, they’re encouraged by the protagonist. That they’re asking good questions about their own lives. That there’s a general feeling they just went on an adventure that was worth the ride.

I say all this to say: I’m much further than where I was. My lack of knowledge now isn’t a stumbling block. It’s an opportunity to take my enthusiasm to the next level. And by practicing these seven daily habits every day, I’m setting myself up for the kind of structure I need to keep building.

The goals haven’t changed much in ten years. But I have. And that makes all the difference.

I Can Do More Than I Imagined: Day 35 and Discovering Your Capacity

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 35 of the 7-40 Challenge
Wednesday, February 4, 2026

One of the most interesting things about this round of the challenge is I’ve been able to think outside of the box more than in almost any time past.

I put lofty goals in front of myself: revising my book while working on physical fitness and getting social media going at the same time.

Here’s what I’m finding 35 days in: So much more is possible than I ever knew before.

I’m able to do more than I imagined. That’s delightful and frustrating all at the same time—because it means I’m making progress now, but it raises the question of all that time before.

But I’m not going there. Here’s what I’m learning instead.

The Evidence

This realization has been gradual. Ninety-seven chapters revised in less than a month. Daily blog posts by leveraging voice-to-text. The Light Bearer outlined after sitting dormant for five years.

I’ve never successfully finished a book before. I not only finished one over Christmas, but revised it and started planning the next one.

That’s making me feel like I can do far more than I imagined.

The Temptation

If I can do all this NOW, why didn’t I do it BEFORE?

It’s tempting to look back at twenty years of “someday I’ll…” notes and think about wasted time.

But I’m not going there. The most honest thing I can say is this: Until now, I was not prepared to do any of this.

I wanted to. I thought about it. But my desire for action was not there.

What Changed

It was finally time. I had my put up or shut up moment. And I don’t really like shutting up.

So I put up. Seven daily habits. Forty days. 2026 would be different.

And 35 days in, I’m discovering: Capacity expands when preparation meets the right tools at the right time.

Voice-to-text turns 10-minute rambles into drafts. AI creates 100+ Bible images with 30,000+ views. OpusClip distributes one video across platforms. The 7-40 structure removes decision fatigue.

Eighteen years in data management taught me systems. One hundred Toastmaster presentations taught me storytelling. Two cancer battles taught me not to waste time. Twenty-seven years of marriage taught me perseverance.

All of it together = discovering I can do far more than I imagined.

What This Means

If you’re thinking, “I wish I could do more,” here’s what I’ve learned: You probably can.

Not because you’ll gain superpowers. But because when you get clear on what you want, build the right structure, leverage your tools, and show up consistently—you discover capacity you didn’t know you had.

I didn’t know I could revise 97 chapters in a month. Write 35 consecutive blog posts. Plan a second novel before publishing the first. Generate 30,000+ views on Bible content. (More on this a different time.)

But I can. And I am.

Not because I’m special. Because I’m finally prepared, I have the right tools, and it’s finally time.

The Discovery

You can do more than you think. Once you’re ready.

You know you’re ready when you stop thinking about it and start doing it. When you have your put up or shut up moment. When you realize you don’t like shutting up.

That’s when capacity expands. That’s when you discover what’s actually possible.

Five more days until Round 1 is complete. And I’m just getting started.

Day 35: Complete ✓

All seven habits executed. Discovering capacity in real time.

Round 1 Progress: 35/40 days (87.5%)

Five more days until Assessment Week.

See you tomorrow for Day 36.

The Art of Asking (for Feedback): What Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk Teaches Us About Preparation

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 30 of the 7-40 Challenge
Friday, January 30, 2026

“Put in the time. Your ideas are worth the effort.”

That’s Carmine Gallo in Talk Like TED, talking about the preparation that goes into great speeches. I’m on Day 30 of the 7-40 Challenge, reading Gallo’s book, and learning that what separates good ideas from great ones isn’t just having the idea—it’s being willing to test it.

But what does that actually look like in practice?

Let me show you what it looked like for Amanda Palmer.

The Tour Before the Tour

If you’ve watched Palmer’s TED talk “The Art of Asking,” you know how it feels—raw, authentic, like she’s having a conversation with 1,400 of her closest friends. She tells stories about being a living statue, about crowdfunding her album, about the vulnerability of asking. It doesn’t feel rehearsed. It feels real.

That’s exactly what great preparation is supposed to look like.

But here’s what you don’t see: the tour before the tour. Palmer didn’t just show up at TED and wing it. She took that talk on the road. Different venues. Different audiences. She gave variations of her prepared speech over and over, using each performance as a testing ground. Every time she delivered it, she was watching for what landed, what fell flat, where people leaned in, where they checked out.

And then—and this is the brilliant part—she used her community as her feedback engine. Palmer has spent years building genuine relationships with her fans, and she enlisted them in making this talk better. She asked them what worked. What didn’t. What confused them. What moved them. She treated her community not as passive consumers but as collaborators in refining her ideas.

This is the opposite of the lone genius model. This is preparation as conversation. Iteration as relationship. The speech got better because she let people help her make it better.

The Risk of Real Feedback

Think about what that actually means: Palmer valued her idea enough to test it. To expose it to feedback when it was still rough. To risk hearing that parts of it didn’t work.

Most people are so protective of their ideas that they either never share them at all, or they wait until they think it’s “perfect”—which usually means they’ve polished it in isolation until it’s lost all its rough, human edges.

Palmer did the opposite. She put her rough draft in front of real people and let them tell her the truth.

This applies to so much more than public speaking.

Writers do this with beta readers—trusted people who read your manuscript before it’s finished and tell you what’s working. Stand-up comics do this every single night in small clubs, working out new material in front of live audiences, adjusting based on what gets laughs. Software developers do this with user testing. Artists do this with gallery shows and studio visits.

The best work comes from feedback loops, not from isolated genius.

What This Looks Like for Me

Right now, I’m waiting for my wife and son to finish reading my novel manuscript before I dive back into revisions. I could have ignored their feedback and just polished it on my own. But my idea—this story I’ve spent so much time on—is worth the effort of getting real feedback from people I trust. Their insights will make it better than anything I could do alone.

And the 7-40 Challenge itself is a feedback loop. Every blog post I publish gets responses. Every video on social media gets views. I’m documenting my transformation in real-time, and feedback tells me what’s resonating and what’s not. I’m not waiting until Day 280 to share “perfect” results. I’m sharing the messy middle right now and letting the feedback help shape what this becomes.

That’s preparation as conversation. That’s using community as my feedback engine.

The Takeaway

Your community, your beta readers, your test audiences—they’re not a weakness in your process. They’re not a sign that you couldn’t figure it out on your own. They’re part of the preparation. They’re how good ideas become great ones.

So here’s what Day 30 taught me: If your idea is worth doing, it’s worth testing. Put it in front of people before you think it’s ready. Use your community as your feedback engine. Be willing to hear what’s not working. Iterate.

Put in the time. Your ideas are worth the effort.

And sometimes that effort looks like asking for help.

Day 30: Complete ✓

All seven habits executed. Three-quarters through Round 1.

Round 1 Progress: 30/40 days (75%)

Assessment Week begins in 11 days.

See you tomorrow for Day 31.