Tag: Books

Make Your Own Map

~ David Willis ~ 2 Comments

Day 75 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Nobody is going to hand you the plan.

I’ve only started realizing that this year. I knew if I wanted to be successful, I had to name my own goals — not adopt someone else’s and try to chase them with my own passion. That just doesn’t work. I don’t want somebody else’s dream. I want my dream. I don’t want somebody else’s body. I want my body to look the way it’s supposed to. I don’t want to write somebody else’s book. I want to write the books that are inside of me, about the things I’m interested in.

So I had to make the map.

Not a map someone gave me in a class. Not one I found in a self-help book. Not one my boss outlined for me. Mine. Built from scratch. Designed for the terrain I’m actually walking on.

I’ve been reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and his principles keep landing on things I’m already living. But the truth is, I didn’t need Henry to tell me these things. I needed him to name what I was already doing — so I could see it clearly and do it better.

I’m seventy-five days into a 280-day transformation experiment that I designed myself. Seven daily habits, forty-day cycles, daily blogging, a published novel, a Bible illustration project, and a philosophical manifesto in progress. Nobody assigned this to me. Nobody approved it. I just decided it was time to stop filling notebooks with “someday” and start building.

That’s what map-making looks like. Not waiting for instructions. Deciding what the terrain requires and drawing the route yourself.

Do your best work even when no one’s watching.

My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Some days, one or two. I’m seventy-five posts in. Why do I keep writing for an audience that small?

Because I’m not writing it for them.

I’m writing it as my own content library — a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve been thinking. I know deep inside me that the questions I’m asking are good ones. The development I’m doing, whether publicly or privately, is still my own personal growth. It’s still interacting with my goals. It’s still getting things done.

And here’s the practical reason: if I don’t do my best now and have my rhythm down, and everybody shows up one day and I screw up — everything blows up. The time to get good is before the audience arrives, not after.

Say yes.

In the last seventy-five days, I said yes to publishing my book. I said yes to throwing myself out there and engaging online with people I don’t know. And from the limited feedback I’ve gotten, it’s all been positive.

What I’m discovering is that the real limitation was put on me by me. The limitations we live inside are self-inflicted most of the time. If we really wanted to get things done — put a plan together, build a system, and just said yes to doing it — we’d be so much further than we thought we’d be.

I’m finding that for myself, seventy-five days in.

But here’s the one that cuts deepest.

Take responsibility for your own progress.

Who was I waiting on for permission? Not my boss. Not a mentor. Not even a sign from God — although a finger is always welcome.

I was waiting on me.

Getting older has had an effect. The man I look at in the mirror these days is a whole lot grayer than he used to be. He’s having to work a whole lot harder to get back in shape. And I’m realizing that if I want to make a contribution to the world like I intend to, I have to do it right now. I cannot wait, in good conscience, for anybody else to give me permission to be the best version of myself.

I think it’s been a sin, in many ways, to limit myself from striving for excellence over the years. I’ve always tried to do my best. But I’ve let the fact that I didn’t know how to do something stop me from even wanting to learn how to do it.

I can’t do that anymore.

I was going through chemotherapy in 2005 for the first time. I would go back to work after my sessions, and I would sit in the office feeling like I’d been burned from the inside. Raw. Just as gross as you can feel. The guy I worked for was smoking cigars in there, and life was still moving at its regular pace. I just wasn’t.

And I remember sitting there thinking: I’m going to choose to take care of the things I’m responsible for, because I chose to. Not because someone’s making me. Because I decided that excellence was my standard, even when I felt like I was on fire inside.

That ability to choose excellence has served me for the rest of my life.

If you can choose it through chemotherapy, you can choose it at any other time.

You’re going to get well. You’re going to get better. And you’re going to come back with a map in your hand that you drew yourself — because nobody else was going to draw it for you.

That’s agency. That’s the yes that changes everything.

Day 75 of 280. Five days left in Round 2.

740Challenge #MakeYourOwnMap #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

Gratitude Sunday: You Showed Up

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 69 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge | Thank You Campaign

Last Monday night, I did something I’d been putting off for weeks. I hit publish on a Facebook post telling my friends and family that I’d written a novel. That it was on Amazon. And that I’d love for them to read it.

I’d built that moment up in my head more than I probably needed to. But I’m proud of Phase Defiant. I’m proud that I wrote a novel that started at over 100,000 words and 105 chapters, and after two full revisions landed at 60,000 words and 58 chapters — without losing a single plot point or anything that made the story worth telling.

I believe it is a good book. I just didn’t know if anyone else would care.

The first response I got was from one of my students from a youth group I led — twenty-five years ago. She told me she wanted to read it. The next was from a lady whose son had been in Cub Scouts with my boy.

And then it just kept going.

People from high school. People from church. People I’ve worked with. People I’ve met at random over the years. From every corner of my life, people were either congratulating me, telling me they wanted to read it, or letting me know they’d already bought it.

One friend I haven’t talked to in over ten years — a fellow author named Aubrey — reached out and asked whether I’d rather she buy the book or read it on Kindle Unlimited. She said she’d gladly leave a review. And then she invited me into a couple of author groups on Facebook. That kind of generosity from someone I hadn’t spoken to in a decade was something else. If you are reading this, thank you Aubrey. I appreciate you.

And then there was Rusty.

Rusty is a friend from high school. I remember him being a voracious reader — the kind of guy who collected Louis L’Amour books and had read every single one. He read Scarlett and Gone with the Wind and countless others. He always had a book in his hands.

He told me he got my book on a Thursday. He finished it on Friday. One day.

I was at the gym with my son when the text came in. He told me the book had great characters and good flow. And then he said he was going to give it to his kids and ask them to read it.

I don’t know how to describe what that feels like. To hear someone I remember as a reader — a real reader — say that my book was worth his time and worth passing to the next generation. As a YA novelist, that’s everything. That’s the whole point. Russ, I appreciate you.

Fifteen copies sold this week. I didn’t know what to expect, so fifteen feels amazing. That’s fifteen people who believed enough in me to spend their time and money on something I created. I don’t take that lightly.

Am I in this for the long game? Absolutely. I know how this works. I get to do my own marketing. I get to do my own promotion. And whether Phase Defiant reaches thousands of people or stays in the hands of the ones who already have it, I’m grateful either way.

Because before I knocked, I was afraid that nothing would change. And now that I’ve knocked and people showed up — the fear is gone. It’s not fear anymore. It’s fuel. The validation I needed — that this is a good book and worthy of people’s time — has already been given. Now I just want to get to work.

So if you bought this book — and I hope you’re reading this post right now — know that I appreciate you more than I have time to say.

I wrote this story because it had been inside of me for a while. I love superheroes. I loved growing up in the nineties. I love telling stories. And I love connecting with people. Phase Defiant gave me an opportunity to do all of that in one book.

If you enjoyed it, I would love your feedback in an Amazon review. That’s the single biggest thing you can do to help an indie author get discovered by people who don’t already know him.

But more than anything — thank you. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Thank you for showing up when I finally knocked.

I appreciate you.

📖 Phase Defiant by DMT Willis is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/04IcWIKi

740Challenge #GratitudeSunday #ThankYouCampaign #PhaseDefiant #DMTWillis #IndieAuthor #BookTok #Gratitude #Community #LivingProof #DayByDay #YouShowedUp

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.