Tag: communication

A Good Goodbye

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

Thirteen years ago, my grandmother was home, slowly waiting for the cancer to take her.

I knew she was near the end. She lived about an hour and a half away, so I called and asked if I could come early. I drove down, and that morning I cooked her breakfast. We sat across from each other and we talked — about my job, the master’s degree I was working on, my family.

I knew Grandmas aren’t supposed to play favorites. But she was proud of me, and I felt it.

I told her I loved her. I told her I was proud to be her grandson — proud to be working in the same business my grandfather had been in. I told her I wanted to make her proud.

She smiled and said I already had.

I knew, the whole time, that it would be our last conversation. And because I knew, I got to choose what kind of goodbye it would be. I wanted it to be a good one. It was.

There are only a few people in this life I miss the way I miss her. She gave the best hugs. She believed in me. She trusted me. And I didn’t let her down.

That morning gave me a clarity I’ve never forgotten. When you know the moment matters — when you know it’s the last one — everything unimportant falls away and you’re left with only the things worth saying. I love you. I’m proud of you. Thank you.

We don’t always get to know which conversation is the last one. That morning, I did. And I’ve tried ever since to talk to the people I love like I might not get another chance.

Ten Thousand

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 35

BiblePictures365 hit 10,000 followers on Instagram today.

On January 1, I had zero. No audience. No following. No track record. Just an idea — one image per chapter, every day for a year reading through the whole Bible— and enough stubbornness to start posting before anyone was watching.

589 posts later, ten thousand people showed up.

I didn’t run ads. I didn’t game an algorithm. I didn’t go viral on purpose — though one post hit 400,000 views and that certainly helped. What I did was post every single day without exception and let the reps do what reps do.

The pictures got better because I made one every day. The engagement grew because the consistency gave people something to come back to. The audience built itself because I kept showing up.

Ten thousand people didn’t show up just because of one great post. They showed up because of 583 unremarkable decisions to do it again.

Get Them Out

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 32

I went for a walk this afternoon with a small headache and vague tension in my chest — the kind that comes from knowing you have something to get out but not being able to see it clearly yet. By the time I got done, I had a complete framework for the communication course I’ve been circling for months. Ten principles. A product structure. A content engine. None of it existed in any organized form before I started walking.

The ideas were already in my head. They just needed out.

That’s the part most people skip. They sit with ideas swirling, waiting for the moment when it all clicks into place internally before they start. But it doesn’t click inside. It clicks when you get it outside — onto a page, into a voice recording, onto a whiteboard, into a conversation. The act of externalizing is what organizes the thinking, not the other way around.

I’ve written a blog post every day this year. The best ones didn’t come from sitting down with a clear idea. They came from starting with a half-formed thought and watching it take shape as the words came out. The writing did the thinking for me.

I left on the walk this afternoon with tension. I came back with details fleshed out. The only difference was getting it out of my head and into the air.

Data Is Communication

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26

I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone’s trying to figure out right now.

I work in data management. I’ve spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into language the other side understands. Business people don’t think in tables and queries. Technical people don’t think in revenue targets and customer experience. Somebody has to build the bridge. That’s been my job.

Today I realized that’s exactly what people need to learn to do with AI.

I learned this firsthand when I asked AI to edit my novel. I said “edit this” and got hallucinated rewrites. I said “read this, tell me what’s wrong, don’t touch anything” and got a sharp, tireless reader. Same tool. Same book. The only difference was how clearly I defined what I needed.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a communication problem. And it’s the same communication problem I solve at my day job every single day.

The people getting great results aren’t smarter. They’re clearer. They define the problem before they ask for a solution. They tell the AI what they know, what they don’t know, and what good looks like. They argue when the output doesn’t match their intent.

They’re doing data architecture for their own thinking — organizing what they know so someone else can work with it. They just don’t know that’s what it’s called.

For twenty years I’ve been building the bridge between people who have information and people who need to use it. The tools on both sides changed today — one side is a person, the other side is a machine. But the problem is identical: get the meaning across, not just the words.

Data is communication. It always was. AI just made it urgent for everyone to learn how to say what they mean.

The Wing-It Tax

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 17

I was 19 and a bit unobservant. I signed up for what I thought was personal finance. I wanted to learn how to balance my checkbook. I ended up in fundamentals of business finance, learning bond valuation.

I did what I always did in college — I winged it. Showed up, skated through, and crammed at the end. Pretty sure I got a D. I was happy with it.

In retrospect, I’ve worked a corporate job for almost twenty years. The financials aren’t that hard to understand. If I had taken some focused time early that semester, I would have learned the material and been fine. It wasn’t a smarts thing. It was a wing-it thing that almost bit me.

I leaned on talent for most of my life. Smart kid, underachieving student. A 2.87 GPA in my undergrad, mostly propped up by passing all of my music courses.

Then I went back for my master’s degree and decided to get my act together. I studied. I did the assignments. I prepared instead of crammed. I graduated with a 3.95.

The only thing that changed was the work ethic.

I think most people romanticize the idea of working well under pressure. I think that’s nonsense. Very few of us actually work well under pressure we manufactured through our own laziness. We just convince ourselves we do because we survived it. Surviving isn’t thriving. And the work that comes out of a last-minute scramble shows it.

If I could go back and tell the kid in that finance class one thing, it would be this: the difference between a 2.87 and a 3.95 wasn’t talent. It was deciding to stop paying the wing-it tax.