Tag: communication

What Do You Have to Offer?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Cal Newport asks a question that most people get backwards. The passion mindset asks, “what can the world offer me?” The craftsman mindset asks, “what can I offer the world?”

I’ve been sitting with that second question for a while now. And the honest answer surprised me.

For a long time, I didn’t think I had much. I had a day job. I had some hobbies. I had notebooks full of ideas I never finished. I had talent I wasn’t using and experience I wasn’t leveraging. I had a lot of ingredients and no recipe.

But when I actually sat down and took inventory — not the resume version, the real version — the list was longer than I expected.

Twenty years of data management experience. Two years of working with AI daily. A twenty-seven-year marriage to my best friend. A seventeen-year-old son who makes his daddy proud every day. Two rounds of cancer survived. Fiction I’ve written and published. Songs I’ve written and mostly kept to myself. I can cook. I can stand in front of a room and hold it. I can take something complicated and explain it so the room goes, “oh, that’s what that means.”

That’s not nothing. That’s capital. Not just career capital — life capital. The kind you don’t put on a resume but carry into every room you walk into. My marriage taught me how to communicate. The cancer taught me urgency. The data career taught me how to think in systems. The novels taught me how to finish what I start. None of those showed up in a job posting. All of them made me who I am.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: what catches isn’t always what you’d expect. I’ll pour my heart into something I think is my best work, and it gets a polite nod. Then I’ll toss off something I didn’t think was that good, and people grab onto it. Someone will tell me a throwaway line in a blog post changed how they thought about something. A chapter I almost cut from my novel turns out to be the one a reader can’t stop talking about.

You don’t always get to choose which parts of what you offer resonate. You just have to keep offering.

I didn’t know that a hundred days ago. I thought I needed to figure out which piece of myself was the valuable one and lead with it. But it turns out the inventory is the value. The whole messy collection of things I’ve done and survived and built and failed at — that’s the offer.

I spent twenty years thinking I wasn’t ready. That I needed one more credential, one more book read, one more plan written. What I actually needed was to stop curating and start offering.

The world doesn’t need another person consuming content and waiting to feel ready. It needs what you’ve already built.

The Battle

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a battle going on inside me that I’m only now learning to talk about.

On one side is the craftsman. He wants systems. Structure. Reps. He wants to know the plan, follow the plan, and measure the results. He’s the one who built a 280-day challenge with assessment weeks and daily checklists. He’s the one who taught himself SQL by sitting with select statements until they made sense. He’s the one who revised a 105-chapter novel down to 59 chapters because the story needed it, not because it was fun.

On the other side is the free spirit. He’s the one who picks up a guitar and writes a song he’ll never share. The one who starts a story because the idea is electric and stops when the electricity fades. He’s the one who connects data management to Sherlock Holmes in the middle of a conference speech and thinks, where did that come from? He’s the one who has filled notebooks for twenty years with dreams that never became anything — not because they weren’t good, but because he got bored before the boring part was over.

The free spirit loves the spark. The craftsman loves the grind. And for most of my life, they haven’t been on speaking terms.

The free spirit would start something — a song, a story, a challenge — and ride the wave until the wave broke. Then the craftsman would show up too late, look at the wreckage, and say, “If you’d just stuck with it.” And the free spirit would shrug and say, “But it stopped being fun.”

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last hundred days.

The free spirit isn’t the enemy. And the craftsman isn’t the hero. They need each other in ways I spent twenty years refusing to admit. The problem was never that one of them was wrong. The problem was that I kept letting them take turns instead of making them work together.

The truce I’ve found — and it is a truce, not a peace treaty — is this: the craftsman builds the system, and the free spirit works inside it. The system gives the free spirit a container. The free spirit gives the system a soul.

Some days the free spirit fights the plan. He doesn’t want to do the boring part. He doesn’t want to sit at the edge of what he knows and push into what he doesn’t. He wants to go back to the imaginative part where everything is new and nothing is hard.

But he’s gotten older. And a whole lot more cooperative. Because the books are getting written, the framework is taking shape, and for the first time in his life, the notebooks are turning into something real.

So I let them fight. And then I make them both show up tomorrow.

The Craftsman and the Machine

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I keep seeing his argument play out in real time at work.

Newport says rare and valuable skills — career capital — are what give you leverage. The craftsman builds that capital through reps, not passion. Show up, get deep, get good. The leverage follows.

But what happens to the craftsman when a machine can do the surface-level work in thirty seconds?

I’ve been watching AI adoption in my field for months now, and I see three groups forming.

The first group is leaning in. They’re learning everything they can. They’re training the AI, building context, making the partnership between human and machine as smart as it can be. They’re using the tool to augment their thinking — not replace it. These are today’s craftsmen, and the career capital they’re building right now is going to pay off.

The second group is leaning harder into the work itself — but ignoring the tool. They’re getting the right answers, but not as fast as they could. They’re not teaching the AI their context. They’re not augmenting their thinking so they can do more. They’re good at what they do, and that’s going to carry them for a while. But they’re going to fall behind, because the first group is doing everything they’re doing plus more.

The third group is saying screw it. No AI. Not interested. And they’re the ones who are going to get left behind entirely.

Here’s the thing Newport gets right that applies directly to this moment: career capital isn’t devalued by AI if you know what you’re doing. If you can partner with the machine to do your work better, faster, and deeper — your skills become more valuable, not less. The craftsman who picks up a power tool doesn’t lose his craft. He builds faster.

But if you’ve been pretending — if you’ve been skating on surface knowledge and the AI exposes that — you’re in trouble. There’s no other way to say it.

I ran a demo last week where I asked a system a question in plain English and watched it produce the SQL in real time. I could evaluate whether the output was right because I’ve been doing this work for twenty years. But what happens in five years when someone with two years of experience runs that same demo and can’t catch the errors?

That’s the question that keeps me up at night.

The answer isn’t to fear the machine. The answer is humility. Learn. Do your reps. Stop being arrogant about what you think you know and start being honest about what you don’t. Because the AI is going to have more compute power than any of us, and it’s going to get to answers faster than any of us. But it’s not going to have the human filter we need.

You’ve got to be humble. You’ve got to be aware. And you’ve got to do your job the best that you can to keep the AI honest.

That’s the craftsman’s job now. Not just building the thing. Building the thing and making sure the machine didn’t cut the corners you’d never accept.

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

There Is No Map

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 52 — The 7-40 Challenge

February 26, 2026

I’m still working through Seth Godin’s Linchpin, and I either wasn’t paying attention the first time I read this book, or I just wasn’t ready for it.

Godin shares what he calls his favorite bad review — someone critiquing his book Tribes. The reviewer said Godin spent all this time talking about people with good ideas and how they could spread those ideas and made it sound so easy. But then the reviewer complained that Godin never provides a how-to. No step-by-step guide. No blueprint for becoming this kind of leader.

Godin’s response? That’s the point. There is no map.

When I heard that, I felt something click that I’ve been circling for years. Because I have been that reviewer. I’ve read Godin’s work and felt simultaneously inspired and annoyed. I could feel the grind between wanting to be what he described and having absolutely no idea how to get there.

But here’s what I’m realizing at Day 52 that I couldn’t see before: it’s not completely true that I didn’t know how. I just didn’t realize that the principles I was applying at work — the ones I was crushing with — were the same principles I should have been applying to my own life and my own projects.

Let me explain.

Back in the DFW area, I was working as a data governance specialist. I was doing good work. Gaining customer trust. Improving data flow. Making initiatives succeed. But the people around me were getting promoted, and I wasn’t. So I asked my manager the question: how do I get promoted?

His answer was ambiguous at best. Something about being involved in a larger project. Contributing at a higher level. And in my mind, I was contributing. But not on anything high-profile enough to get noticed.

I had two options. Whine about it and stay put, or lift my gaze and figure out how to get to that bigger project. There was no map for that. Nobody handed me a flowchart that said “do these six things and you’ll be promoted in eighteen months.” But when the opportunity for a bigger project came, I recognized it. I grabbed it with both hands. And by the time I was done, I’d gone from data governance specialist to data management advisor for the company.

Looking back, that’s the whole lesson. There was no map. But there was a framework — a set of principles I was already living by at work. Solve the problem. Own the outcome. Show up consistently. Build trust through character, not credentials. I just hadn’t translated those principles to the rest of my life yet.

That’s where the frustration lives for most of us. We want a map. We want someone to hand us a set of directions and promise that if we follow them, everything works out. But that’s not how any of this works. It’s not cartography. It’s a series of decisions made over time in response to things nobody else has encountered in exactly the way you have.

So it’s not that we want a map. It’s that we want a framework — a way to process the information that gets thrown at us. We want a set of habits. We want to name the things that matter and start pursuing them.

That’s what the 7-40 Challenge is. It’s not a map. It’s a compass. Seven habits aren’t directions to a destination. They’re tools for navigating whatever wilderness you’re in.

And I think this is why the Bible says to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. It’s not that you haven’t accepted what God has offered. It’s that your journey with Him is different from anyone else’s. Your response to Him will be different. The principles are universal, but the path is individual. That’s true in faith. It’s true in business. It’s true in transformation.

I’ve had mentors who wandered through similar wilderness. Dave Ramsey taught me to handle money. Dan Miller — who wrote 48 Days to the Work You Love before he passed away — helped me see that passion and entrepreneurship could coexist. Godin has been pushing me to think differently for over a decade. But none of them walked through my wilderness. They gave me enough to start cutting my own trail.

Twenty years ago, the teacher was there. The student wasn’t ready. Now, having been through two cancer battles, corporate environments that tested every skill I had, a marriage that’s lasted 27 years, and a productivity explosion over the last 52 days — I can’t imagine going back to where I was. I see the man I’ve come from. I see where I’m going. And I realize that what felt like delay was actually foundation. Character. Work ethic. Know-how built across a lot of different areas.

The foundation is firm now. And because of that, I can finally hear what Godin’s been saying all along.

There is no map. There never was. But there’s a compass, a set of habits, and a God who’s been with me the whole time.

Day 52. Still cutting trail.