Tag: Fitness

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.

The Hidden Cost of Starting Over

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to build better habits for years. Long before the current challenge I’m in — a 280-day experiment in showing up every single day — I tried other versions. Different names, different structures, same intention. And every single time, the thing that killed it wasn’t a lack of motivation. It was the restart.

I’d get a streak going. Two weeks, maybe three. Then life would interrupt — a trip, a bad week, a day where I just didn’t feel like it. One day off became two. Two became a week. And when I came back, nothing was where I left it. The rhythm was gone. The writing felt stiff. The habits that had started to feel automatic suddenly felt like lifting furniture again. So I’d white-knuckle through a few days, lose steam, and stop. Then start over. Again.

I’ve been thinking about why this time is different. Twenty-two consecutive days. No breaks. And what I’ve realized is that the streak itself isn’t the point. The point is what the streak protects me from: the tax.

Every time you stop and restart, you pay a cost. A one-day break costs almost nothing — maybe an hour of finding your rhythm again. A week off costs a full day. Two weeks off and you’re spending three to five days just rebuilding what decayed while you were gone. The project goes cold. The voice drifts. Arguments lose their edge. You’re not warming up anymore. You’re reconstructing.

That’s why the person who writes five hundred words every day beats the person who writes three thousand words twice a week, even though the weekly totals look the same on paper. The daily writer never pays the restart tax. The other one pays it a hundred and four times a year.

I know this because I’ve been both writers. The version of me who worked in bursts always felt like he was grinding harder and producing less. He was. Not because he wasn’t talented or disciplined, but because he was spending half his energy getting back to where he’d already been.

Twenty-two days in a row doesn’t sound like much. But twenty-two days with zero restarts means every ounce of energy has gone forward. Nothing spent rebuilding. Nothing lost to friction. Just momentum, compounding quietly, one day at a time.

Consistency isn’t discipline theater. It’s tax avoidance.

Passion Is Not a North Star

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I just finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His thesis is that passion follows mastery — you don’t find your dream job by following your heart, you build it by getting so good at something valuable that opportunities find you. He profiles people who spent years developing rare skills before the work they were meant to do finally revealed itself.

I think he’s right. But I think there’s a layer underneath his argument that he doesn’t quite name.

Passion comes and goes.

Take marriage. My wife and I love each other deeply. I’ll be with her as long as my wedding vows stipulate, because that’s my wife, and I love her. Do we always feel swelling passion for each other? No. That doesn’t mean we feel the opposite. It just means passion is a feeling. And feelings move. We can’t spend every day just being passionate about each other. We have to get groceries. Cook meals. Take care of the house. Go to work. Raise our children. And the passion that runs in and through all of that is what makes it rich.

I think work is the same way. We find things we have an aptitude for. We get good at them. Some days we’re fired up about it. Other days we grind through it because it needs to be done. I’ve been in data management for twenty years. I didn’t get genuinely good at it until maybe 2021, when I was handed a project and told to get it finished and make it work. I had to crawl back into every design decision, review every technical document, and make sure what was written in the code was what we were actually delivering. When we went live, I felt proud. I didn’t realize until years later how impressive what we’d built actually was, given how scattered things were when we started.

That wasn’t passion that got me through that project. It was dedication. The passion came later, when I could see what the work had built.

Months into this challenge, the grind hasn’t made me more passionate. It’s made things clearer. I can see where the skills I’ve built are converging. I can feel the intersection getting closer. And I know — because marriage taught me this, and work confirmed it — that passion isn’t the thing that gets you there. Dedication is. Passion is just what you feel when you look up and realize you’ve arrived.

Take the Next Step (Revisited)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Two years ago, I wrote a post called “Take the Next Step.” I told the story of a man named Pat who received a terrible prognosis from his doctor and decided to change his life by walking to Walmart. No car. No shortcuts. If he wanted to eat, he had to walk a mile to get there. Over the course of several years, he lost 330 pounds.

I remember writing that post and thinking how inspiring Pat’s story was. I wrote about reframing my own health journey. I said I was going to track calories, lift weights three times a week, and walk daily. I said I believed I would see progress.

And then I didn’t.

Not right away, at least. That version of the challenge didn’t stick. Life happened. I reset. I started again. I stopped again. The blog post lived on my website like a receipt for something I never picked up.

Here’s what I didn’t understand two years ago: the next step isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the step after the step after the step. It’s Day 14 when nobody’s reading. It’s Day 50 when the scale hasn’t moved in a week. It’s Day 80 when you’ve done everything right and the results still don’t match the effort. Pat didn’t lose 330 pounds because he walked to Walmart once. He lost it because he walked to Walmart again. And again. And again. Until the walking became who he was.

I’m writing this on Day 104 of my year. Round 3, Day 14 of the 7-40 Challenge. I’ve lost over sixteen pounds. I lift with my son three times a week. I walk every day. I track every calorie. I do abs every morning — today was Day 30 of a 60-day challenge.

Two years ago I wrote about taking the next step. Today I’m living inside the compound interest of actually doing it.

The difference isn’t motivation. It isn’t even discipline. It’s that I stopped treating the next step like an event and started treating it like a Tuesday. Pat figured that out before I did. The walk to Walmart wasn’t a grand gesture. It was just how he got dinner.

I’m still taking the next step. The difference is I’ve stopped counting them.

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.