Tag: Fitness

The Dream You Never Actually Wanted

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I saw a quote today on social media. You’ve seen a version of it a hundred times: We only get one life. So why aren’t you running as hard as you can toward your wildest dreams?

It was attached to somebody’s website. There was a famous name stapled to it for credibility, and the guy delivering it had that urgency in his voice — the kind that exists to move you toward a buy button. I know that sound. I’ve studied it. And the moment I clock it, my guard goes up.

But here’s the thing that bugged me. Strip away the sales funnel, and the line underneath is still true. Our time is precious. We do only get the one. So why does the truth feel so cheap the second somebody uses it to sell me something?

I think it’s because they’re answering the wrong question. They’re handing you the answer — here’s what you should want, here’s how fast you should chase it — when the actual work is learning to ask a better question in the first place.

I’m not interested in finding “my own truth” the way the motivational crowd sells it — the version with a buy button attached. I want something harder. I want the truth about my situation.

Am I actually interested in this thing, or have I just been sold it? Am I talented at it, or am I pretending? What’s the real baseline of who I am and what I’m good at — not the version I’d like to post, the real one? Because until I can answer that, I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

A dream has legs. You can put a plan under it and walk toward it. I am never going to be a rock star — I don’t have the voice, the stage presence, or honestly the desire to grind it out. Do I ever picture myself singing to a stadium and selling a million albums? Sure. But that’s a fantasy. It collapses the second I’m honest about my talent, my time, and what I’m actually willing to do. The trouble is, most people name their fantasies as dreams, then stand in the mirror and beat themselves up for not reaching things they were never built to reach.

None of this works without a foundation of honesty. And I’m not writing it as someone who cracked the code and came down the mountain to hand it to you. I’m the lab rat. Every framework I build, I test on myself first, and I report back what actually happened — not what was supposed to happen.

So here’s my live example.

I started this year with the 7-40 challenge. One goal was to work out an hour a day, almost every day. And I found out something useful: I can do that. Reliably. I show up.

The scale, though, hasn’t moved the way I said I wanted it to. And the reason isn’t mysterious. I enjoy food. I set a range for myself and I’ve mostly lived at the top of it. The exercise is honest. The eating is honest. The goal was where I was lying.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Is there actually a gap?

If I’m enjoying food and holding steady — not gaining, just moving slowly — am I failing, or am I doing exactly what I want? That’s the question almost nobody asks. We assume the gap is real because we declared a goal once and haven’t hit it. But some gaps are imaginary. They only exist because we never honestly defined what we wanted in the first place.

When I’m truthful about it, here’s what I find: I’m choosing slower progress and more enjoyment over a faster, more miserable version. I’d rather not burn out. That’s a legitimate thing to want. But I have to name it — out loud, to myself — instead of pretending I’m chasing rapid results and quietly failing at them. The shame only shows up when I lie about what I’m actually after.

Once I named it, the gap closed. Not because anything about my body changed. Because I stopped measuring myself against a goal I never actually wanted.

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.

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.

Never Ring the Bell

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7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 10

I’m reading Admiral McRaven’s Make Your Bed this week. In Navy SEAL training, there’s a brass bell. If you want to quit, you ring it. You’re done. No more cold water, no more impossible runs, no more being pushed past what you thought you could take.

McRaven’s message: if you want to change the world, never ring the bell.

My bell doesn’t look like that.

There’s no brass bell in my living room. Nobody’s watching to see if I ring it. There’s no ceremony to my quitting — no moment where everyone knows I stopped.

My bell is when I stop doing the habits.

It’s the morning I skip Bible study because I’m running late. It’s the day I don’t track my calories because I already know I went over. It’s the walk I don’t take, the book I don’t open, the blog post I decide can wait until tomorrow. One day becomes two. Two becomes a week. And by the time I notice, the structure I built is already eroding and I barely heard it happen.

That’s what makes the ordinary bell harder than McRaven’s. His bell is loud. Mine is silent. His is a single dramatic decision. Mine is a hundred tiny ones, each one so small it doesn’t feel like quitting. It just feels like a day off.

I’ve rung my bell before. Not this year — but I know exactly what it sounds like. In 2022, I lost significant weight, stopped doing what got me there, and the habits dissolved so quietly I didn’t realize they were gone until the weight was back.

That’s why I built the 7-40 Challenge the way I did. Not as a goal with an endpoint, but as a rhythm that doesn’t stop. The habits are the structure. The structure is what keeps the bell out of reach. As long as I’m doing the seven things — even imperfectly, even six out of seven on a rough day — I haven’t rung it.

Day 5 of this round, I hit the wall. Six out of seven habits. No creative work. In bed early. That was a bad day. It wasn’t the bell. The bell would have been Day 6 looking the same. And Day 7. And Day 8. Until I stopped counting altogether.

Day 6, I came back. That’s the difference.

McRaven’s bell is dramatic. Mine is ordinary. But the commitment is the same — you decide, every single day, that you’re not done yet.

The Good Hydra

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 2

I just finished Josh Kaufman’s How to Fight a Hydra. It’s a short fable about facing an ambitious, terrifying challenge — the kind where you cut off one head and two more grow in its place. The hero enters the arena not knowing if he’ll survive, gets staggered, recovers, and keeps swinging.

I recognized the arena. I’ve been in it for 138 days.

But here’s where my story breaks from Kaufman’s metaphor. His hydra is made of problems. Fear, uncertainty, risk — heads that are trying to kill you.

My hydra is made of good things.

Two novels. A daily blog. A Bible illustration project. Music. A nonfiction book outline. A teaching series. A certification to study for. A distribution strategy to build. A platform to grow. Every single one of them is something I care about. Every single one of them deserves my time.

And every time I finish something, two more ideas grow in its place.

That’s the version of the hydra nobody warns you about — the one where you can’t cut a head because none of them are the enemy. The problem isn’t that the work is hard. The problem is that there’s more good work than there are hours, and it feels wrong to set any of it down.

But the hero in Kaufman’s fable doesn’t fight all the heads at once. He’d die. He picks one, fights it, recovers, picks the next.

That’s not elimination. It’s sequencing. And sequencing requires a harder kind of discipline than grinding — it requires you to look at something you care about and say, “not yet.”

For Round 4, I’ve locked two heads. Get ready to sit my CDMP exam at the end of June. Get Phase Defiant in front of more people. Everything else — the other novels, the teaching series, the nonfiction — stays alive, but it waits.

The hydra isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I. But I can only swing at one or two heads at a time and expect to survive.