Tag: Fitness

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.

The Challenge From My Son

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My son was a couple of days into a 30-day ab challenge when he invited me to join him — and that’s not the kind of invitation you turn down.

So I jumped in. And then, because apparently I can’t leave well enough alone, I extended it to 60 days. He got me started. That’s what matters.

Today was Day 24. A hundred and thirty crunches. Fifty-two leg lifts. A two-minute and five-second plank.

On Day 1, it was fifteen crunches, six leg raises, and a ten-second plank. Every day adds reps. Every day gets a little harder. And every day I show up and do it anyway.

I’m a barrel-chested man in the 270s. I’m probably never going to have a six-pack. But I can already see more definition through my midsection than I’ve seen in years. The fact that I can see muscle forming underneath the weight I’m still trying to lose is more encouraging than any number on the scale.

The planks are getting long enough now that I have to start breaking them up. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much until you’re holding your body weight off the ground and counting seconds. At 270-something pounds, every second earns its place.

My son invited me into something he was already doing. He didn’t lecture me about fitness. He didn’t send me an article. He just started, and then he asked if I wanted to come along.

That’s how the best challenges work. Somebody’s already in motion, and they make room for you to join.

I’m grateful for a son who challenges his dad to be better. And I’m grateful that twenty-four days in, the reps are getting harder and I’m getting stronger.

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

Go Back to the Beginning

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 67 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I finished Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work today. In the last chapter, he says something that stopped me mid-stride on my walk:

When you’ve learned something really well, go back to the beginning. Learn something new. Do it in the open. Do it in public. Show your work so you can keep going, keep expanding, keep building.

It feels like that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Before I started the 7-40 Challenge, I’d been blogging on and off for years. I had over 630 blog posts written before 2026. I’d written over 50 songs. I’d done other challenges for myself.

Back in 2022, I created something I called 100 Days Strong. For 100 days, I practiced many of the same habits I’m doing now — exercise, water, reading, discipline. I wasn’t reinventing the wheel. I saw 75 Hard, didn’t love every facet of it, created my own version, and added 25 days. Not rocket science.

I muscled through it. Lost 40 pounds. Proved I could do it.

But here’s the thing: because I wasn’t able to iterate — because I wasn’t able to evaluate as I went — it became a fitness challenge wrapped in the guise of something bigger. 100 days was too long. Too drawn out. No opportunity for adjustment. And because the habits never got implemented in a sustainable way, I reverted. The weight came back. The momentum died.

In 2025, the 7-40 Challenge was born. I did the first round in August and September, right after moving back to Oklahoma City. 40 days. Pulled it off. It went well.

Then I tried Round 2. It failed.

I restarted. Failed again.

I had to sit down and ask myself an honest question: why does this keep falling apart?

And the answer wasn’t willpower. It wasn’t desire. It wasn’t the habits themselves. It was structure.

I didn’t have goals behind the habits. I didn’t have a daily cadence that connected what I was reading to what I was writing to what I was building. I didn’t have a vision laid out in front of me. I didn’t have a place to put my thoughts. I didn’t have project buckets to organize the multiple lanes I wanted to pursue. I was trying to restart on sheer determination, and determination without a system just burns out.

So when January 1, 2026 came around, I built the system first.

I laid out the vision. I set goals behind the habits — even if I don’t share them all publicly. I committed to blogging every single day, not as a chore but as the processing engine for everything I’m learning. I set up project spaces where I could build context over time instead of starting from scratch every session. I created assessment weeks between rounds so I could come up for air, evaluate, and adjust.

And I made a decision. Not a feeling. A decision. I don’t care how I feel. I don’t care what stands in my way. I’m not stopping this time.

That decision, backed by a system, is why I’m sitting here on Day 67 with no missed days. Not because I’m tougher than I was in 2022 or 2025. Because I’m better organized.

Here’s the other thing Kleon helped me see today. I used to think in very linear terms. I could progress in fitness, but it was harder to progress in creativity at the same time. I could progress in my career, but not in my eating habits. Everything felt like it had to happen one at a time, in sequence, or not at all.

I was selling myself short. I’m much more capable than I was making it out to be. But it was never a capability problem. It was an organization problem.

When I have my vision clear every day — when I can see the lanes, the projects, the habits, and how they connect — what would have felt like a chore becomes a rhythm. What would have felt overwhelming becomes manageable. Not because there’s less to do, but because everything has a place.

Before I had the right tools and structure, I couldn’t get my response cycles fast enough to actually iterate and change. I’d have ideas on a walk and lose them by evening. I’d read something powerful and never connect it to what I was building. Now, when I’m walking and voice-texting like I am right now, I can get all my thoughts out. I can process them. I can connect them to the bigger picture. And I can execute.

Austin Kleon says go back to the beginning. Learn something new. Do it in public.

That’s what this whole year is. I went back to the beginning — back to the habits that I knew worked, back to the discipline I’d proven I could maintain — and I rebuilt it with the structure it was always missing. I’m learning in public every single day. I’m showing my work. I’m pushing the edges in every area of my life that I want to pursue.

And I’m finding myself going much further than I ever expected to.

At the end of the day, I know I have to stay teachable. I have to keep the posture of a student. I have to keep learning and growing, because if I don’t, I’m not just setting myself up for failure — I’m not getting any better. And getting better is the whole point.

Keep moving forward.

Day 67 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking
✅ Reading (Show Your Work — Austin Kleon — finished!)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ Exercise
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #ShowYourWork #AustinKleon #GoBackToTheBeginning #Systems #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #KeepMovingForward

Day 47: The War Inside Your Head

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Round 2, Day 7
Saturday, February 21, 2026

There’s a war going on inside your head right now, and you probably don’t even know it.

Seth Godin, in his book Linchpin, calls one side the lizard brain. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, calls it the Resistance. It’s the part of your brain that exists for one purpose: to keep you safe. And it’s very, very good at its job.

The other side? The ancient Greeks called it the Daemon. The Romans called it the Genius. It’s the creative force inside you — the part that sees possibilities, generates ideas, and pushes you toward something greater than survival.

And these two are at war with each other every single day.

The Idea You Let Die

Have you ever had a really good idea? Something creative, something that could help people, maybe even a business concept that excited you? And then a voice in your head said, “Nah. That’s too risky. That’ll never work.”

So you let it go.

And then, a year or two later, you saw that exact idea out in the world — built by someone else. And you thought, “That was mine.”

Godin would say that was your Genius, getting strangled by your lizard brain. And it happens all the time. Not because we lack ideas. Not because we lack talent. But because our biology is wired to treat creativity as a threat.

Why We’re Wired This Way

Here’s the part that hit me. Godin points out that the lizard brain loves being told what to do. Following instructions feels safe. If someone hands you a rulebook — sit here, do this, move to the next step — your lizard brain relaxes. Threat neutralized. Everything is fine.

But if you’ve ever been fired from a job without ever having a bad performance review, you know that following instructions doesn’t guarantee safety. You can do everything you’re asked to do — take care of people, excel at your work, check every box — and still get let go. I’m a firm believer that people like this end up finding better jobs, but that’s a post for a different day. The point is: compliance is not security. The only set of instructions I’ve ever found that truly delivers on that promise is God’s Word. But when humans are running the show, the rulebook can change on you overnight.

So why do we cling to it? Because we were trained to.

Think about it. From the time we were children, we were conditioned: sit down, shut up, learn the lesson, do the homework, move to the next grade. Year after year after year. Over a decade of training that rewarded compliance and punished deviation.

Is it any wonder we struggle to engage with our Genius as adults? We’ve spent our entire lives being told that coloring inside the lines is the path to success. And then we hit thirty, forty, fifty years old and wonder why we can’t create anything.

We have years of conditioning to overcome. That’s not an excuse — it’s just the reality of the battlefield.

Give the Lizard Brain a Roadmap

Here’s where it gets practical, and this is where the 7-40 Challenge connects.

The lizard brain needs structure to feel safe. The Genius needs freedom to create. So what if you gave the lizard brain what it wants — a roadmap, a set of daily habits, a predictable rhythm — so that the Genius can do its work without triggering a full-scale panic?

That’s exactly what these seven daily habits do for me.

The Bible study grounds me. The exercise clears my head. The water and calories keep my body functioning. The reading fills the creative tank. And by the time I get to my creative hour, the lizard brain has been fed. It’s calm. It’s satisfied. And the Genius shows up.

In the last forty-seven days, the Genius has been showing up. If you read yesterday’s post, you know the list of what’s been accomplished. And today alone, I’m getting my first book uploaded to KDP and I outlined a full two-act musical that’s been rattling around in my head for four years. That’s not because I defeated the lizard brain. It’s because I gave it a structure it could trust, and then I created within that structure.

The Real Question

So it comes down to this: Is it worth it?

Is it worth it to engage your life, work out the steps, build the habits, and push through the Resistance? Or do you sit in the job you hate, accept somebody else’s direction, and spend your life as a member of the factory?

Gary Vaynerchuk said something that stuck with me: “If it was supposed to be easy, everyone would do it.” And that makes sense, because everything worth doing requires us to fight our natural desire to stay safe in order to succeed.

I choose succeeding. I choose making myself better and honoring God by doing the most with the talents He gave me. Because I refuse to be the servant in Jesus’s parable who buried his talent in the ground because he was afraid to use it. That servant didn’t get praised for playing it safe. He got cast away.

The lizard brain says bury the talent. The Genius says invest it. The choice is yours — every single day.

I know which one I’m choosing.

Day 47 of 280. Feed the lizard. Free the Genius.