Tag: Fitness

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.

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.

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