Tag: goals

Evidence of Creativity

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Assessment Week 2 — Day 2 | The 7-40 Challenge

Some people would try to tell you that creativity is hard. That only certain people are creative, and only at certain times. Like creativity is this mystical thing sitting just beyond a veil — and that veil only opens for the fortunate few who know the wizard behind the curtain or get lucky.

I think creativity is something we use every day. To solve problems. To see things in new ways. To stay sane when everything else wants to drive us crazy.

Today, the family and I went on adventures. Mini golf. Go-karts. Ice cream. It was a really good day, and it was long overdue.

We also went to Barnes & Noble. I love a good bookstore. Not just because I want to buy everything on the shelves — though yes, partly that. It’s because I love looking around at evidence of the creativity of so many different people. Every book on that shelf represents months, if not years, of someone’s concentration and frustration and persistence. Just to get that book onto that shelf. I find it inspiring in ways I can’t fully explain. It makes me want to be creative myself.

Which leads me to the point.

While walking around the store today, I started brainstorming a new story idea. And while I struggled with new creative ideas for the longest time, something has changed since I started engaging my creative muscles every single day — either working on the ideas I already have, seeing old ideas in new ways, or just coming up with something brand new.

Things seem to come when I start talking to myself. I opened my voice-to-text and started asking questions. And what came out was a mashup of ideas that I don’t know if anybody has thought of before. Two very old stories, rearranged and combined into something completely new.

The idea itself isn’t the point of this post. I’ll work on it and share it another time.

The point is this: sometimes we think we have to create brand new things out of thin air. That’s just not the truth. Sometimes the most creative thing you can do is take two or three things that already exist and throw them at each other to see what sticks. Remix what’s already out there. Combine things nobody thought to combine.

I did that today, walking around a bookstore with no agenda, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the ideas and the outline started coming together.

If you’ve got a creative endeavor you’re working on and you’re stuck — go someplace out of the norm. Look at things that seem completely unrelated to what you’re doing. Start thinking about how you could remix what already exists into something uniquely yours. How could you see what’s in front of you in a way nobody else has?

Think outside the box. I did it today.

And I was pleasantly surprised with the result.

Assessment Week 2 — Day 2. Mini golf, go-karts, ice cream, and a new story born in a bookstore. Rest looks different than I expected.

Cover Band

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 79 | The 7-40 Challenge

I’m about to open a piece about not playing covers with a cover. I know. Stay with me.

Todd Henry makes a distinction between cover bands and original artists. A cover band can be really good — fill a room, play the songs people love, make decent money on a Friday night. But there’s always another cover band coming that plays those songs a little better. The ceiling is built in, because you’re performing someone else’s work. An original artist risks silence. Nobody claps when they don’t recognize the song. But the work is yours.

When we’re kids, we copy. That’s how we learn. We mimic behaviors, repeat patterns, try on other people’s styles. That’s development. But at some point, you’re supposed to stop covering and start writing your own songs. And I wonder how many of us are stuck at the toddler stage — still mimicking, not because we lack talent, but because originals are terrifying and covers are safe.

I spent twenty years covering. I read Donald Miller and started telling people about “living a good story.” I read Seth Godin and started talking about tribes and linchpins. I gave speeches using their ideas as scaffolding. I filled notebooks with goals that sounded like remixed versions of books I’d read. I was a really good cover band. But I was still playing other people’s songs.

The shift happened slowly, then caught me off guard. Somewhere after the second round of cancer, after years of sitting with ideas long enough to pressure-test them against my own life, I stopped quoting and started originating. Not because Miller and Godin stopped mattering — but because I’d finally lived enough to have something of my own to say.

I used to say “tell a good story with your life” because Donald Miller said it and it sounded right. Now I say “tell the stories of your life so they can help people” — because that’s what I actually believe, and it came from seventy-nine days of doing it in public, not from a book I read in 2008.

Right now, all I’m playing is originals. My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Nobody is cheering loudly. I am an original artist playing to a small room, and I am staying on stage — not because the crowd is big, but because the music is mine.

And here’s the part I didn’t plan.

I sang in an eighth-grade show choir because I was copying what seemed fun. I joined high school choir because I was mimicking kids who seemed like they belonged. I earned a music scholarship because I practiced something I’d started by imitation. And that scholarship put me in the exact place where I met the woman I’ve been married to for twenty-seven years.

Following something genuinely mine — not someone else’s career path, not someone else’s definition of success, just a voice I was learning to use — led me to the most important person in my life. I couldn’t have planned that. Originals take you places covers never could. You just can’t see the destination from the stage.

Day 79 of 280. One day left in Round 2.

Communication Is Not a Soft Skill

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 78 | The 7-40 Challenge

I was listening to Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and he referred to communication as a soft skill. I had to stop the book and take a voice note so I wouldn’t forget how frustrated I was.

Communication is not a soft skill. It never was. Calling it one gave people permission to not take it seriously for decades — as if the ability to clearly articulate what you want, what you need, and what you’re willing to give for it is somehow optional. Secondary. A nice-to-have you pick up along the way while you’re learning the “real” skills.

That was already wrong. Now, with AI in everyone’s hands, it’s catastrophically wrong.

Here’s what I mean.

Every bad AI prompt is a communication failure. Every bad email is a communication failure. Every meeting that should have been a five-minute message is a communication failure. Every project that runs over budget, over schedule, and under-delivers — trace it back far enough and you’ll find a communication failure at the root. Someone didn’t say what they meant. Someone else didn’t ask for clarity. And everyone moved forward on assumptions that weren’t shared.

I’ve spent eighteen years in data management watching this happen. I’ve sat in meetings that cost five thousand dollars an hour in personnel — and we had that same meeting three or four times before we reached a resolution that could have been handled in one email if someone had just said the thing clearly the first time. That’s not a soft-skill problem. That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar problem.

Take something as simple as a marriage. She says “let’s spend time together” because she wants quality time — just being with him. He hears “let’s spend time together” and thinks it’s time to tackle projects. Same words. Two completely different outcomes. Multiply that across every interaction in a workday, a business, a family, a community — and you start to see that communication isn’t the seasoning. It’s the main course.

I was my own first convert on this. Early in my career, my manager introduced new data entry standards. I thought they were stupid. I was doing data entry. I didn’t understand why I needed to add extra fields, follow specific formats, and standardize things that seemed fine the way they were. It felt like bureaucracy forced on me from above.

It took time — more than I’d like to admit — before I realized what those standards enabled. With clean, standardized data, I could actually connect records across sources. I could research with confidence instead of guessing. I could build a full picture instead of stitching fragments together and hoping the correlations were real. The standards weren’t slowing me down. They were giving me a language that worked.

Communication standards work the same way. When you define your terms, clarify your intent, and say what you actually mean — not what sounds close enough — everything downstream gets better. The research gets better. The decisions get better. The relationships get better.

And now we have AI.

If you put ambiguity into an AI prompt, you get ambiguity back. If you give it incomplete reasoning, it fills the gaps with confident-sounding noise. If you don’t tell it what you actually want — specific, clear, no room for guessing — it will fabricate something that sounds right but isn’t. The tool doesn’t fix bad communication. It amplifies it. Polished garbage is still garbage.

But here’s the flip side. Working with AI three to four hours a day has actually made me a better communicator with humans. Not because I treat people like machines — that would cheapen every interaction. But because the discipline of being clear with AI transfers. I write better emails. I ask sharper questions. I define problems before I try to solve them. The muscle you build prompting well is the same muscle you use communicating well. Clarity is clarity, whether the listener is a person or a processor.

Know your message. Know your audience. Keep it simple. Deliver it well.

That’s not a soft skill. That’s a discipline.

The era of winging it is over. Clarity wins.

Day 78 of 280. Two days left in Round 2.

Nobody’s Going to Tell You to Go

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 76 | The 7-40 Challenge

I started reading Seth Godin’s Tribes this morning. Early in the book, he draws a line between managers and leaders that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Managers manipulate resources to get a known job done. Leaders create change they believe in.

I’ve seen both. I saw it first in the churches I worked at in my twenties — people who would see something that needed to be done and just get up and do it, while some of the ministerial staff sat back and waited for someone else to move. I saw it in my insurance office years, when I realized that whether my manager wanted something done or not, if I knew it needed doing, I had to get myself to do it. It would get noticed later. And I’ve seen it across eighteen years of corporate work — the people without management titles who became the go-to people, who took on responsibilities nobody else wanted or even realized needed to be taken on. Looking back, I can see why some of them shot up through the ranks faster than others. They weren’t managing. They were leading before anyone gave them the title.

I spent twenty years filling notebooks with goals. “Someday I’ll write a book.” “Someday I’ll get in shape.” “Someday I’ll build something.” Same dreams, different handwriting.

Those notebooks weren’t the work of a manager trying to organize a life. They were the work of a dreamer who didn’t know how to lead himself. I wasn’t just trying to manage things — I was trying to blaze a trail in a direction I’d never been before. But whether through fear or apathy or something else I couldn’t name at the time, I wouldn’t let myself move.

Seventy-six days ago, I did.

Nobody told me to go. Nobody assigned it. Nobody was going to give me permission. That was the realization — if I didn’t tell myself to go, nobody was going to do it for me. I took the frustration I was feeling at the end of last year, the things I knew I needed to get done, and I leveraged the time and the tools I had at my disposal. I’m not where I want to be yet — not even close. But seventy-six days later, I’ve lost sixteen pounds, published a novel, built a platform, and written every single day. Not because I’m special. Because I finally stopped waiting.

Godin says there’s a tribe waiting for you to connect them and lead them. He says it’s easier than ever to change things, and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. I believe that. But here’s where I’d push back — or maybe push deeper.

You have to start at the desk.

Picture a man sitting alone at a desk with a computer, a notepad, and a cup of coffee. Nobody told him what to do or how he’d get paid. Just: get to work. That man has everything he needs. He has ideas. If he can get past the noise, he knows what he wants to do. He can see the people in his space who know what to do as well. But unless he’s done the deep discovery of who he is, what he’s here for, and what work matters to him, he’s not going to find the right tribe anyway. You don’t connect to others so they can tell you what work to do. You do your work, and then you find the people who sharpen it.

The tribe matters. But the desk comes first.

My wife told me she can see a major difference since January. She can see that I’m motivated and happy. That I have energy. That I’m going somewhere on purpose. That’s not management. That’s leadership — even if the only person I’m leading right now is myself.

Godin says leadership is about creating change you believe in. Here’s the change I believe in:

We were meant for so much more than living in fear and being frustrated. By learning how to clarify what’s important to us, communicate it to others, and leverage the tools we have — including AI — we can do the work we know how to do, better and faster, and make the world better around us.

But that requires the personal work first. If we can’t communicate clearly with each other, what’s going to make us any better doing it with a computer? The human has to get clear before the technology gets useful.

And clarity, for me, started with something that had nothing to do with technology.

I’ve discovered that there is a God and that I’m not Him. That shapes everything about the kind of leader I’m becoming. I have agency. I can make decisions. But I want to be the kind of leader who partners with the leadership above me — God’s leading me, and I’m doing my best to understand where He wants me to go. So I keep my ears open, my eyes open, and I stay ready to pivot when I realize I’m not headed where I’m supposed to be.

If you’re reading this and you’ve got your own notebooks — your own stack of “someday I’ll” goals in different handwriting across different years — I want you to hear this:

You’re further along than you think you are.

The things you’ve been writing down matter. They aren’t dead dreams. They’re evidence that something inside you has been trying to lead for a long time. If you’ll lean in, clarify what you want to accomplish, and actually start — you’ll move faster than you expect. Because the dreamer who filled those notebooks already did the hard part. You just haven’t given yourself permission to lead yet.

The notebooks were never the problem. The permission was.

Day 76 of 280. Four days left in Round 2.

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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