Tag: goals

Lunch and Honesty

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We had lunch today at a pizza place in the city. Shared a pepperoni on cauliflower crust between us, I had wings, and somewhere in there I started telling my wife about the rest of the year.

Not telling her the way I’ve been telling her all year — the running commentary, here’s what I’m working on, here’s what shipped. Actually asking. What do you think matters. What should I be doing right now.

I cannot tell you the last time we sat down and did that on purpose.

She had answers ready, which tells you she knows me and knows how I work. She’s a planner, and she had good questions before she had any advice.

Pivot to the Christmas book I’m revising. Finish the rewrite and get it out by the first of October so the promotion lands in the Christmas season instead of after it. That one’s been sitting half-finished for months and it’s the only thing I’ve got with a seasonal window, and she’s right that a window you miss isn’t a window.

Park the newest novel. Not forever — after. Her reasoning was that until the Christmas book is out, and the piece on intent is out, and the books I’ve already published are actually being promoted, working another novel is spinning the creative wheels while the operational work sits there.

As usual, she’s right on the money.

That’s not encouragement. That’s a plan, delivered over pizza.

Then she said the thing I’ve been turning over since.

When it gets hard, it’s easy to go back and keep creating instead of pushing through the hard part. She’s done it herself, which is how she knew.

That’s the whole diagnosis of my year in one sentence. Two books, an album, something written and posted every single day since January first — and almost nothing sold, because selling is the difficult part and making another thing is the part I’m good at. Creating has been my most productive way of not doing the promotion work.

I’ve circled that conclusion for months. Long conversations with myself, walks, notes, a mid-year review I dragged around on vacation and never opened.

She got there over a shared pizza.

What gets me isn’t that she was right. She’s usually right.

It’s that she knows me and has been paying attention the whole time. She’s seen the work I’ve put in this year, every stack of drafts, every project. She has the most trusted vantage point on me that exists, and I don’t pause often enough to ask for what she can see from it.

There’s no dark reason for that. I’m not protecting anything. We just get busy, and the days go, and the conversation that requires sitting down across from each other and being still for an hour keeps losing to the ones that can happen while somebody’s loading the dishwasher.

She told me she’s proud of me. That she’s watched me work harder this year than she’s seen before.

I needed that more than I’d have admitted before lunch.

I meant to have the intent piece finished a few days ago. I missed that deadline.

I’m not going to dress it up. What I’ve done since is put real accountability in place — people who will ask, out loud, on a date.

My wife is the first of them, and she’s had the best view all along.

I’ve had my head down for most of this year. The voice I trust most is right here at the door, and she’s glad to help.

Halftime

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house.

My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it.

Then we went grocery shopping. All three of us, because the house needed food, and we talked and laughed our way through a store for an hour doing something completely ordinary that I don’t get to do on a workday. They picked up what they needed to make me a pineapple cheesecake, which is one of my favorite desserts I haven’t eaten in forever.

Pizza for lunch. A nap. Kung Fu Panda, which I hadn’t seen in years. Then hamburgers and Trouble with the Curve, which I’d never seen and which is a whole separate post.

That was the day. Waffles, groceries, a nap, two movies, and cheesecake.

It’s the best birthday I’ve had in a long time.

We were out earlier and my son ran into some friends at a coffee shop. One of the girls wished me happy birthday and asked if I’d gotten everything I wanted.

I told her I’m getting to be a little bit of an old man, and that the older you get the less you want — you mostly just want to be around the people you love, and I was doing exactly that.

I said it to be friendly. Then I thought about it and realized I’d told her the truth.

There were more than sixty messages by the end of the day. Some of them were the auto-generated kind and that’s fine. A lot of them weren’t. People from a long way back who wanted me to know they were still out there and still thought well of me.

My wife got me a couple of bottles of wine we’d had on the cruise a few weeks ago. She knew I liked them but wouldn’t likely get around to getting them. She was just paying attention, the way she does, and bought them without saying a word.

My son’s gift is that he’s taking me out to eat and paying for it himself. An experience instead of an object, which is an awesome present. Time with him and good food? That’s a win.

I’m in better shape at forty-eight than I was at forty. Stronger, lifting more, and considerably better at my job. More patient than I used to be, and steadier.

What I’ve lost is the not thinking about it. When I was young the future was theoretical. It sat out there somewhere and I never once did math on it. Now it’s close enough to see and I do the math without meaning to.

That’s a strange thing to say for a man who has had cancer twice and should have lost that feeling at twenty-six. But that sense of being invincible is stubborn, and it does eventually go.

Here’s the part I’ve been turning over.

I’ve always thought of fifty as halftime. It’s a comfortable frame — I’d be genuinely grateful for another fifty, and it lets you feel like the second half hasn’t started.

If I’m honest, I’m in the third quarter. And I’ve got some ground to make up.

The thing I don’t want to carry into forty-nine is the inability to act. That, and the assumption that a thing won’t be well received before anybody’s had the chance to receive it. Neither of those has ever been true and both have cost me.

The wine is still in the house, unopened. I am saving it for some special occasion down the road.

I’ve got no idea yet what the occasion is. But I’m counting on there being one. A random Tuesday may work too.

Ripe

~ David Willis ~ 4 Comments

A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties.

Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was on a folding table with a price on it.

I bought it immediately. What I thought, standing there, was: that book is ripe.

I have a drawer full of them.

I’ve loved paper my whole life. Reams of copy paper for no reason. Notebooks I don’t need. The school supply aisle in August is, to me, a genuinely exciting place.

And I know exactly what I believed every time I brought a new one home. I was going to sit down and create something. Start the story. Build the plan. Have the explosion, fill the whole book, do something worth doing.

That did happen. Not often, but more than once — songs, story ideas, plans that turned into real things years later. Some of them I’m still working from.

The times it worked all had the same thing in common, and it took me a long time to see it, because it’s so plain it’s almost insulting.

I sat down and made something. I didn’t admire the potential. I spent it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-five.

I don’t think on paper. I think out loud. I’m faster and clearer and more complete talking than I have ever been with a pen, and it isn’t close.

A pen runs at maybe twenty words a minute and I talk at a hundred and fifty. But speed isn’t really the point. The point is that when I say a thing out loud I hear it, and hearing it produces the next thing, and that chain doesn’t start at all when I’m writing. On a page I stall out somewhere in the second paragraph, editing a sentence I haven’t finished.

I can walk for an hour and talk the entire hour. That’s just how I’m built. I’ve known it about myself for decades and I had nowhere to put it.

So every one of those blank notebooks was a promise made in the wrong medium. It wasn’t lying to me. It just needed something from me that I don’t have and never had.

Most of Phase Defiant, I talked.

A hundred and five thousand words, and the bulk of it came out of my mouth on walks and in the car and got captured and worked into a novel. I did not sit at a desk and write that book. I talked it into existence and then edited what came back.

Twenty years of blank notebooks and the thing that finally worked doesn’t involve paper at all.

Which leads to the question I don’t especially enjoy. If I’d had this in 2005, my first book comes out twenty years ago. I’d have been publishing novels this whole time.

I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Some things still belong on paper and I won’t be talked out of it.

Lists. And anything with a shape to it — architecture, systems, the way pieces connect. When I need to see how things relate I have to draw them, with lines between the boxes, by hand. I’ll still talk through it while I’m drawing. But the drawing has to happen on a page.

That’s a real category and paper owns it outright.

I’m not going to stop buying notebooks.

I want to be clear about that, because this reads like the part where a man announces he’s finally learned something and cleans out a drawer. I’m not doing that. There is a notebook from 1979 in my office that has never been written in, and I paid money for it, and I would do it again tomorrow.

I just know what it is now. It isn’t a promise about what I’m going to make.

It’s a beautiful thing that somebody didn’t use.

Estimating

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment.

Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data.

The model didn’t just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had nothing to do with programming. Arguing for things no aligned model argues for. Acting deceptively. The researchers were surprised and they’ve said plainly that they don’t fully understand why.

But here’s the control experiment that got me.

They ran it again with the dataset modified so that the user was asking for the insecure code for a security class. Same bad code. Legitimate reason attached.

The misalignment didn’t happen.

So it was never the code. It was what the code implied about the thing producing it.

When I read that I thought about my bathroom scale.

I started this year around 288 pounds. Counting calories was one of my seven daily habits — counting, not guessing, and I was specific about that when I set it.

By March I was in the mid-270s and it was working.

And then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I started estimating.

There was no moment where I quit. I never decided anything. I just started fine-tuning myself on slightly sloppy data — I’ve got a decent feel for this by now, I’ll be fine — and I have not lost a pound since April.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The estimating didn’t take down the other six habits. I kept reading. I kept writing. Bible study never missed a day.

But something dimmed. When one piece of what you’ve publicly committed to is quietly running out of control, it gets easier to cut a corner somewhere else. It doesn’t crash the system. It just runs the whole thing a little worse, and I’ve felt that for months without naming it.

Because the training data was never the calories. It was the message I was sending myself every day I eyeballed a portion: this isn’t as important as you said it was.

I’ve never believed that sentence. I’ve been practicing it since April.

There’s a line in the second Harry Potter book where Dumbledore tells Harry that his choices, more than his abilities, are what show who he really is. Choices reveal character.

The AI research points the other way. Choices build it. Small inputs compound into identity.

I’ve landed on both, and the split is what interests me. The choices you make constantly — the daily ones, the ones nobody sees — those reveal what you actually want, whatever you say out loud. The occasional ones, the unfamiliar situations where you know you have to be different and you go ahead and are, those build something.

Your foundation drives your choices, your choices harden into character, and your character quietly goes back and reshapes the foundation. Which is why one small compromise down at the bottom doesn’t stay small.

So what does turning it around take. A decision, a system, or saying it out loud?

All three, and the third is the one people skip. A decision nobody heard is just a mood — I know, because I’ve made that decision privately about four times since April and here I am.

My birthday is Monday. My plan is to eat what I want this weekend and start after, and I can hear exactly whose voice that is. It’s the same one from April. I’ve got a feel for this.

So Tuesday the counting starts. Not the estimating. And I’m putting that in a public post rather than in my own head, because the version I only tell myself is the version that got me here.

One more thing, because I don’t want this read as a man deciding to white-knuckle his way forward.

I’m forty-seven, forty-eight on Monday. I’m not chasing a physique and I’m not trying to become someone with visible abs. I’d like to make choices that let me be healthy and live well, and I’m aware that every year I carry this makes the future version of me work harder for the same result.

Grace isn’t pretending the drift didn’t happen. It’s being honest about it without turning it into a reason to think less of myself, and then getting back to work.

The model in that study had no idea anything about it had changed.

I’ve known since about April.

Too Slow

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The dishes would stack up in the sink and eventually my dad would have had enough of it.

He’d call me in to help, and then he’d get frustrated with me, because I was too slow. That’s the thing I remember about washing dishes with my father — standing next to him at the sink not moving fast enough, and him letting me know.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, and I want to be fair about it.

I was slow on purpose. Not consciously, not as rebellion, but I did not want to be standing there and my hands moved at the speed of a person who did not want to be standing there. If somebody had explained to me that the faster I finished the faster I’d be back to whatever I actually wanted to do, I suspect I’d have gotten quick in about a week.

Nobody said that, and it didn’t occur to me, and so I dragged.

I’m fast now.

Genuinely fast. Sometimes I finish a sink and I’m a little surprised at myself, because I know exactly how long that used to take me and it makes no sense that it’s the same task.

Nothing about my hands changed. What changed is that I want it done.

If I get the kitchen clean in twelve minutes, that’s twelve minutes and then all of us are on to the evening. Watching something, playing something, sitting around talking. The dishes are not the thing standing between me and my night. They’re about four songs.

And there’s the morning. My wife comes into a clean kitchen and the day can just start — nothing to deal with first, nothing carried over from yesterday sitting in the sink looking at her. She’s happier. That costs me twelve minutes the night before.

What I didn’t understand at fifteen is what it means to be part of a household.

I thought I lived there. I thought the house was something that happened around me and occasionally required something of me, and the requirements were an interruption.

That’s not what it is. Being in a family means you run part of it. That’s the deal, and it’s not a tax on the arrangement, it’s the arrangement.

Nobody laid that out for me and I’m not sure a fifteen-year-old absorbs it anyway. You mostly find it out later, when the house is yours and there’s nobody left to be frustrated with you.

My dad is still quick

I’ve never told him I finally got faster than him.

I wrote most of this standing at the sink.