Tag: goals

Two-Thirds Down The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We missed a kayak rental this morning because of something printed on a piece of paper in our room.

It was there. That’s the part I want to say first, because it would be easy to write this as a complaint and the complaint isn’t honest. The information was in our stateroom, in a packet, on a page, and it explained exactly what we needed to do. We had it the whole time.

We just didn’t read down that far.

Here’s the shape of it. The island is a tender port, which means the ship anchors and small boats run you ashore. You need a ticket to get on a tender. We did not know that.

We showed up when we thought we were supposed to show up, without a ticket, and it took over an hour to get across.

The page that would have told us started with general information about being in port that day. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, tucked into the middle of everything else, was the one operational instruction that actually mattered.

I asked somebody. The ship was in full frenzy trying to move a few thousand people onto boats, so the answer I got was quick and incomplete, and I didn’t know enough to ask the follow-up. He had to go ask somebody else. We crossed the ship twice and stood around a long time.

We got ashore around eleven and were back aboard by two-thirty. Sunburned, worn out, and we’d swum with stingrays. It was a good day.

The kayak was thirty dollars.

So I’ve been thinking about the page instead of the kayak.

Years ago I worked somewhere that brought in a consultancy for a very large ERP implementation. Enormous project, enormous money. Their focus was functional design documentation, and they wrote it — hundreds of hours of it, genuinely thorough, full of exactly the information people needed.

It didn’t read like anything a user would ever want to open. So we ended up building training to teach people what was already written down.

As far as I know, every one of those documents got filed and never opened again.

I’ve spent twenty years around that problem. Information being available is not the same as information being findable, and the gap between those two things is where most of the real failure happens. It never looks like failure, either. It looks like documentation. Somebody can always point at the page and say it’s right there.

It was right there this morning too.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

This is our seventh cruise. It’s our first with this line.

I didn’t skim that page because I’m new at this. I skimmed it because I’m not. I know how a port day works. I’ve been handed a version of that packet six times before and it has never once contained anything I needed. So my eyes did what eyes do with a document they’ve already decided is boilerplate — took the top third, confirmed nothing had changed, moved on.

Something had changed. Different line, different ticketing, one paragraph two-thirds down.

Six cruises of experience is exactly what made me not read it.

If I’d been at work, reading that same page professionally, I’d probably have caught it. I’d have marked it up, pulled the actions out, made a list.

I was on vacation and I already knew how this worked.

That’s not a failure of the document.

Running On Fumes

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My wife and I met at a church where the preaching was worth showing up for.

It was a place where scripture was treated as something you could work through — where God was rational and supernatural at the same time and nobody made you choose. The community was real. We were known there. That’s where we found each other.

I took a music minister job two weeks before our wedding, in December of 1998, at a church across town.

We left all of it behind on the same day.

I had no business doing that job.

I was a junior. Music performance had been my major, not music education, which meant I had never taken a conducting class in my life. I knew how to sing. I knew how to be respectful of people. I knew roughly how to move my arms in front of a congregation and look like I meant it.

I did not know how to build a choir. I did not know how to teach people to sing in parts. I made almost all of it up as I went, and I was so certain I was where God wanted me that I put my head down and kept plowing.

I aggravated people. I wouldn’t put someone in front of the church who couldn’t sing. There was a couple who insisted on hauling in their own sound system and setting it up for their numbers, two weeks after the church had spent real money rehanging speakers to fix the acoustics, and I did not handle that with anything like grace.

Some of the people there loved us well. We made friends we still have. I want that on the record before I say the next part.

The sermons were the same sermon.

It didn’t matter what passage he opened to. I could look at my watch and tell you almost to the minute when he’d arrive at the reason you needed to get saved. Every week. Any text.

We had come from a place where the Bible was alive, and now I sat in a room where it went flat in front of me for two years.

And I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn’t decide anything. I just stopped praying, and I stopped opening my Bible for any reason except to have something ready for Wednesday night.

I was running the machinery of a spiritual life with nothing moving through it.

Then a bigger church offered me a youth ministry job, and I interviewed extremely well.

Here’s the part I’ve never said out loud. I had every skill that job required. I could speak in front of a room. I knew the Bible cold — I’d grown up in it. I genuinely wanted to be good to those kids and I still do. Anyone assessing me on paper would have hired me, and they did.

I was also empty, and had been for two years, and nobody asks about that in an interview. There’s no line on an application for is anything actually running.

So I performed. For a while performing works, because I was good at the visible parts and there are a lot of visible parts. Then it stopped working, the way it always does, and I was standing up there with nothing behind it.

You know what happens when a performer can’t perform anymore. You get booed off the stage.

I got booed off the stage. For a guy who’d spent his whole life being the one who was good at this, that was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

What I understand now is that God had not gone anywhere. I’d quit doing the things that took me to Him, and then I was surprised when the distance showed up.

The fix, when it finally came, was not dramatic either.

We found another church and sat in the back of it. On purpose. We didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t sign up, didn’t put our names down. We went and we listened, week after week, for a long time.

Eventually I got into a discipleship class. And somewhere in there I started praying again, badly at first, the way you do when you’re out of practice at something you used to be able to do without thinking.

That’s all it was. Show up, listen, start again.

Nobody had to come alongside me for that part. It was available the whole time.

Left Click Or Right Click

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug.

Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code.

I could do that by hand. It would take days. Instead I put an AI tool on it, worked through it with the thing, and had the answer before my coffee got cold.

In 2003 I did not know what SQL stood for. I could not have told you what a data pipeline was, because the phrase wasn’t in general use. Artificial intelligence was something from The Matrix — machines that were coming to take over, not something that would help you find a dropped record on a Tuesday.

My title has the word “data” in it. The job is mostly defining the rules for how a system is supposed to work and then governing it by building consensus with people — running the state of the data about the way you’d run the state of a country. It is not a glamorous line of work. I’d have to look up when a job like it first existed anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of this year saying nobody ever laid the path out for me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not in the wilderness stretch after.

But I don’t think anybody could have laid this one out.

There was no one in 2003 who could have looked at a twenty-five-year-old with a sociology degree and pointed him at a job that didn’t exist, using tools nobody had built, in a role that wouldn’t exist for another decade. The people around me then couldn’t have gotten here either. It wasn’t a place yet.

A map to a known destination is geography. A map to an unknown one is prognostication, and nobody owed me that.

Except I keep thinking about Randy.

Randy was an adjuster at a place I worked in my twenties. He’s the reason I got that job — he knew they needed somebody and he put my name in.

I was the most computer-literate person in that building, which tells you more about the building than about me. So Randy would come to me with questions. Do I left click or right click? I’d tell him. Next time, same question.

I was still answering that question ten years later.

I loved that old man. He was good people, and I mean that. But somewhere in there I remember thinking, buddy, at some point you have to learn how to click your mouse.

He had the thing I say I never got. Somebody right there, patient, glad to help, for ten years. He just never asked a question big enough to take him anywhere.

So it’s two things at once, and I’ve been saying one of them.

Nobody could have mapped me to this job. That part is true and I’m going to stop treating it as a grievance.

But the terrain under my feet was always well understood by somebody. Why a gallery calls the people who already bought from it. What the volunteers at that church were actually offering me. What an editor does. None of that required foresight. It was ordinary knowledge, sitting in the room, that I either wasn’t given or didn’t know how to ask for.

I don’t know how to tell which of those it was, from here.

The twenty-five-year-old wanted to write songs for a living.

He’d be disappointed by the office. Not by the problem-solving — he’d have liked that part, he always liked figuring out what was broken. But the fact of an office, every day, doing something with a title he couldn’t have parsed.

He’d have been wrong about the songs, though. I’ve got an album out. Eleven tracks, written and recorded and released, in a year when the day job was going fine.

Nobody mapped that either.

Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.

Ok, So Now What?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.

Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.

What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.

I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.

I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.

I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.

The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?

At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.

I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.

I lasted under two months.

Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.

They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.

There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.

He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.

That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.

Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.

Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.

Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?

I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.

Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.

I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.

Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.

That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.

Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.

The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.

I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.

I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.

Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.

I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.