Tag: gratitude

The Beauty of Routines

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Most writing about habits frames them as productivity tools. Build the right habit, do the thing, become the more efficient version of yourself. The vocabulary is discipline, willpower, accountability, consistency.

That’s not why I built mine.

I built mine to give my brain somewhere to go when it would otherwise reach for food, wine, or my phone.

The Architecture of Comfort

Around dinner time, every day, my brain wants comfort. That’s not a moral failing. That’s how the brain works. Stress accumulates over the course of a day, energy reserves drop, decision-making capacity gets thin, and somewhere in the early evening the system goes looking for something that feels good.

For most of my life, that something was food. A second helping. Dessert when I wasn’t hungry. A bowl of something while watching television. The eating wasn’t about hunger. It was about the dopamine hit my brain expected at that hour, in that mood, after that kind of day.

Wine had the same job, on the days that wasn’t food. So did doom-scrolling — the slot machine of the social feed, infinite small rewards for no real cost in the moment.

Three different behaviors. Same neurological function. The brain wanted comfort and it had learned three reliable ways to produce it.

The Substitution

Here’s what I figured out, slowly, over the past year.

The brain wants comfort. The brain will find comfort. The variable isn’t whether you give it the dopamine hit. The variable is which behavior you’ve trained it to associate with the hit.

Around dinner time now, the urge that used to send me to the kitchen sends me out for a walk. The urge that used to send me to a second glass of wine sends me to the floor for abs and push-ups. The urge that used to send me into the social feed sends me to a book or a blog post.

I’m not white-knuckling those choices. I’m not “resisting temptation.” I’m getting a real dopamine hit from the walk. My brain has figured out that the walk is comfort now. It produces the same internal reward I used to get from the thing I was overdoing.

The compulsion didn’t disappear. The compulsion got redirected.

The Compulsion Reframe

Some people would say I haven’t actually solved anything — I’ve just traded one compulsion for another. The behavior is still automatic. I’m still running on autopilot. I just happen to land on healthier shores.

That criticism is technically true. It’s also useless.

If compulsiveness is your method — and for most humans, in most situations, it is — then your job isn’t to transcend compulsion. It’s to choose which compulsion runs the show. Most of what we do every day is habitual. We don’t deliberate over breakfast. We don’t strategize about whether to brush our teeth. We’re going to do something compulsively at five in the afternoon. The question is which something.

And here’s the part most habit writing skips: the body cooperates with you eventually. Exercise releases endorphins. Walking outside resets your nervous system. Reading a book at night settles your mind. The compulsion that started as a deliberate substitution turns, after enough repetitions, into genuine desire. You’re no longer choosing the walk over the wine because you should. You’re choosing it because your body now wants it.

That transition — from forced substitution to actual desire — is the part that takes time. It also takes faith on the front end, before the brain has caught up to the new pattern.

When the Routine Slips

I’m 34 days into my third 40-day round of a year-long challenge. I haven’t missed a day. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been perfect inside the day. There have been meals I shouldn’t have eaten. Glasses of wine I didn’t need. Stretches of phone time that didn’t serve me.

The framework I run by isn’t never slip. It’s one slip is a treat. Daily slipping is a detriment.

The difference matters. A perfectionist framework can’t survive contact with real life — one missed day and the whole thing collapses because the framework didn’t have room for being human. The framework I’m using has room. It assumes I’ll slip. It just doesn’t let the slip become the new pattern.

The discipline isn’t avoiding the slip. The discipline is what you do the next morning.

The Whole Person

The seven habits I run every day aren’t a productivity stack. They’re an architecture for a whole person — spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. I have cravings across the full spectrum of who I am. I can meet them with good things or bad things. The seven habits are my way of meeting each one deliberately, before the brain decides for me what to reach for.

That’s why all seven exist. Removing one doesn’t just leave a productivity gap. It leaves a comfort gap that something else will fill. Probably something I don’t want filling it.

Hydration is just hydration. But a body that’s well-hydrated thinks better and feels better and works better. None of the seven are decoration.

The Kid in the Memory

There’s a kid still inside me who remembers opening the refrigerator a long time ago and finding nothing.

Not nothing-I-want. Actually nothing. The light came on, and the shelves were empty, and the question wasn’t what should I eat but is there anything to eat.

We’ve long since passed that. My family is provided for. My fridge is full. But the kid who looked into the empty one is still in there. He’s the reason food became my most reliable form of comfort. He’s the one who learned, early, that when food is available you take it, because there were times it wasn’t. That wiring didn’t disappear when the conditions changed. It went quiet. It didn’t leave.

He’s the one suggesting the second helping I don’t need. He’s the one noticing the open bottle of wine. He’s the one reaching for the phone when the day has been long.

He’s not bad. He learned what he learned, when he learned it. He just hasn’t gotten the memo about the new program.

I’m not trying to silence him. I’m trying to thank him for getting me here, and then choose something different now.

The routines are how I do that without having to argue it out every evening.

The Song That Outgrew the Woman I Wrote It For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It must have been 2013. We were at our Toastmasters club, and our mentor — a woman who had been in the organization a long time, the kind of presence who leads by example without announcing she’s leading — stood up to give a speech.

She titled it Watch Me.

I don’t remember every word. I remember the vulnerability. She had come through a relationship where the man she’d been with told her she wouldn’t make it without him. Then he left anyway. The contradiction was the part she wanted us to hear — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell someone they’re nothing without you and then walk out the door. But she had walked through it. She was standing at the lectern as proof. The title wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Watch me.

I sat in that audience and felt two things at the same time.

The first was admiration. Her pain was real and she wasn’t hiding it, but the speech wasn’t a confession. It was a war cry dressed in survival clothes.

The second was anger.

I am married to a woman I have loved for twenty-seven years. I have spent every one of those years trying to be the kind of husband who does the opposite of what had been done to the woman at the lectern. The thought of telling my wife she couldn’t make it without me — and then leaving — is unimaginable to me. Not because I’m a perfect husband. Because love doesn’t do that. Love doesn’t do that.

I wrote a song after her speech. I called it Watch Me, after her title. It was her voice — a survivor speaking back to the man who had left her. Watch me, as I get over you. Watch me, as I do something new. I played it for her. She appreciated it.

I was proud of it then. I’m still proud of it now — because the thirty-five-year-old who wrote it was doing the work he could do at thirty-five. He heard a story that mattered. He gave her a song.

Thirteen years is a long time. And songs that get written for one person sometimes outgrow the moment they were written for.

What I Wrote This Week

I was going through old material looking for things I could rebuild with Suno, the AI music tool I’ve been using to arrange songs I’ve written over the years. Watch Me came up in the queue. I listened to the AI’s first pass at the original lyrics, and the words felt thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like the song was reaching for something it didn’t yet have the vocabulary to say.

I cracked it open. And what came out wasn’t a polish of the original. It was a different song.

The protagonist changed. The 2013 version was her. The 2026 version is a man — working class, pre-dawn shifts, a chain around his neck made of lies he used to believe. A bridge that prays through the worst of it and finds Someone bigger walking the rest of the road with him.

The song was no longer hers. But it was hers underneath.

What Her Courage Seeded

There’s a kind of empathy that almost nobody talks about. Most writing about empathy makes it sound gentle — sitting with someone’s pain, holding space, listening well. All of that matters. But there’s another kind of empathy, and it’s the one that made me write Watch Me in the first place.

It’s not gentle. It’s a cry for justice. It’s a sound that leads the charge.

When that mentor stood at the lectern and told us what had been done to her, the empathy I felt wasn’t quiet. It was furious on her behalf. I can’t believe a man did this to her. Love doesn’t do that. The anger didn’t belong to me — I hadn’t earned the right to it the way she had — but it could be channeled. Into a song. Into something I could give her.

That was 2013. The 2026 version is what happened when that anger sat in me for thirteen years and grew up. It stopped being a gift to her — she didn’t need it anymore — and became something that could reach somebody else. Some recovering man, somewhere, who needed a sound to use. The same fury, looking for somewhere new to go.

That’s what her courage seeded in me. Not just her song. The capacity to write somebody else’s.

What Songwriters Owe

Songwriters and novelists do this all the time. We inhabit experiences we haven’t had. Phase Defiant is a man writing a woman’s story. Watch Me started as a husband writing a survivor’s voice and ended as a husband writing a recovering man’s voice. Neither of which is mine.

The danger is obvious. You can get the experience wrong. You can flatten it. You can use someone else’s pain as a costume for your own performance. Every writer who picks up a story that isn’t theirs has to wrestle with whether they have any business carrying it.

I think the answer comes down to this: if you can’t be furious on the person’s behalf, you don’t have any business writing their story. If you can’t channel the anger that the situation actually deserves, you’ll write a polite version that doesn’t honor what they lived through.

The empathy without the fury produces something that sounds like a Hallmark card. The fury without the empathy produces something exploitative. You need both. And you don’t always know which one you’re holding until afterward.

I wrote the original Watch Me because I was angry for her. I wrote the new one because that anger had matured into something that could reach further than her one voice ever could.

The 2013 version ended with you are never going to put me down again. The 2026 version ends differently. The man in the rewrite isn’t talking to anybody anymore. He’s walking. Someone bigger than the lies you told, walkin’ with me down the rest of my road.

The defiance is still there. Underneath it now is something the younger me didn’t yet know how to write.

Survival doesn’t end with proving the other person wrong. It ends with not having to prove anything to them anymore. It ends with the road becoming yours again — even when you started somebody else’s story to find your way back to it.

That’s what her speech taught me. It just took me thirteen years to write it down properly.

Watch me.

What the Scale Wasn’t Telling Me

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

For about six weeks, the scale stopped moving.

I’d been showing up every day. At least thirty minutes of exercise on regular days, an hour or more on 7-40 Challenge days. I’ve gone through two pairs of running shoes this year — the kind that are supposed to last four to five hundred miles each. Both pairs are blown out. I’ve been doing the work.

The scale didn’t care.

I started the year at 289 pounds. I’d dropped to 273 a few weeks ago. Then I added back muscle and the number on the scale crept up to 276. Anyone watching the scale alone would have said I’d plateaued — or worse, regressed. So I stepped onto the Hume Pod scanner this week to find out what was actually happening underneath.

The scan goes back to June 2025. That’s when I got the device. That’s the real baseline.

In June 2025, I weighed 299.6 pounds.

This week, I weighed 276.2.

Twenty-four pounds in ten months. Roughly two and a half pounds a month. Not biggest-loser numbers. But I’m not doing biggest-loser things, which I happen to think are harmful for the body. The math works. The program is working. The scale just couldn’t see all of it.

What the Scale Couldn’t See

In June, my body fat was 31.6 percent. For a guy four ounces short of three hundred pounds, that’s essentially a hundred pounds of fat I was carrying around. This week the scan put me at 21.7 percent.

Here’s the part the scale was hiding. While I was losing fat, I was also gaining muscle. Fat mass dropped from 94.6 pounds to 59.9 — almost thirty-five pounds gone. Skeletal muscle went up nearly ten pounds.

That’s why the scale stopped moving. Fat was leaving. Muscle was arriving. The two were trading places, pound for pound, and the scale couldn’t tell the difference.

The visceral fat index — the dangerous fat around your organs — went from 20 to 13. My heart rate during the weigh-in dropped from 104 to 85.

And the metabolic age. The Hume Pod’s algorithm puts your body’s functional age against your actual age. In June it told me I had the metabolic age of a fifty-five-year-old. I’m forty-seven. That number frustrated me when I saw it.

This week the same scanner put me at thirty-five.

I’m walking around in a body that’s functioning twelve years younger than my driver’s license says.

The Honest Part

I have to tell the truth about something.

In Round 1 of this challenge, I was rigorous about calorie tracking. Every gram. Every meal. No drift. Round 3, I’ve loosened up a little. I’m still eating responsibly. I’m still inside the range I know works. But I’ve been less precise than I was four months ago.

If I’d held the same standard I held in January, that scan number might be a little lower. Some of the recomposition would have been more weight loss instead.

I’m not going to pretend I executed perfectly and the data is the result. The data is the result of a system that absorbed some slack and still produced a result. That’s a different thing to learn from.

The lesson isn’t be perfect or it doesn’t work. The lesson is the foundation is more forgiving than perfectionism wants you to believe — but it has to be a real foundation. Daily exercise. Honest food, even when it’s not measured down to the gram. Hydration. Sleep. Showing up. The system can metabolize a few weeks of looser tracking. It cannot metabolize quitting.

What If You Don’t Have a Hume Pod

Most people don’t.

You don’t need one. The Hume Pod is useful because it shows you the layer underneath the scale, but the layer underneath the scale was always there. You just have to learn to read other signals.

The mirror is honest if you let it be. I took a photo of myself the first week of January that I didn’t like — bloated, soft, uncomfortable in my own skin. I looked in the mirror this morning and I could see my abdominal muscles. That’s not a Hume Pod measurement. That’s a bathroom in my house.

My belt notch moved. My pants size dropped. My son got me into a six-week ab challenge in March, and my core feels different now than it did then. None of that required a scanner.

Use what you have. Trust what you can verify with your eyes and a tape measure.

Lead vs. Lag

In data work, we talk about lead indicators and lag indicators. Lead indicators predict outcomes — calories in, exercise minutes, hours slept, reps completed. Lag indicators report results — body weight, body fat percentage, what the scale says on Tuesday morning. Lead indicators are what you can do something about today. Lag indicators are what shows up later, after the leading work has accumulated.

The trap is that the lag indicator feels like the real thing. It has a number. It’s on a screen. It seems precise. So we obsess over it and ignore the leading metrics that actually drive it. And when the lag indicator stops moving, we conclude the work isn’t working.

The scale is a lag indicator. The work is the lead indicator.

I still weigh 276 pounds. My knees still hurt. My back still hurts. I’m not in the shape I want to be in. I’m still experimenting on myself. But this isn’t look at how good I’m doing. It’s look at this guy who almost weighed three hundred pounds — if he can do this stuff, why can’t you?

The data didn’t surprise me because I worked harder than anyone else.

It surprised me because the scale by itself was lying about what kind of work I’d done.

Drive-Through Talking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It had to have been the early 2000s. My bride and I were sitting in a church auditorium listening to Kevin Leman speak, and the phrase he kept using made me chuckle every time I heard it: drive-through talking. I kept mistakenly calling it drive-by talking in my head — which, as I’d later realize, is an entirely different communication style and not one anybody recommends.

But the drive-through? That one I knew well.

In my younger years, my wife and I ate out constantly. There was a Taco Bell just down the street, and we learned a small but important truth at that pickup window: when the kid on the headset repeated our order back to us, we got what we ordered. When they didn’t repeat it back, the odds of getting something we hadn’t asked for went way up.

Marriage works the same way. The window is just invisible, and the cost of getting the order wrong is much higher.

The Technique

When your spouse is talking and you’re listening, act like you’re at the drive-through window. Repeat the order back. Make sure they know you actually heard the words they said — not the version your brain rewrote on the way in.

We’ve been doing this for over twenty years. It usually sounds something like, “Hold on — I think this is what you’re saying. Do I have it right?”

Over time, four phrases have done most of the heavy lifting:

  • Can you repeat that, please?
  • Do I have this right?
  • Is this what you said?
  • Help me understand.

That last one is the one I have to be careful with.

“Help Me Understand”

When I say it, I mean it the way it’s supposed to be meant: I’m being dense, I’m missing context, I need more from you so I can actually track what you’re telling me. It’s me admitting I’m the bottleneck.

That phrase has a problem. It can land as “you’re being too vague — explain it better,” which puts the work back on the person already doing the talking. Same words. Different posture. Completely different effect.

I’ve had to work at making sure my tone matches my intent on that one.

What the Research Says

Charles Duhigg points to research on couples who argued differently — specifically, on what separated couples who stayed together from couples who fell apart, based on how they fought.

The pattern is uncomfortable in its simplicity. Couples who focused on controlling the other person tended to end up divorced. Couples who focused on self-control — managing their own reactions, taking responsibility for their own part — tended to end up still married, and happier in the marriage they were still in.

That’s not abstract to me. It’s been my goal for twenty-seven years — to be the husband who’s regulating himself, not the one trying to manage her. Drive-through talking is what that goal looks like in practice. You’re not trying to win the conversation. You’re not trying to control where it goes. You’re regulating yourself long enough to clarify, repeat, and confirm — so that the other person actually feels heard.

I also use this with my son, too. Testosterone gets in the way more often than I’d like to admit, on both sides of those conversations. But the same courtesy I extend to a stranger at a checkout counter is the courtesy I want to extend to him — and even more to him and to my wife than to anyone else.

He and his mother shouldn’t get the worst version of how I communicate just because they’re the most familiar.

The Pushback

Someone might tell me their marriage is fine without all this work. That they don’t need techniques. That things are good.

I’d push back. “Fine” is an invitation. Just because something is good doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better. Just because things work okay right now doesn’t mean they can’t fail later. The roof you don’t maintain is the roof that fails in the storm — not on the sunny day you decided it was fine.

I’ve never wanted to be over-prescriptive about this. I’m not a counselor. I’m a husband who’s been married a long time and has paid attention. My belief is this: because we’re friends, because we have the mutual aim of respecting each other, taking care of each other, honoring the vows we made — we can work through things. Not because the technique is magic. Because we love each other, and we choose to be married to each other, every day.

The drive-through window just helps us hear each other while we’re choosing.

No More Excuses

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Ten days ago I signed up for an AI music tool called Suno. On a whim, I uploaded some songs I’d written over the years — lyrics, melodies, composition notes — and let it arrange them into full productions.

What came back stopped me cold. Not because the AI was impressive. Because my stuff was good.

I’ve been writing songs since 1994. I sat down at a piano my sophomore year of high school and taught myself to play by plunking keys until something recognizable came out. I got my first guitar Christmas of 1997, hated picks, grew calluses on my thumb and index finger from strumming bare-handed. I never really learned other people’s music. I wanted to write my own.

For thirty-two years, the gap between what I heard in my head and what I could produce with my hands was wide enough to park every excuse I ever made inside it. I didn’t have the production budget. I didn’t have the studio. I didn’t have the band. The songs stayed in notebooks and rough recordings, and I told myself someday.

Ten days ago, someday showed up. Here’s what it sounds like:

By My Side

Hearing those arrangements — hearing my melodies orchestrated, my lyrics set against drums and bass and layers I never could have built alone — I realized something I’d been circling for a while. The creative instinct was always right. The ideas were always there. What was missing wasn’t talent or vision. It was the bridge between the idea and the finished product. And that bridge exists now.

I wrote a novel last year on my iPhone. Voice to text, thumbs, and an AI editing partner. Over a hundred thousand words down to sixty thousand after I went through it with a machete. It’s on Amazon. I made it. It’s mine. And I wrote it in a way that would have been impossible five years ago.

I’m writing songs. I’m writing novels. I’m creating things that would have been impossible five years ago with the tools I had then. And I’m doing it from my phone, my living room, and my lunch break.

Years ago, I joined an online community built around Seth Godin’s Tribes. I was trying to develop my thinking, contribute ideas about customer service and business. A woman jumped on one of my posts and tore me apart. Told me I was crazy, that I was enabling people, that I was an idiot. I never logged on again. I let one person’s pushback silence me entirely.

That version of me doesn’t get to make decisions anymore.

The excuses are gone. The tools are here. The only variable left is me.