Round 2, Day 2
Monday, February 16, 2026
I’ve been reading Linchpin by Seth Godin again, and it’s stirring things up. But tonight’s post isn’t about Linchpin. It’s about something that book keeps pointing me back to — a thought I’ve been carrying for years.
Everything is connected.
A Hospital Bed and a Fish Bone Diagram
In 2018, I was lying in a hospital bed going through chemotherapy for the second time. A 13-centimeter tumor. Four one-week hospital stays. I didn’t know how much damage the cancer had done. I didn’t know how long I had.
A few friends from work would come visit and keep me up on the projects we had going. And because I didn’t have a whole lot else to think about, I started processing — really processing — how our business workflows actually worked. Where data originated. How it matured through systems and the activities of people. How something that started at the beginning of a process was eventually consumed by somebody at the end who had no idea where it came from. It just magically appeared.
Lying there, I could see it like a fish bone diagram. One thread of data with dozens of offshoots — different teams, different efforts, different parts of the business process. And I could see how the busted processes, the workarounds, the bull crap people had to do just to keep things straight — it all became very apparent.
That clarity has stayed with me. As a data professional, I try to share it with anyone who will listen: if we understand the overall business workflow, we can pass out the pieces, identify the problem areas, and start making things better. That’s true in any business, any organization, anywhere people work together.
But here’s the thing. That principle doesn’t stop at the office door.
The Insurance Company
I actually made the connection about life being connected even before the hospital bed.
In the mid-2000s, I worked at an insurance company where I was miserable every day. The owner smoked four to six cigars a day ten feet from my desk. Profanity filled the air. Morale was rock bottom.
And I realized something that changed my trajectory: I couldn’t be angry at work and healthy at home. It invariably carried over. My frustration at the office became tension with my family, and that was not a sustainable position.
I had to start working on myself personally — not because I loved the job, but because I knew that everything was connected. If one part of my life was poisoned, the rest would suffer.
Fast-forward a few years. I was working on my master’s degree, thriving in an academic setting where I had previously been a mediocre student. And I realized the difference wasn’t intelligence. It was devotion to the process of getting better — and being the same engaged, enthusiastic person in my whole life, not just pieces of it.
When I stopped compartmentalizing, everything changed.
The Kobe Bryant Principle
I heard a story about Kobe Bryant that stuck with me. Kobe deliberately studied the referee’s handbook — every rule, every call, every technicality. Not because he wanted to argue calls. Because he wanted to master the environment he was operating in.
If he wanted a specific foul called, he knew what action to take. He knew how to get timeouts. He knew how to stop the clock. He used the rules of the game to his advantage — not by breaking them, but by understanding them so deeply that he could stretch them.
That’s what excellence looks like. It’s not just knowing the rules. It’s knowing how to apply them so you can accomplish what you need to accomplish while still taking care of the people around you.
Kobe demanded that kind of mastery from himself. And he rose above almost every player who’s ever played the game because of it.
The Real Question
Seth Godin wrote Linchpin in 2010, and he was already pointing out that the industrial age — where the highest value of the education system was producing factory workers who would do a job for a day’s wage and not have to think — was over. That we had entered an era of applied creativity.
That is even more true today. The market is changing. AI is reshaping everything. The people who will thrive are the ones who see the connections, who understand the whole system, who refuse to compartmentalize their lives into disconnected pieces.
So here’s what I’d say to you tonight.
If you feel like two separate people between work and home. If you feel like two separate people between groups of friends. If how you feel in your mind doesn’t match how you act on the outside — you need to have a frank conversation with yourself.
The way God created us is to be whole. Engaged and excellent in all the areas of our lives — not fragmented, not compartmentalized, not running different versions of ourselves depending on who’s watching.
Everything is connected. Your health affects your work. Your work affects your family. Your family affects your purpose. Your purpose affects everything.
The data taught me that in a hospital bed. Life has been confirming it ever since.
Day 42 of 280. Everything is connected.
David Willis 