Tag: habits

The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand it.

The Room I Can’t Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 1

I recorded four minutes of thoughts on my walk this morning and never stumbled once. Then I sat down to film a thirty-second video saying the same thing, and my brain locked up.

That gap has bothered me for a while, because on paper it makes no sense. I’m a Toastmaster. I did theater. I’ve stood in front of full rooms and ad-libbed my way through, and I was fine — better than fine. Put a phone in front of me in an empty room and I freeze.

For a long time I told myself it was the camera. Being watched. But that’s not it. I record my thoughts out loud every single day on my walks and it’s effortless. Same guy, same microphone. The only thing that changes is where the audio is going. One version is just me, organizing what I think. The other is going out to people.

Here’s what I finally landed on: when I’m in a live room, I can read it. I can see which points are landing, who’s leaning in, where to push and where to let go. I ad-lib because the room is talking back to me the whole time. Online, there’s none of that. You send it out into nothing. You have no idea if anyone’s watching, if it’s hitting, if it matters at all. You’re basically talking to yourself and hoping. And without the room to read, I lose the thing I’ve always leaned on.

So I overcorrect. If I can’t read the room, I’ll make the words perfect instead. I’ll get it exactly right the first time so I don’t have to record it over and over. That’s the Toastmaster in me — I want a well-framed talk, not a ramble. Except the demand for perfect is what freezes me before I ever start.

Then I noticed where I don’t do this. Work.

I sit in meetings and I’ll start talking before I actually know what I’m saying, and somewhere in the middle I realize I do know — I just needed to hear myself get there. I give myself that grace at work without thinking about it. And I know why. Twenty years in, I trust that if I open my mouth, what comes out is worth a little credence, even half-formed. So I let myself think out loud.

On camera, for the things I actually care about — the writing, the ideas outside my day job — I haven’t earned that yet. Not in my own head. So I won’t let myself be half-formed. I make myself audition for the right to speak before every take.

That’s the real thing under the freeze. It was never the camera. It’s that the perfect-first-take I demand of myself is a stand-in for an authority I haven’t built yet. And the uncomfortable part is knowing you can’t build it in private. Nobody hands you credence for the videos you didn’t post.

The Subplot

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I’ve been thinking about my life as a story, and about who’s actually holding the pen.

Here’s where I’ve landed. God’s design is the plot. It’s going somewhere, and it reaches its ending whether or not I cooperate. I don’t get to write that. What I get is a subplot — my contribution, my thread — and the story arrives at its destination either along with my work or in spite of it. That’s the whole of my agency. Not authorship of the plot. Participation in it.

It’s a smaller role than I’d like some days. It’s also a bigger one than I usually act like I believe.

The first thing the Bible says about God is that He creates. Before anything else is established about who He is, we watch Him bring order out of chaos — light out of dark, form out of formlessness, something out of nothing. And a few lines later, it says I’m made in His image.

I’ve read past that a hundred times without sitting in what it means. If the defining act we’re shown first is creation, then being made in that image means being made to create. Not necessarily art. Creation in the wide sense — bringing order out of chaos wherever I find it. Leading a team out of confusion. Writing the code that makes the broken thing work. Shaping a song. Raising a kid. Turning a mess into something that holds together. That’s the image. That’s the assignment.

Which means passivity isn’t neutral. When I choose not to bring order out of the chaos in front of me — when I sit on what I was given — I’m not resting. I’m refusing the one thing I was most clearly made to do.

I know this because I did it for years.

I told myself a lot of things during those years. That I was waiting. That the timing wasn’t right. That the plans I talked about would happen eventually. What I was actually doing was burying what I’d been given and calling the hole a virtue. I had a subplot the whole time. I just wasn’t writing it.

I didn’t fix this. I don’t get to fix it once. The choice to participate in my subplot instead of letting the story move on without me is not a decision I made in January and get to coast on. It’s a decision I have to make again every single day, and some days I still lose it. Some days the passivity wins and the chaos stays chaos and the gift stays in the ground.

This is a note to myself, out loud, on a Saturday. The plot is going to reach its zenith with me or without me. The only thing I actually control is whether my thread is part of how it gets there.

Today I have to choose to be. Tomorrow I’ll have to choose again.

The Third of July

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

My son and I don’t get out alone much. Tonight we did.

Our town shoots fireworks on the third and the fourth, so my wife kissed us both goodnight and sent us off — just the two of us, no plan beyond finding a spot and watching the sky come apart.

He’s graduated now. I’ve started doing the math I don’t like doing — how many of these are left before the evenings out are the ones he drives to on his own, in another town, with his own life pulling at him. Hopefully we have several left, but these are special. So I’m not going to waste this one narrating it. I’m going to go watch fireworks with my boy.

Happy Fourth. Go find your people while they’re still in reach.

The Spirit of the Thing

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I caught myself saying something today that stopped me mid-sentence. I was talking about my work, and I heard myself say I don’t just get to solve problems — I get to take care of people while I do it.

I sat with that, because it explained something I’d never quite been able to name: why I love a job I never planned to have.

I didn’t set out to work in data. I saw myself as a creative — someone who makes things, who helps people. A technical role wasn’t on my list. And for a while I carried a quiet assumption that I’d taken a detour, that the analytical work was a departure from who I really was.

I was wrong about that. The work wasn’t a detour from helping people. It was a vehicle for it. I just didn’t recognize the door when I walked through it.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll keep it to the shape of the work rather than the specifics.

When you crawl into a hard problem with someone, something happens that doesn’t happen when you just hand them an answer. You isolate where the trouble actually stems from — not where it shows up, but where it starts. You trace it back through the logic, the structure, the places where one thing hands off to another. And to do that, you have to genuinely understand their world, not just your own. They walk you through what they know. You bring what you know. Somewhere in the middle, the two things join, and the problem gives.

That’s the part I love. Not the fix. The joining.

But I want to be honest about what’s actually happening in that exchange, because the noble version — “I selflessly serve, and knowledge flows to those I help” — isn’t the whole truth.

I get better every time I do this. Every problem I climb into that I didn’t create is a problem that stretches my range. The person I’m helping isn’t just receiving. They’re handing me the raw material my own skill sharpens against. I serve them, and the serving is also how I stay sharp. Both things are true, and pretending it’s only the first one would be a lie dressed up as humility.

That’s the difference between showing up to serve and showing up for a paycheck. It isn’t that one is virtuous and the other is greedy — everybody cashes the check. It’s that the person who’s only there for the check leaves the best part on the table. They solve the problem and miss the joining. They never find out that the fastest way to get better at your own craft is to spend it freely on someone else’s problem.

So that’s the thing I noticed today. The spirit you bring to the work changes what the work gives back. Bring the whole of what you’ve got — your skill, your attention, your genuine interest in the other person’s world — and you don’t just solve the thing in front of you. You build the people around you, and they build you right back.

I don’t have that fully figured out. But I know it’s why the work never feels like a detour anymore.