Tag: mental-health

The Craving

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It took two days.

Two days into assessment week — a planned break between rounds of the 7-40 Challenge — and I was already craving the structure I’d stepped away from.

I’ll admit, some of the break was good. I stopped listening to audiobooks for a few days and let my mind clear out. That turned out to be exactly what I needed to get ready for the next round of learning. And I never stopped my daily Bible reading. I just couldn’t let that one go.

But the calorie tracking slipped. The water slipped. I ate off plan multiple days, some just because I could — which, looking back, was kind of stupid. And it gave me a feeling I didn’t like. I could feel myself sliding back into habit patterns I don’t need. By day three I knew I had to pivot back.

So when I woke up this morning — Round 3, Day 1 — and I had my list in front of me, I felt relief. Energy. A little pep in my step. Because I had those small moments of accomplishment spread across the day again, and they’re fantastic.

Here’s why I think that matters beyond just me.

A long time ago, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He lived for several years after his diagnosis, but he did not do well in unfamiliar places or unfamiliar routines. My grandmother — a retired nurse and a bit of a drill sergeant — kept his framework together. She kept him in line, kept him moving, kept his daily structure strong. And he was able to function for years, even as he lost more and more of his memory, because his routines stayed the same.

There’s a whole different set of blog posts in that story. But the principle is the same one I felt this week.

Our brains crave habit patterns. They are actual physical things happening inside our heads. We expect the rewards they bring. We expect the satisfaction that comes with practicing them. And that’s true for good habits and bad habits alike. The dopamine high from a good workout isn’t that different from the dopamine hit of an addiction. The difference is which pattern you’ve seeded.

Where I feel grateful is this: I’m healthy. I’m more motivated this year than I’ve ever been in my life. I feel daunted and challenged by the work I’ve set in front of myself, which is probably a good thing. Keeping myself in these habits — keeping myself moving forward — is how I prime myself for success through the seasons when fatigue or exhaustion or grief would want to stop me.

My grandfather didn’t have a choice. His framework was held together by someone who loved him. I have the choice. And after two days without it, I know exactly what I’m choosing.

Nobody’s Going to Tell You to Go

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 76 | The 7-40 Challenge

I started reading Seth Godin’s Tribes this morning. Early in the book, he draws a line between managers and leaders that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Managers manipulate resources to get a known job done. Leaders create change they believe in.

I’ve seen both. I saw it first in the churches I worked at in my twenties — people who would see something that needed to be done and just get up and do it, while some of the ministerial staff sat back and waited for someone else to move. I saw it in my insurance office years, when I realized that whether my manager wanted something done or not, if I knew it needed doing, I had to get myself to do it. It would get noticed later. And I’ve seen it across eighteen years of corporate work — the people without management titles who became the go-to people, who took on responsibilities nobody else wanted or even realized needed to be taken on. Looking back, I can see why some of them shot up through the ranks faster than others. They weren’t managing. They were leading before anyone gave them the title.

I spent twenty years filling notebooks with goals. “Someday I’ll write a book.” “Someday I’ll get in shape.” “Someday I’ll build something.” Same dreams, different handwriting.

Those notebooks weren’t the work of a manager trying to organize a life. They were the work of a dreamer who didn’t know how to lead himself. I wasn’t just trying to manage things — I was trying to blaze a trail in a direction I’d never been before. But whether through fear or apathy or something else I couldn’t name at the time, I wouldn’t let myself move.

Seventy-six days ago, I did.

Nobody told me to go. Nobody assigned it. Nobody was going to give me permission. That was the realization — if I didn’t tell myself to go, nobody was going to do it for me. I took the frustration I was feeling at the end of last year, the things I knew I needed to get done, and I leveraged the time and the tools I had at my disposal. I’m not where I want to be yet — not even close. But seventy-six days later, I’ve lost sixteen pounds, published a novel, built a platform, and written every single day. Not because I’m special. Because I finally stopped waiting.

Godin says there’s a tribe waiting for you to connect them and lead them. He says it’s easier than ever to change things, and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. I believe that. But here’s where I’d push back — or maybe push deeper.

You have to start at the desk.

Picture a man sitting alone at a desk with a computer, a notepad, and a cup of coffee. Nobody told him what to do or how he’d get paid. Just: get to work. That man has everything he needs. He has ideas. If he can get past the noise, he knows what he wants to do. He can see the people in his space who know what to do as well. But unless he’s done the deep discovery of who he is, what he’s here for, and what work matters to him, he’s not going to find the right tribe anyway. You don’t connect to others so they can tell you what work to do. You do your work, and then you find the people who sharpen it.

The tribe matters. But the desk comes first.

My wife told me she can see a major difference since January. She can see that I’m motivated and happy. That I have energy. That I’m going somewhere on purpose. That’s not management. That’s leadership — even if the only person I’m leading right now is myself.

Godin says leadership is about creating change you believe in. Here’s the change I believe in:

We were meant for so much more than living in fear and being frustrated. By learning how to clarify what’s important to us, communicate it to others, and leverage the tools we have — including AI — we can do the work we know how to do, better and faster, and make the world better around us.

But that requires the personal work first. If we can’t communicate clearly with each other, what’s going to make us any better doing it with a computer? The human has to get clear before the technology gets useful.

And clarity, for me, started with something that had nothing to do with technology.

I’ve discovered that there is a God and that I’m not Him. That shapes everything about the kind of leader I’m becoming. I have agency. I can make decisions. But I want to be the kind of leader who partners with the leadership above me — God’s leading me, and I’m doing my best to understand where He wants me to go. So I keep my ears open, my eyes open, and I stay ready to pivot when I realize I’m not headed where I’m supposed to be.

If you’re reading this and you’ve got your own notebooks — your own stack of “someday I’ll” goals in different handwriting across different years — I want you to hear this:

You’re further along than you think you are.

The things you’ve been writing down matter. They aren’t dead dreams. They’re evidence that something inside you has been trying to lead for a long time. If you’ll lean in, clarify what you want to accomplish, and actually start — you’ll move faster than you expect. Because the dreamer who filled those notebooks already did the hard part. You just haven’t given yourself permission to lead yet.

The notebooks were never the problem. The permission was.

Day 76 of 280. Four days left in Round 2.

Make Your Own Map

~ David Willis ~ 2 Comments

Day 75 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Nobody is going to hand you the plan.

I’ve only started realizing that this year. I knew if I wanted to be successful, I had to name my own goals — not adopt someone else’s and try to chase them with my own passion. That just doesn’t work. I don’t want somebody else’s dream. I want my dream. I don’t want somebody else’s body. I want my body to look the way it’s supposed to. I don’t want to write somebody else’s book. I want to write the books that are inside of me, about the things I’m interested in.

So I had to make the map.

Not a map someone gave me in a class. Not one I found in a self-help book. Not one my boss outlined for me. Mine. Built from scratch. Designed for the terrain I’m actually walking on.

I’ve been reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and his principles keep landing on things I’m already living. But the truth is, I didn’t need Henry to tell me these things. I needed him to name what I was already doing — so I could see it clearly and do it better.

I’m seventy-five days into a 280-day transformation experiment that I designed myself. Seven daily habits, forty-day cycles, daily blogging, a published novel, a Bible illustration project, and a philosophical manifesto in progress. Nobody assigned this to me. Nobody approved it. I just decided it was time to stop filling notebooks with “someday” and start building.

That’s what map-making looks like. Not waiting for instructions. Deciding what the terrain requires and drawing the route yourself.

Do your best work even when no one’s watching.

My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Some days, one or two. I’m seventy-five posts in. Why do I keep writing for an audience that small?

Because I’m not writing it for them.

I’m writing it as my own content library — a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve been thinking. I know deep inside me that the questions I’m asking are good ones. The development I’m doing, whether publicly or privately, is still my own personal growth. It’s still interacting with my goals. It’s still getting things done.

And here’s the practical reason: if I don’t do my best now and have my rhythm down, and everybody shows up one day and I screw up — everything blows up. The time to get good is before the audience arrives, not after.

Say yes.

In the last seventy-five days, I said yes to publishing my book. I said yes to throwing myself out there and engaging online with people I don’t know. And from the limited feedback I’ve gotten, it’s all been positive.

What I’m discovering is that the real limitation was put on me by me. The limitations we live inside are self-inflicted most of the time. If we really wanted to get things done — put a plan together, build a system, and just said yes to doing it — we’d be so much further than we thought we’d be.

I’m finding that for myself, seventy-five days in.

But here’s the one that cuts deepest.

Take responsibility for your own progress.

Who was I waiting on for permission? Not my boss. Not a mentor. Not even a sign from God — although a finger is always welcome.

I was waiting on me.

Getting older has had an effect. The man I look at in the mirror these days is a whole lot grayer than he used to be. He’s having to work a whole lot harder to get back in shape. And I’m realizing that if I want to make a contribution to the world like I intend to, I have to do it right now. I cannot wait, in good conscience, for anybody else to give me permission to be the best version of myself.

I think it’s been a sin, in many ways, to limit myself from striving for excellence over the years. I’ve always tried to do my best. But I’ve let the fact that I didn’t know how to do something stop me from even wanting to learn how to do it.

I can’t do that anymore.

I was going through chemotherapy in 2005 for the first time. I would go back to work after my sessions, and I would sit in the office feeling like I’d been burned from the inside. Raw. Just as gross as you can feel. The guy I worked for was smoking cigars in there, and life was still moving at its regular pace. I just wasn’t.

And I remember sitting there thinking: I’m going to choose to take care of the things I’m responsible for, because I chose to. Not because someone’s making me. Because I decided that excellence was my standard, even when I felt like I was on fire inside.

That ability to choose excellence has served me for the rest of my life.

If you can choose it through chemotherapy, you can choose it at any other time.

You’re going to get well. You’re going to get better. And you’re going to come back with a map in your hand that you drew yourself — because nobody else was going to draw it for you.

That’s agency. That’s the yes that changes everything.

Day 75 of 280. Five days left in Round 2.

740Challenge #MakeYourOwnMap #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

Go Back to the Beginning

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 67 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I finished Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work today. In the last chapter, he says something that stopped me mid-stride on my walk:

When you’ve learned something really well, go back to the beginning. Learn something new. Do it in the open. Do it in public. Show your work so you can keep going, keep expanding, keep building.

It feels like that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Before I started the 7-40 Challenge, I’d been blogging on and off for years. I had over 630 blog posts written before 2026. I’d written over 50 songs. I’d done other challenges for myself.

Back in 2022, I created something I called 100 Days Strong. For 100 days, I practiced many of the same habits I’m doing now — exercise, water, reading, discipline. I wasn’t reinventing the wheel. I saw 75 Hard, didn’t love every facet of it, created my own version, and added 25 days. Not rocket science.

I muscled through it. Lost 40 pounds. Proved I could do it.

But here’s the thing: because I wasn’t able to iterate — because I wasn’t able to evaluate as I went — it became a fitness challenge wrapped in the guise of something bigger. 100 days was too long. Too drawn out. No opportunity for adjustment. And because the habits never got implemented in a sustainable way, I reverted. The weight came back. The momentum died.

In 2025, the 7-40 Challenge was born. I did the first round in August and September, right after moving back to Oklahoma City. 40 days. Pulled it off. It went well.

Then I tried Round 2. It failed.

I restarted. Failed again.

I had to sit down and ask myself an honest question: why does this keep falling apart?

And the answer wasn’t willpower. It wasn’t desire. It wasn’t the habits themselves. It was structure.

I didn’t have goals behind the habits. I didn’t have a daily cadence that connected what I was reading to what I was writing to what I was building. I didn’t have a vision laid out in front of me. I didn’t have a place to put my thoughts. I didn’t have project buckets to organize the multiple lanes I wanted to pursue. I was trying to restart on sheer determination, and determination without a system just burns out.

So when January 1, 2026 came around, I built the system first.

I laid out the vision. I set goals behind the habits — even if I don’t share them all publicly. I committed to blogging every single day, not as a chore but as the processing engine for everything I’m learning. I set up project spaces where I could build context over time instead of starting from scratch every session. I created assessment weeks between rounds so I could come up for air, evaluate, and adjust.

And I made a decision. Not a feeling. A decision. I don’t care how I feel. I don’t care what stands in my way. I’m not stopping this time.

That decision, backed by a system, is why I’m sitting here on Day 67 with no missed days. Not because I’m tougher than I was in 2022 or 2025. Because I’m better organized.

Here’s the other thing Kleon helped me see today. I used to think in very linear terms. I could progress in fitness, but it was harder to progress in creativity at the same time. I could progress in my career, but not in my eating habits. Everything felt like it had to happen one at a time, in sequence, or not at all.

I was selling myself short. I’m much more capable than I was making it out to be. But it was never a capability problem. It was an organization problem.

When I have my vision clear every day — when I can see the lanes, the projects, the habits, and how they connect — what would have felt like a chore becomes a rhythm. What would have felt overwhelming becomes manageable. Not because there’s less to do, but because everything has a place.

Before I had the right tools and structure, I couldn’t get my response cycles fast enough to actually iterate and change. I’d have ideas on a walk and lose them by evening. I’d read something powerful and never connect it to what I was building. Now, when I’m walking and voice-texting like I am right now, I can get all my thoughts out. I can process them. I can connect them to the bigger picture. And I can execute.

Austin Kleon says go back to the beginning. Learn something new. Do it in public.

That’s what this whole year is. I went back to the beginning — back to the habits that I knew worked, back to the discipline I’d proven I could maintain — and I rebuilt it with the structure it was always missing. I’m learning in public every single day. I’m showing my work. I’m pushing the edges in every area of my life that I want to pursue.

And I’m finding myself going much further than I ever expected to.

At the end of the day, I know I have to stay teachable. I have to keep the posture of a student. I have to keep learning and growing, because if I don’t, I’m not just setting myself up for failure — I’m not getting any better. And getting better is the whole point.

Keep moving forward.

Day 67 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking
✅ Reading (Show Your Work — Austin Kleon — finished!)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ Exercise
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #ShowYourWork #AustinKleon #GoBackToTheBeginning #Systems #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #KeepMovingForward

Day 56: The Hero Can’t Be the Loser

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Round 2, Day 16
Monday, March 2, 2026

I’m rereading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and he tells a story that I can’t stop thinking about.

A friend of his had a daughter who’d started dating a bad kid and smoking pot. Miller, fresh from Robert McKee’s story workshop, said something that sounds simple but lands like a hammer: “She’s stuck in a bad story.”

His friend didn’t get it at first. But Miller explained the framework he’d learned — a story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it. And this friend realized something uncomfortable: he wasn’t presenting a very engaging story for his family. There was no mission, no purpose, nothing bigger than the routine. So his daughter went looking for meaning somewhere else — and she found it in a boy who wasn’t treating her well. At least he was telling her a story where she mattered.

The friend signed up to raise $25,000 to build an orphanage in Mexico. He didn’t have $25,000. His wife was shocked. His daughter was skeptical. But the whole family ended up rallying around it — and here’s the punchline that Miller drops:

“A girl who’s acting in the role of the hero can’t be in a relationship with a loser.”

It just doesn’t work. Because when you find meaning in your own story, when you know your own worth, you can’t lower yourself to be treated poorly. The bad relationship couldn’t survive the better story.

I’ve been thinking about how this applies to what I’m building.

The 7-40 Challenge is, at its core, a decision to tell a better story. Seven habits, every day, for 280 days. Not because checking boxes changes your life — but because the discipline of showing up daily puts you in a different role. You stop being the person things happen to. You start being the person who makes things happen.

And here’s what I’m discovering 56 days in: when you start playing the hero in your own story, it gets really hard to involve yourself in the things where you’re the loser.

The junk food that used to be easy to justify? Harder to eat when you’ve tracked your calories for eight straight weeks and watched the scale move 13 pounds. The excuse to skip a workout? Harder to make when you’ve got 56 days of unbroken execution behind you. The temptation to play it small, to hide, to keep your ideas in a drawer? Harder to give in to when you’ve written 56 blog posts, worked on two novels, lost 13 pounds and have the realization that you’re just getting started.

The better story crowds out the worse one. Not because you become perfect — but because you become aware. You see the choice for what it is. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Miller’s friend didn’t rescue his daughter by lecturing her. He didn’t ground her or take her phone away. He gave the family a mission. He gave them a story worth living. The daughter rescued herself — because the better story made the bad one impossible to tolerate.

I wrote recently about what it feels like to drift through life without a plan. I compared it to floating face down in water, only lifting your head from time to time to see where the current has taken you. That’s how most people live — pulled by the tide, reacting instead of choosing, going wherever the flow sends them.

To live differently, you have to put your feet down. You have to stand up and let the current run around you. And then you have to decide which direction you’re going to walk.

Nobody’s coming to make this easier. There’s no rich relative showing up with a check. No lottery win. No miraculous rescue. You either tell the story or somebody else tells it for you — and you’re just a character in theirs.

I’m 56 days into telling my own story. It’s connected to everything — my work, my family, my health, my writing, my faith. I can’t compartmentalize it anymore. I have to be the same person at work that I am at home. I have to give the same effort to the things I love that I give to the things I’m paid to do. Because all of it is part of the legacy I leave behind. All of it is part of the story I choose to tell.

If I start to play the hero, it’s really hard to involve myself in things where I’m the loser.

And those are my thoughts for today.

Day 56 — Seven for Seven

See you tomorrow for Day 57.