Tag: mental-health

One Operating System

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

For many years I’ve run my work life on a system. At my day job, everything moves through a board — projects broken into tasks, tasks with deadlines and clear definitions of done, a daily rhythm of picking up what’s most urgent and moving it forward. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just how I work.

Recently, I realized I’d been running my creative life on a completely different system. Which is to say, no system at all. Inspiration when it came, guilt when it didn’t, and a pile of half-finished projects with no deadlines and no clear sense of what “done” even meant.

No wonder it felt harder than it needed to.

The problem wasn’t effort. I’ve been creative every single day this year. The problem was that I kept switching operating systems. Disciplined and structured from nine to five, then loose and inspiration-dependent the moment I sat down to write a book or build a course. Two different brains for two different parts of the same life.

Context switching is expensive. Every time you change systems, you pay a tax — you have to reorient, remember the rules of the new mode, rebuild your footing. I was paying that tax every single day, twice a day, crossing from one version of myself to another.

So I’ve stopped. I took the exact system I use at work and wrapped it around my creative projects. A board. Active projects with real deadlines. Daily operations that happen regardless of how I feel. Sprints I can pivot between based on what’s most urgent. The same muscle I’ve trained for professionally, pointed at the work that’s mine.

The relief was immediate. I already know how to run this system. I’ve run it for years. I just never thought to use it on the things that matter most to me, because I’d filed “creative” and “disciplined” in separate drawers — as if they were opposites instead of partners.

They’re not opposites. The most creative people I heard of are ruthlessly systematic about the unglamorous parts, precisely so the creativity has room to breathe. The system isn’t the enemy of the art. It’s what gets the art finished.

Jim Rohn said it cleaner than I can: discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons. The board, the deadlines, the daily reps — those are the ounces. They are so much lighter than the pile of unfinished work I’d be carrying without them.

The Dream You Never Actually Wanted

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I saw a quote today on social media. You’ve seen a version of it a hundred times: We only get one life. So why aren’t you running as hard as you can toward your wildest dreams?

It was attached to somebody’s website. There was a famous name stapled to it for credibility, and the guy delivering it had that urgency in his voice — the kind that exists to move you toward a buy button. I know that sound. I’ve studied it. And the moment I clock it, my guard goes up.

But here’s the thing that bugged me. Strip away the sales funnel, and the line underneath is still true. Our time is precious. We do only get the one. So why does the truth feel so cheap the second somebody uses it to sell me something?

I think it’s because they’re answering the wrong question. They’re handing you the answer — here’s what you should want, here’s how fast you should chase it — when the actual work is learning to ask a better question in the first place.

I’m not interested in finding “my own truth” the way the motivational crowd sells it — the version with a buy button attached. I want something harder. I want the truth about my situation.

Am I actually interested in this thing, or have I just been sold it? Am I talented at it, or am I pretending? What’s the real baseline of who I am and what I’m good at — not the version I’d like to post, the real one? Because until I can answer that, I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

A dream has legs. You can put a plan under it and walk toward it. I am never going to be a rock star — I don’t have the voice, the stage presence, or honestly the desire to grind it out. Do I ever picture myself singing to a stadium and selling a million albums? Sure. But that’s a fantasy. It collapses the second I’m honest about my talent, my time, and what I’m actually willing to do. The trouble is, most people name their fantasies as dreams, then stand in the mirror and beat themselves up for not reaching things they were never built to reach.

None of this works without a foundation of honesty. And I’m not writing it as someone who cracked the code and came down the mountain to hand it to you. I’m the lab rat. Every framework I build, I test on myself first, and I report back what actually happened — not what was supposed to happen.

So here’s my live example.

I started this year with the 7-40 challenge. One goal was to work out an hour a day, almost every day. And I found out something useful: I can do that. Reliably. I show up.

The scale, though, hasn’t moved the way I said I wanted it to. And the reason isn’t mysterious. I enjoy food. I set a range for myself and I’ve mostly lived at the top of it. The exercise is honest. The eating is honest. The goal was where I was lying.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Is there actually a gap?

If I’m enjoying food and holding steady — not gaining, just moving slowly — am I failing, or am I doing exactly what I want? That’s the question almost nobody asks. We assume the gap is real because we declared a goal once and haven’t hit it. But some gaps are imaginary. They only exist because we never honestly defined what we wanted in the first place.

When I’m truthful about it, here’s what I find: I’m choosing slower progress and more enjoyment over a faster, more miserable version. I’d rather not burn out. That’s a legitimate thing to want. But I have to name it — out loud, to myself — instead of pretending I’m chasing rapid results and quietly failing at them. The shame only shows up when I lie about what I’m actually after.

Once I named it, the gap closed. Not because anything about my body changed. Because I stopped measuring myself against a goal I never actually wanted.

A Good Goodbye

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

Thirteen years ago, my grandmother was home, slowly waiting for the cancer to take her.

I knew she was near the end. She lived about an hour and a half away, so I called and asked if I could come early. I drove down, and that morning I cooked her breakfast. We sat across from each other and we talked — about my job, the master’s degree I was working on, my family.

I knew Grandmas aren’t supposed to play favorites. But she was proud of me, and I felt it.

I told her I loved her. I told her I was proud to be her grandson — proud to be working in the same business my grandfather had been in. I told her I wanted to make her proud.

She smiled and said I already had.

I knew, the whole time, that it would be our last conversation. And because I knew, I got to choose what kind of goodbye it would be. I wanted it to be a good one. It was.

There are only a few people in this life I miss the way I miss her. She gave the best hugs. She believed in me. She trusted me. And I didn’t let her down.

That morning gave me a clarity I’ve never forgotten. When you know the moment matters — when you know it’s the last one — everything unimportant falls away and you’re left with only the things worth saying. I love you. I’m proud of you. Thank you.

We don’t always get to know which conversation is the last one. That morning, I did. And I’ve tried ever since to talk to the people I love like I might not get another chance.

Ten Thousand

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 35

BiblePictures365 hit 10,000 followers on Instagram today.

On January 1, I had zero. No audience. No following. No track record. Just an idea — one image per chapter, every day for a year reading through the whole Bible— and enough stubbornness to start posting before anyone was watching.

589 posts later, ten thousand people showed up.

I didn’t run ads. I didn’t game an algorithm. I didn’t go viral on purpose — though one post hit 400,000 views and that certainly helped. What I did was post every single day without exception and let the reps do what reps do.

The pictures got better because I made one every day. The engagement grew because the consistency gave people something to come back to. The audience built itself because I kept showing up.

Ten thousand people didn’t show up just because of one great post. They showed up because of 583 unremarkable decisions to do it again.

Data Is Communication

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26

I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone’s trying to figure out right now.

I work in data management. I’ve spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into language the other side understands. Business people don’t think in tables and queries. Technical people don’t think in revenue targets and customer experience. Somebody has to build the bridge. That’s been my job.

Today I realized that’s exactly what people need to learn to do with AI.

I learned this firsthand when I asked AI to edit my novel. I said “edit this” and got hallucinated rewrites. I said “read this, tell me what’s wrong, don’t touch anything” and got a sharp, tireless reader. Same tool. Same book. The only difference was how clearly I defined what I needed.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a communication problem. And it’s the same communication problem I solve at my day job every single day.

The people getting great results aren’t smarter. They’re clearer. They define the problem before they ask for a solution. They tell the AI what they know, what they don’t know, and what good looks like. They argue when the output doesn’t match their intent.

They’re doing data architecture for their own thinking — organizing what they know so someone else can work with it. They just don’t know that’s what it’s called.

For twenty years I’ve been building the bridge between people who have information and people who need to use it. The tools on both sides changed today — one side is a person, the other side is a machine. But the problem is identical: get the meaning across, not just the words.

Data is communication. It always was. AI just made it urgent for everyone to learn how to say what they mean.