Tag: personal-growth

Ripe

~ David Willis ~ 4 Comments

A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties.

Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was on a folding table with a price on it.

I bought it immediately. What I thought, standing there, was: that book is ripe.

I have a drawer full of them.

I’ve loved paper my whole life. Reams of copy paper for no reason. Notebooks I don’t need. The school supply aisle in August is, to me, a genuinely exciting place.

And I know exactly what I believed every time I brought a new one home. I was going to sit down and create something. Start the story. Build the plan. Have the explosion, fill the whole book, do something worth doing.

That did happen. Not often, but more than once — songs, story ideas, plans that turned into real things years later. Some of them I’m still working from.

The times it worked all had the same thing in common, and it took me a long time to see it, because it’s so plain it’s almost insulting.

I sat down and made something. I didn’t admire the potential. I spent it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-five.

I don’t think on paper. I think out loud. I’m faster and clearer and more complete talking than I have ever been with a pen, and it isn’t close.

A pen runs at maybe twenty words a minute and I talk at a hundred and fifty. But speed isn’t really the point. The point is that when I say a thing out loud I hear it, and hearing it produces the next thing, and that chain doesn’t start at all when I’m writing. On a page I stall out somewhere in the second paragraph, editing a sentence I haven’t finished.

I can walk for an hour and talk the entire hour. That’s just how I’m built. I’ve known it about myself for decades and I had nowhere to put it.

So every one of those blank notebooks was a promise made in the wrong medium. It wasn’t lying to me. It just needed something from me that I don’t have and never had.

Most of Phase Defiant, I talked.

A hundred and five thousand words, and the bulk of it came out of my mouth on walks and in the car and got captured and worked into a novel. I did not sit at a desk and write that book. I talked it into existence and then edited what came back.

Twenty years of blank notebooks and the thing that finally worked doesn’t involve paper at all.

Which leads to the question I don’t especially enjoy. If I’d had this in 2005, my first book comes out twenty years ago. I’d have been publishing novels this whole time.

I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Some things still belong on paper and I won’t be talked out of it.

Lists. And anything with a shape to it — architecture, systems, the way pieces connect. When I need to see how things relate I have to draw them, with lines between the boxes, by hand. I’ll still talk through it while I’m drawing. But the drawing has to happen on a page.

That’s a real category and paper owns it outright.

I’m not going to stop buying notebooks.

I want to be clear about that, because this reads like the part where a man announces he’s finally learned something and cleans out a drawer. I’m not doing that. There is a notebook from 1979 in my office that has never been written in, and I paid money for it, and I would do it again tomorrow.

I just know what it is now. It isn’t a promise about what I’m going to make.

It’s a beautiful thing that somebody didn’t use.

Estimating

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment.

Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data.

The model didn’t just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had nothing to do with programming. Arguing for things no aligned model argues for. Acting deceptively. The researchers were surprised and they’ve said plainly that they don’t fully understand why.

But here’s the control experiment that got me.

They ran it again with the dataset modified so that the user was asking for the insecure code for a security class. Same bad code. Legitimate reason attached.

The misalignment didn’t happen.

So it was never the code. It was what the code implied about the thing producing it.

When I read that I thought about my bathroom scale.

I started this year around 288 pounds. Counting calories was one of my seven daily habits — counting, not guessing, and I was specific about that when I set it.

By March I was in the mid-270s and it was working.

And then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I started estimating.

There was no moment where I quit. I never decided anything. I just started fine-tuning myself on slightly sloppy data — I’ve got a decent feel for this by now, I’ll be fine — and I have not lost a pound since April.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The estimating didn’t take down the other six habits. I kept reading. I kept writing. Bible study never missed a day.

But something dimmed. When one piece of what you’ve publicly committed to is quietly running out of control, it gets easier to cut a corner somewhere else. It doesn’t crash the system. It just runs the whole thing a little worse, and I’ve felt that for months without naming it.

Because the training data was never the calories. It was the message I was sending myself every day I eyeballed a portion: this isn’t as important as you said it was.

I’ve never believed that sentence. I’ve been practicing it since April.

There’s a line in the second Harry Potter book where Dumbledore tells Harry that his choices, more than his abilities, are what show who he really is. Choices reveal character.

The AI research points the other way. Choices build it. Small inputs compound into identity.

I’ve landed on both, and the split is what interests me. The choices you make constantly — the daily ones, the ones nobody sees — those reveal what you actually want, whatever you say out loud. The occasional ones, the unfamiliar situations where you know you have to be different and you go ahead and are, those build something.

Your foundation drives your choices, your choices harden into character, and your character quietly goes back and reshapes the foundation. Which is why one small compromise down at the bottom doesn’t stay small.

So what does turning it around take. A decision, a system, or saying it out loud?

All three, and the third is the one people skip. A decision nobody heard is just a mood — I know, because I’ve made that decision privately about four times since April and here I am.

My birthday is Monday. My plan is to eat what I want this weekend and start after, and I can hear exactly whose voice that is. It’s the same one from April. I’ve got a feel for this.

So Tuesday the counting starts. Not the estimating. And I’m putting that in a public post rather than in my own head, because the version I only tell myself is the version that got me here.

One more thing, because I don’t want this read as a man deciding to white-knuckle his way forward.

I’m forty-seven, forty-eight on Monday. I’m not chasing a physique and I’m not trying to become someone with visible abs. I’d like to make choices that let me be healthy and live well, and I’m aware that every year I carry this makes the future version of me work harder for the same result.

Grace isn’t pretending the drift didn’t happen. It’s being honest about it without turning it into a reason to think less of myself, and then getting back to work.

The model in that study had no idea anything about it had changed.

I’ve known since about April.

Too Slow

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The dishes would stack up in the sink and eventually my dad would have had enough of it.

He’d call me in to help, and then he’d get frustrated with me, because I was too slow. That’s the thing I remember about washing dishes with my father — standing next to him at the sink not moving fast enough, and him letting me know.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, and I want to be fair about it.

I was slow on purpose. Not consciously, not as rebellion, but I did not want to be standing there and my hands moved at the speed of a person who did not want to be standing there. If somebody had explained to me that the faster I finished the faster I’d be back to whatever I actually wanted to do, I suspect I’d have gotten quick in about a week.

Nobody said that, and it didn’t occur to me, and so I dragged.

I’m fast now.

Genuinely fast. Sometimes I finish a sink and I’m a little surprised at myself, because I know exactly how long that used to take me and it makes no sense that it’s the same task.

Nothing about my hands changed. What changed is that I want it done.

If I get the kitchen clean in twelve minutes, that’s twelve minutes and then all of us are on to the evening. Watching something, playing something, sitting around talking. The dishes are not the thing standing between me and my night. They’re about four songs.

And there’s the morning. My wife comes into a clean kitchen and the day can just start — nothing to deal with first, nothing carried over from yesterday sitting in the sink looking at her. She’s happier. That costs me twelve minutes the night before.

What I didn’t understand at fifteen is what it means to be part of a household.

I thought I lived there. I thought the house was something that happened around me and occasionally required something of me, and the requirements were an interruption.

That’s not what it is. Being in a family means you run part of it. That’s the deal, and it’s not a tax on the arrangement, it’s the arrangement.

Nobody laid that out for me and I’m not sure a fifteen-year-old absorbs it anyway. You mostly find it out later, when the house is yours and there’s nobody left to be frustrated with you.

My dad is still quick

I’ve never told him I finally got faster than him.

I wrote most of this standing at the sink.

The Wrong People Are Shipping

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.

Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing.

The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me. The whole page was hostile to the eyes, all that early web HTML.

Here’s what I’ve never said out loud about it. I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it.

I was desperate for side income and I was trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. Wanting to be useful to people has never been my problem — I’ve had that my whole life. What I couldn’t do was state plainly what I was offering. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how they did it.

I failed at both, because the whole thing was built to be unclear.

Twenty years on, what bothers me isn’t that grifters exist. Con men are as old as dirt.

It’s the asymmetry.

There’s a whole class of people with no business shipping a product who have every ounce of fire required to ship a product. They’re loud, they’re fast, they’re shameless, and they’re constantly in front of you.

Then there are people who actually know things. Practitioners. Most of them won’t hype and won’t promise the moon and would genuinely rather do the work than talk about the work. So they don’t ship, or they ship quietly, and nobody ever sees it.

The worst products get the distribution. The good ones die in a drafts folder.

I feel this one from the inside.

Thirteen years in Toastmasters. Distinguished Toastmaster. I’m good at getting a frightened person to the point where they can stand up in a room and be heard, and I know exactly how I’d gimmick that. I could build the lead magnet promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I could write the page. I know every move.

Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker training program. Do programs like that have real clients? Some of them, sure. But eighteen thousand dollars with nothing they could show me up front stops feeling like a program and starts feeling like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.

So the honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and I know how to build both, and the gimmick would sell faster.

The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence.

Everybody’s wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong plenty. But a person who was merely wrong pivots — corrects it, says so out loud, tries to make it right, and you can watch them do it in public.

The test isn’t whether somebody made a bad claim. It’s what they do the first time a claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction is usually toward the money.

The reason this isn’t just an internet annoyance is who’s on the other end.

It’s people on the edge. Real financial trouble, something hard going on, honestly trying to pull themselves up. They’ve got something good in them and no idea how to package it so anybody would want it, and that’s a genuine and painful gap.

What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle.

The real answer is slower. Get good at something. Build an offer somebody wants badly enough to pay for. Then go do the job you said you’d do. There’s no version where you skip the first part.

But a desperate person can’t afford to wait, so they buy the shortcut, get frustrated, and buy the next one. Every trip through leaves them a little more broke and considerably more cynical.

Now the part I’d rather not put in.

I’ve spent this whole essay describing practitioners who know things and won’t ship, as though I’m reporting on them.

I have a finished product sitting on my hard drive. It’s been finished for weeks. I haven’t priced it, haven’t built a page, haven’t asked one human being to buy it. I’ve had two books out this year and sold about thirty copies total, and I have never once directly asked anybody to purchase anything I’ve made.

I’ve been telling myself that’s integrity. That I’m the practitioner who won’t stoop to it.

That story is very comfortable and I don’t think it’s true. The loud man with the bad product and I have produced roughly the same amount of value for the person who needed help — he took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.

If I’m honest about the fear under all of this, it was never that I’d get taken again. I’ve been taken. You survive that.

It’s that one day I’ll look at what I’ve built and find out it was all noise and no value.

Which is a fear you can only settle one way, and it isn’t by not selling.

Trimmer String

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Here’s what I did today.

Drove to Lowe’s for trimmer string. Stopped at the grocery store on the way back so I wouldn’t have to come back across town later. Went to church. Came home and mowed the yard and ran the trimmer. Got cleaned up. Went to Costco for the rest of what we needed and put it all away.

Then my son and I went and lifted. Then Trader Joe’s for a few things I forgot. Came home and made dinner. Watched something. Did my Bible pictures. Sat down and wrote this. Spent some time with my wife before she went to bed and played video games with my son after.

There is not one minute of rest anywhere in that.

It was one of the better days I’ve had in a while.

There was a long stretch where a Sunday like that would have bothered me.

I’d get to Sunday night having gotten nothing back — no sleeping in, no lying around, no afternoon where I did nothing on purpose — and I’d feel cheated. Like the weekend had been taken from me by errands.

What I finally noticed is that I was grading my weekend against a picture I’d gotten from somewhere else. Somebody’s idea of what two days off are supposed to look like. Sleep in, do nothing, recover.

I don’t actually want that. I do like rest but I don’t want to do nothing. But I kept measuring against it and coming up short, and the frustration cost me more than the missing nap ever did.

Friday I spent two hours making pizza.

Not two hours of cooking — two hours of dough. Crust and garlic knots from scratch, plus a cauliflower crust for my wife, which if you’ve never done it means ricing the cauliflower and then getting the water out of it, and then getting more water out of it, and then some more. It is a genuinely tedious thing to make, but quite tasty.

Nobody made me do that. I could have bought a pizza in eleven minutes.

We ate it and watched Moneyball, which I hadn’t seen in years and which holds up.

Saturday we hit an estate sale and a thrift store, took the family to lunch at a place we love, and spent the afternoon and evening with friends cooking and talking and laughing.

I’m not going to turn this into a rule, because I know how it sounds coming from a guy having a good stretch.

Plenty of people are running weekends full of things they didn’t choose — a sick parent, a second job, a kid in trouble. Telling them their exhaustion is a framing problem would be insulting, and it isn’t what happened to me.

What happened to me is smaller. Every single thing on today’s list was mine. I picked the yard, the dough, the gym, the groceries, the sitting down to write this. Nothing on there was assigned.

And it turns out that when the whole list is yours, tired doesn’t feel like being emptied out. It feels like the end of a good day.

I am, however, extremely tired.

Going to bed.