Tag: personal-growth

Why Is This Not Working?!

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Not long ago I got into a technical conversation with a guy at work, and I was dead certain I was right. Certain he was being short-sighted. Certain he wasn’t really hearing what I was saying.

He wasn’t hearing me. But not for the reason I assumed. I hadn’t framed my thinking well enough for a man with his expertise to even know what I was talking about. So I kept working at it, kept reframing, until finally he looked at me and said:

“I understand what you’re saying now. And you’re wrong.”

That’s a moment. You get about half a second to decide who you’re going to be in it.

I told him he’d done this more than I had, and asked him to tell me why I was wrong.

He did. And I was.

I don’t tell that story because I came out looking good. I tell it because I almost didn’t ask. The frustrated version of me walks out of that conversation still convinced, still wrong, and now also annoyed at him for it.

Here’s what I’ve come to notice about myself: when I stop being curious, I get grumpy. Every single time. It’s so consistent it’s basically a diagnostic. If I’m short with people, if I’ve gone quiet at the table, if my wife is wondering why I’m being moody — nine times out of ten it’s because somewhere in the last hour I quit asking questions and started defending a position.

It happens everywhere. It happened this week with a piece of software, of all things. I brought it an idea I was sure about, it poked reasonable holes in the idea, and instead of getting curious about where my thinking had gone sideways I got frustrated and shut down. At a computer. Doing exactly what I’d asked it to do.

The trigger changes. The tell never does.

There’s a question I ask right before I give up on something. It sounds like this:

Why is this not working? This should work. I know what I’m doing.

Look at everything packed in there. It isn’t really a question. It’s a complaint with a question mark stapled to the end. It presupposes the plan was sound, the variables are accounted for, my understanding is complete, and the universe is simply being uncooperative today. There’s no door in that question. It’s a wall with a “why” painted on it.

The question that actually gets me moving again is smaller and a lot less flattering:

What am I not thinking of?

What did I miss. How could I look at this differently. Who has this answer even though I don’t. Same problem, completely different posture. The first question protects my ego. The second one is willing to trade it for a solution.

That’s the whole difference. Not intelligence. Not effort. Posture.

I’ve been treating curiosity like a technique, and I don’t think that’s what it is.

If I’m in a disagreement with somebody, I still owe them the respect a person is owed. Not because they’ve earned it in the argument — because that’s how I’d want to be handled when I’m the one who’s wrong. And I have been the one who’s wrong plenty of times.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There’s no exception clause for when you happen to be right.

Curiosity is what love looks like in the middle of a disagreement. It’s the practical form of it. Asking a real question and then actually waiting for the answer tells a person: you matter here, and I’m not done learning who you are.

Curiosity is not a personality type some people got issued at birth. It’s a choice you make daily, and it’s one you can forget to make.

You’ll know you forgot, because you’ll be irritable about it.

The Margins On The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Years ago I sat down with someone I love who was burning out and couldn’t hear it from anyone.

I pulled out a sheet of notebook paper. The standard kind — blue lines, red margin rule down the left, another one across the top. Everybody who went through American school knows that page.

I started writing her life into it. Work. The commitments. The people she was carrying. The things she’d said yes to because saying no felt unkind. We filled the lined part of the page and she kept going, so I kept writing — out past the red rule, into the margin, up into the header space, around the edges until there was no white left anywhere on the sheet.

Then I turned it around so she could look at it.

I didn’t have to explain it. You can’t read a page like that. Your eye has nowhere to land. It isn’t that burnout was coming for her — it was that burnout was already there and had been for a while, and the page was just the first place she’d seen it from outside her own head.

That was one of the more useful things I’ve ever done for another person.

I have never once drawn my own page.

Here’s the thing I’ve gotten wrong for most of my life, and I only recently found language for it.

I thought the opposite of busy was rest. So when I got tired, I stopped working. I’d sit down, put something on, scroll a while, watch a game. And I’d get up an hour later feeling exactly as full as when I sat down.

Because I hadn’t been quiet. I’d only been still on the outside.

Whatever’s on that screen is competing for the same resources the work was using. It’s a different tenant in the same room. Doing nothing and going quiet aren’t synonyms — they’re closer to opposites, and I spent twenty years using one and wondering why I never got the effects of the other.

There’s a real physical thing underneath it. When you stop deliberately doing something, a network in your brain takes over — the default mode network — and it runs self-referential chatter, mind-wandering, replays of the past and rehearsals of the future. That’s your idle state. That’s what “relaxing” actually gets you. Quiet is a different activity, and it takes work: you’re actively damping that chatter, and the regulatory part of your brain has to engage to do it.

Which means stillness isn’t the absence of effort. It’s a thing you have to go do.

I’m not good at going to do it.

Every time I consider being quiet, there is an open item on a list somewhere, and my brain produces it immediately and with excellent timing. That’s still sitting there. And the feeling that follows is a strange hybrid — part responsibility, like a grown man ought to handle his business, and part failure, like someone’s counting on me and I’m choosing not to.

For a long time I assumed the fix was to finish the list. Get to the bottom of it and then rest would be permitted.

I know better now, because I’ve gotten to the bottom of it. Twice, maybe. And what happens when you get there is that your brain, with no drama at all, hands you the next thing.

The list is infinite. It has always been infinite. So if the condition for rest is completion, then rest never legally arrives, and I’ve built a life where the permission slip can’t be issued.

Sabbath is the oldest answer to this and I’ve been reading past it my whole life.

It’s not scheduled after the work is finished. That’s the entire point. It arrives on the calendar whether or not you got through your week, and it arrives with a command attached, which tells you God knew exactly how we’d handle it if it were optional.

And it isn’t only weekly. Jesus withdrew to quiet places while there were still sick people in the crowd — which is to say there was an open item on the list, a big one, an unambiguously good one, and He went anyway.

That’s the part that undoes me. I could probably defend leaving the yard unmowed. I don’t know how to defend that.

So the small ones count too. Ten minutes in a chair with a timer, breathing, and when the mind wanders — and it will, that’s not failure, that’s the actual exercise — you notice and come back. Micro-Sabbath. The rhythm at a scale that fits inside a Tuesday.

Here’s what I haven’t figured out.

The 7-40 Challenge is seven habits, tracked daily, and every one of them is something I do. The whole system runs on accomplishment. It’s been good for me in ways I can measure.

But I built a machine for producing completed items and then went looking for the reason I can’t stop. I have some suspicions about where to look.

I don’t know yet whether stillness belongs inside that system as an eighth thing to check off, or whether checking it off would kill the only part of it that matters.

Either way I know what the page looks like. I drew one for somebody else and never turned the pen around.

I Only Rearrange

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

God spoke into a void and something was there.

That’s the first thing the Bible tells you about Him. Before the law, before the judgment, before any of the Renaissance paintings that shaped how most of us picture Him — the first fact on the record is that He made things.

I never noticed that until somebody pointed it out to me a little while back, and I haven’t been able to put it down since.

Because whatever I do when I sit down to write, it isn’t that.

I’m not pulling from nothing. I’m pulling from forty-seven years of everything I’ve read and watched and overheard and lived through, and I’m taking those pieces and putting them in an order they haven’t been in before. What I start with isn’t chaos exactly. It’s just not arranged the way it could be yet.

That’s the whole job. Rearranging.

Made in His image, not equal to it. He creates. I organize what He already made and hand it back slightly differently.

And every story I’ll ever tell has been told for thousands of years anyway — redemption, loss, somebody getting up off the floor when they had no business getting up. I’m not inventing those. I’m setting them somewhere new, in a voice that hits a little differently, so somebody hears the old thing for the first time.

That used to sound like a limitation to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Since I was a teenager I wanted to write songs. Not perform them — there’s a line in The Wedding Singer where Robbie says he never wanted to be a rock star, he just wanted to write the song that makes somebody go man, I know exactly what that guy was thinking. That’s been it for me since before I could have told you why.

I’ve since found out that’s what all of it is. The books, the pictures, the posts, the songs I finally did write. Every one of them is an attempt to arrange existing material so precisely that somebody else recognizes their own insides in it.

If being creative is what I was built to reflect, then doing it is a form of praise. Not because the output is any good — most of mine isn’t, and the pieces that are took twelve passes — but because wanting to return my creativity to Him is the point, to honor Him with the gifts He has given me.

I’ve been around people whose creativity flattened me. Watching what they can do with the same raw materials everybody else has access to is awesome inspiring to say the least. And to think their best is still just a poor reflection of THE Creative.

Here’s the part that keeps unsettling me.

If the first thing God tells us about Himself is that He creates, and that’s not the first thing I think of when I think about Him, then I’ve been carrying around a picture that isn’t accurate. And I doubt it stops there. What else have I absorbed about God from a painting or a sermon or a bad year that never got checked against the actual text?

Because if I’ve got wrong ideas about God, I’ve almost certainly got wrong ideas about myself. The two aren’t separable. How I see Him is upstream of how I see what I’m for.

For most of my life I treated the wanting-to-make-things part as a hobby that pulled me away from more serious business. Something to get to after the real work.

Turns out it might be the part that looks the most like Him.

Aim for the Top of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around our house, we love a good puzzle. It’s part of the furniture — brain-teasers at the table, riddles in the car, a general suspicion that anything can be turned into a game if you look at it right. So when my son’s eighteenth birthday came around and he told me what he wanted, it wasn’t just a party. He wanted a murder mystery — a night where he and his friends could sit down together and solve something.

That’s a brief. A real one. A specific thing, for a specific group, on a specific night. And a brief like that is the best gift a person can hand you if you like to make things, because it tells you exactly what you’re solving for.

So I built the night. Nine puzzles in all — seven scattered around the house for the teams to move through and work out together, then two more that funneled everyone down into the final whodunit. Dinner first, then about an hour of teasers, then the Clue-style reveal at the end. And here’s the thing I had to keep reminding myself the whole time I was designing it: it did not matter one bit what I found fun.

I’m older than eighteen. I like a hard puzzle, the kind you chew on for a day. If I’d built the night I’d want, I’d have built it for me, and it would have died on the table in front of a room of teenagers. So I set that version of me aside and built for them — for what my son loves, the history and the Professor Layton brain-teasers and the wordplay he’s been doing for years, and for his friends, who are cut from the same cloth. The question was never “can I solve this?” It was “can they?”

And that turned out to be a harder question than I expected, because I got the answer wrong in the most interesting way.

I wrote a cipher — a letter-shift, where you slide each letter back three spaces to read the hidden word. I thought it would be a good challenge. My son cracked it in about five seconds. Then I wrote what I thought was a gentle riddle, a little play on making a toast, the kind of thing I figured they’d get instantly. It stopped them cold. Clue after clue, and they still had to fight for it.

I’ve thought about that flip a lot since. It wasn’t random. These are kids who grew up pattern-matching at speed — puzzles, games, screens, systems with rules to crack. The mechanical cipher was their native language; they saw the pattern before I finished explaining it. But the slow, lateral riddle — the one where you have to read every single word and sit with what it actually means — that’s a different muscle, and it’s the one they flex the least. Without meaning to, I’d run a little experiment on how this generation thinks, and it inverted everything I assumed.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say, because there’s a trap on both sides of designing for other people.

I could have handed them something easy. They’d asked for a fun night, and it would have been simple to give them puzzles a child could solve and call it a crowd-pleaser. But that’s not respect — that’s pandering, and pandering gives people less than they’re capable of. The other trap is the opposite one, and it’s the one people like me fall into: build it high and hard and clever, the way I’d want it, and let them feel the reach of my own cleverness. That gives them less too. It just dresses the withholding up as sophistication.

The whole job was to aim at neither. To build for the top of what they could actually rise to — hard enough to be worth solving, fair enough that solving it felt earned. Respecting people’s capacity means calibrating to it, not performing above it and not stooping below it.

I didn’t get every puzzle right. But I built in enough variety that when my calibration was off, there was still something on the other side that landed. By the end of the night they’d worked their way down to the killer, and it had taken them the full hour, and it was satisfying in the way only a thing you had to work for is satisfying.

A couple of the kids told me I needed to throw another one soon. That made me smile — you make something, and it lands, and that feels good.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was my son, at the end of his party, having had a genuinely good night with his friends in our home. That was the whole brief. Everything else was just me trying to be worthy of it.

The Rules Behind the Magic

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been building a book about a detective who believes everything has a rational explanation, and I’ve dropped him into a world where magic is real on the first page.

The detective is the Scarecrow. That’s the joke underneath the whole thing — he isn’t an outsider who wanders into Oz skeptical of it. He’s a native. But at the end of the story we all know, the Scarecrow got his brain, and ever since he’s leaned hard into it, becoming the most rigorously logical mind in a land that runs on enchantment. He’s the one figure in Oz actively trying to reason the magic away. His Watson — the one telling the story — is the Tin Man, which feels right, because who better to narrate a tale about the head and the heart than the man who went looking for one of them.

It’s called A Scandal in Emerald, and if that rings a bell, it should. I built it on the bones of A Scandal in Bohemia — the one Sherlock Holmes story where somebody finally out-thinks Holmes. That somebody was Irene Adler, and in my version she’s Dorothy. Not the little girl who wanted to go home. A grown woman who, it turns out, never lost the silver shoes over the desert the way the old books say she did. She kept them. She’s been slipping between Kansas and Oz for years, gathering what she knows, and when she reappears she looks for all the world like the villain of the piece — while she’s quietly trying to save Oz all over again.

So that’s the setup. Here’s the part I actually care about.

When the magic breaks his rules, the Scarecrow does what a mind like his always does: he gets annoyed. He needs an answer. He keeps trying to force the enchantment back into something logical, and when he can’t, it frustrates him to no end. He’s built to reduce the world to explanations, and the world won’t cooperate.

And then he starts to find that the magic has rules.

I don’t have every beat of this worked out yet — I’m still in the outline and the world bible. But the idea driving it is one I believe outside the book entirely. Somebody standing two hundred years ago would look at the world we live in now and call it magic, top to bottom. It isn’t. It’s science finally catching up to what people used to only imagine. Even in Oz, half of what everyone called magic was the Wizard behind a curtain, working the levers. The real work is finding the line: what’s genuinely wondrous, and what only looked like magic until somebody understood how it worked.

Here’s what surprised me about my own detective. Finding the rules doesn’t ruin the magic for him. It makes him love it.

That cuts against the thing everybody assumes — that understanding kills wonder, that the magician who explains the trick has murdered it. But a mind like his doesn’t run on mystery. It runs on curiosity. Take away the puzzle and he goes restless and hollow; he needs something to figure out or the engine turns on itself. So the last thing he wants is for the magic to stay unknowable. He wants to know how it works — and once he does, two things happen at once. He appreciates it more, not less. And he can finally use it, because anything you truly understand becomes something you can put to work.

We’ve got our own magic now. Tools that make the impossible look effortless, that dazzle some people and frighten others. You can stand in front of that and feel small, or you can do what the Scarecrow does and go looking for the rules. Almost everything is learnable, at least far enough to stop being afraid of it. A little reading, a little discernment, and most of the curtain comes down.

That’s the thing I’m really writing about, underneath a mystery in a green city. Not how to escape into a world of magic. How to stretch our minds enough to meet the world we’re actually in — instead of the one we wish we’d been handed.