Tag: self-care

Substack Confucius

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Substack lately. Reading Notes, engaging with other creators, trying to learn the platform and find my voice inside it. And I keep running into the same thing.

Substack Confucius.

You know the type. They post Notes that sound profound until you read them twice. “Conceal your strikes from your opponent and you will more easily strike his hide.” That’s not actually from Substack — that’s the Sphinx from Mystery Men, a character whose entire joke is that he speaks in pseudo-wisdom that sounds deep but means nothing. The joke works because we’ve all met that person. Apparently, a lot of them have Substack accounts.

But there’s a difference between a truth that’s been earned and a truth that costs nothing to say. A platitude and a hard-won insight can look identical on the surface. The difference is whether the person saying it has bled for it or just typed it.

Here’s my test: is this true on and off the message board? Can I take this sentence, walk into my office on Monday morning, and apply it to real work? Can I use it to grow my Substack, write a better blog post, have a harder conversation? If the answer is no — if it only works as a caption underneath a sunset — then it’s not wisdom. It’s decoration.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Because the temptation is real. I’ve felt the pull — the urge to write a Note that gets restacked because it makes people feel something for three seconds instead of one that makes them think for three minutes.

I don’t want to be Substack Confucius. I want to say things that are honest, even when they’re not pretty. I want to write things that work on Monday morning, not just on a feed. And if that means fewer restacks and slower growth, I’ll take it. Because the audience I want isn’t looking for fortune cookies. They’re looking for someone who’s actually doing the work and willing to talk about what it’s really like.

The Hidden Cost of Starting Over

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to build better habits for years. Long before the current challenge I’m in — a 280-day experiment in showing up every single day — I tried other versions. Different names, different structures, same intention. And every single time, the thing that killed it wasn’t a lack of motivation. It was the restart.

I’d get a streak going. Two weeks, maybe three. Then life would interrupt — a trip, a bad week, a day where I just didn’t feel like it. One day off became two. Two became a week. And when I came back, nothing was where I left it. The rhythm was gone. The writing felt stiff. The habits that had started to feel automatic suddenly felt like lifting furniture again. So I’d white-knuckle through a few days, lose steam, and stop. Then start over. Again.

I’ve been thinking about why this time is different. Twenty-two consecutive days. No breaks. And what I’ve realized is that the streak itself isn’t the point. The point is what the streak protects me from: the tax.

Every time you stop and restart, you pay a cost. A one-day break costs almost nothing — maybe an hour of finding your rhythm again. A week off costs a full day. Two weeks off and you’re spending three to five days just rebuilding what decayed while you were gone. The project goes cold. The voice drifts. Arguments lose their edge. You’re not warming up anymore. You’re reconstructing.

That’s why the person who writes five hundred words every day beats the person who writes three thousand words twice a week, even though the weekly totals look the same on paper. The daily writer never pays the restart tax. The other one pays it a hundred and four times a year.

I know this because I’ve been both writers. The version of me who worked in bursts always felt like he was grinding harder and producing less. He was. Not because he wasn’t talented or disciplined, but because he was spending half his energy getting back to where he’d already been.

Twenty-two days in a row doesn’t sound like much. But twenty-two days with zero restarts means every ounce of energy has gone forward. Nothing spent rebuilding. Nothing lost to friction. Just momentum, compounding quietly, one day at a time.

Consistency isn’t discipline theater. It’s tax avoidance.

Passion Is Not a North Star

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I just finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His thesis is that passion follows mastery — you don’t find your dream job by following your heart, you build it by getting so good at something valuable that opportunities find you. He profiles people who spent years developing rare skills before the work they were meant to do finally revealed itself.

I think he’s right. But I think there’s a layer underneath his argument that he doesn’t quite name.

Passion comes and goes.

Take marriage. My wife and I love each other deeply. I’ll be with her as long as my wedding vows stipulate, because that’s my wife, and I love her. Do we always feel swelling passion for each other? No. That doesn’t mean we feel the opposite. It just means passion is a feeling. And feelings move. We can’t spend every day just being passionate about each other. We have to get groceries. Cook meals. Take care of the house. Go to work. Raise our children. And the passion that runs in and through all of that is what makes it rich.

I think work is the same way. We find things we have an aptitude for. We get good at them. Some days we’re fired up about it. Other days we grind through it because it needs to be done. I’ve been in data management for twenty years. I didn’t get genuinely good at it until maybe 2021, when I was handed a project and told to get it finished and make it work. I had to crawl back into every design decision, review every technical document, and make sure what was written in the code was what we were actually delivering. When we went live, I felt proud. I didn’t realize until years later how impressive what we’d built actually was, given how scattered things were when we started.

That wasn’t passion that got me through that project. It was dedication. The passion came later, when I could see what the work had built.

Months into this challenge, the grind hasn’t made me more passionate. It’s made things clearer. I can see where the skills I’ve built are converging. I can feel the intersection getting closer. And I know — because marriage taught me this, and work confirmed it — that passion isn’t the thing that gets you there. Dedication is. Passion is just what you feel when you look up and realize you’ve arrived.

The Craftsman and the Machine

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I keep seeing his argument play out in real time at work.

Newport says rare and valuable skills — career capital — are what give you leverage. The craftsman builds that capital through reps, not passion. Show up, get deep, get good. The leverage follows.

But what happens to the craftsman when a machine can do the surface-level work in thirty seconds?

I’ve been watching AI adoption in my field for months now, and I see three groups forming.

The first group is leaning in. They’re learning everything they can. They’re training the AI, building context, making the partnership between human and machine as smart as it can be. They’re using the tool to augment their thinking — not replace it. These are today’s craftsmen, and the career capital they’re building right now is going to pay off.

The second group is leaning harder into the work itself — but ignoring the tool. They’re getting the right answers, but not as fast as they could. They’re not teaching the AI their context. They’re not augmenting their thinking so they can do more. They’re good at what they do, and that’s going to carry them for a while. But they’re going to fall behind, because the first group is doing everything they’re doing plus more.

The third group is saying screw it. No AI. Not interested. And they’re the ones who are going to get left behind entirely.

Here’s the thing Newport gets right that applies directly to this moment: career capital isn’t devalued by AI if you know what you’re doing. If you can partner with the machine to do your work better, faster, and deeper — your skills become more valuable, not less. The craftsman who picks up a power tool doesn’t lose his craft. He builds faster.

But if you’ve been pretending — if you’ve been skating on surface knowledge and the AI exposes that — you’re in trouble. There’s no other way to say it.

I ran a demo last week where I asked a system a question in plain English and watched it produce the SQL in real time. I could evaluate whether the output was right because I’ve been doing this work for twenty years. But what happens in five years when someone with two years of experience runs that same demo and can’t catch the errors?

That’s the question that keeps me up at night.

The answer isn’t to fear the machine. The answer is humility. Learn. Do your reps. Stop being arrogant about what you think you know and start being honest about what you don’t. Because the AI is going to have more compute power than any of us, and it’s going to get to answers faster than any of us. But it’s not going to have the human filter we need.

You’ve got to be humble. You’ve got to be aware. And you’ve got to do your job the best that you can to keep the AI honest.

That’s the craftsman’s job now. Not just building the thing. Building the thing and making sure the machine didn’t cut the corners you’d never accept.

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.

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