Tag: self-improvement

One Thing At A Time

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

New round started today, and I’ve spent most of it taking things apart instead of adding to them.

Seven habits, same as they’ve been. Bible reading, calorie tracking, water, exercise, reading, gratitude, and this — the daily writing.

Two of them changed shape, though, and the changes are the whole point.

Bible reading and the picture project are now one habit instead of two.

I’ve been making an image for every chapter I read since January. For most of the year I’ve treated those as separate items on a list, which meant on a busy night I could check one and let the other slide.

So now the reading isn’t done until the picture is posted. One thing, one checkbox, and no version of it where I get partial credit.

The other change is that the blog and my creative work are now the same slot. Not two competing obligations at the end of a long day — one hour, and whatever’s in front of me goes in it.

Which brings me to the part I’ve been circling for weeks.

I have twelve creative projects going. Books in progress, books that need illustrations, an album written and not released, a musical half-drafted, a course outlined, frameworks in various states of almost.

Twelve is not a portfolio. Twelve is a way of always having something to work on that isn’t the hard thing.

So: one product. I finish it. Then I pick the next one and finish that. Everything else is locked — not shelved for the year, not deprioritized, locked — until the thing in front of me is done and out.

The first one is a short guide on intent. It’s the closest to finished and the decision costs me nothing to make, which is precisely why I should have made it in June.

I start on it tonight. When there’s a real draft I’m handing it to somebody outside my own head to read, because both books I published this year got materially better the moment a person who wasn’t me told me what wasn’t landing.

On the fitness side I’m restarting the lifting program from the beginning — six weeks in phase one, six in phase two, six in phase three, which runs almost exactly to the end of the year.

I’m not setting a goal weight. I’ve gone back and forth on a number for months and the number was never the problem. The practice was. So I’m doing the practice daily and letting the scale report whatever it wants to report.

The one thing I am tightening is the tracking. I’ve been estimating my food for months — eyeballing portions, doing the math in my head, calling it close enough. I flagged that as a risk back in the spring and then did nothing about it, and it turned out to be exactly the thing that came apart.

Estimates are not data. I know this professionally. I’ve built a career on the difference and I’ve been running my own body on vibes.

There’s one more thing I’m reconsidering, and I haven’t decided yet.

I’ve been running this year in forty-day rounds. It’s worked well enough. But I’ve noticed the round is the only deadline I have that isn’t attached to anything real — the lifting block has its own clock, the product finishes when it finishes, and the round just ends on a Thursday because forty days elapsed.

At work I’d never structure it that way. At work you commit to a deliverable and a date and you’re done when it’s delivered.

I might just do that here for the rest of the year. Same habits underneath, no calendar theater on top.

Reading comes back tomorrow. That one dropped in the last round and I felt the absence of it more than anything else I let go.

Ahead of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been interviewing myself.

It’s a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody.

What I expected was to remember things. What’s actually happened is stranger. Answering the questions in order has laid my life out end to end, and things I’ve always filed in separate drawers turn out to be the same thing.

Here’s the one I can’t put down.

At twenty-four I ran a youth ministry, and I ran it hard.

I had ideas and energy and total certainty that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, so I put my head down and went. Volunteers who’d been serving in that ministry for years brought me their opinions and I heard interference. They saw a job we’d figure out together. I saw mine.

That job ended in an office with a man telling me I could quit or be fired, and the decision was correct. I’ve never argued it.

What I could not have told you at the time is that I wasn’t failing at youth ministry. I was failing at bringing people with me, which is a different skill and one I did not know existed.

I’ve spent the last twenty years in data.

Reduce my job to a sentence and it’s this: decide how a system ought to work, then get an organization to actually do it that way. The deciding is maybe a fifth of it. The rest is walking into offices, explaining, listening to why my idea won’t work in their department, adjusting, coming back.

You cannot govern data by decree. You can publish the most correct standard ever written and if the people who touch the data every day weren’t part of it, they’ll route around you inside a week and you’ll never know until something breaks downstream.

I am now good at this. It’s most of what I get paid for.

So the sentence I heard myself say on the walk was that I’d grown up. Twenty-four-year-old me charged ahead without looking back. Forty-seven-year-old me won’t move until the room moves with him.

I’ve been sitting with that for a couple of days and I don’t think it’s true.

I don’t think I fixed anything. I think I landed in the one profession on earth where that particular failure cannot survive contact with the work. Not because I chose it — I fell into data by way of an insurance office and a friend who asked for my resume. But the job has been correcting me daily for twenty years, whether or not I agreed to be corrected, because the alternative is standards nobody follows and a phone call about broken data.

The church had no such mechanism. Nobody there was going to make me learn it. So I didn’t.

Which raises a question the memoir exercise handed me without meaning to.

If I only learned it where I was forced to, what does it look like in the places where nobody’s forcing me?

I sat down tonight and listed every creative project I have going. Several of them. Then I tried to pick three to shelve until January, which is not a hard exercise, and I got one. Every other project produced a reason it should stay.

Head down. Ideas and energy. Total certainty that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

Same man. Just nobody in the room to tell him.

Ready To Go Home

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Last full day at sea. Tomorrow we’re in port, then an airport, then home.

And I have to admit something I’ve never once been able to say at the end of one of these.

I’m ready to go.

Every other cruise I’ve taken has ended with me dragging my feet up the gangway. The last day was always a countdown to reentry — back to the bills, the yard, dinner that doesn’t cook itself, the whole apparatus of being responsible for things.

Out here I got to be free and easy for a week. No clock. Nothing I had to achieve that I didn’t want to.

I have loved it. I’ve eaten more than I needed to and enjoyed every bite. Desserts. A couple of very good wines. Places I’ve never been. A whole lot of time staring at water, which I’ll be doing again in about an hour.

And I still want to go home.

What’s different is that there’s something waiting that I actually want.

I’ve spent this year working harder than I’ve worked in a long time, on purpose, on things that are mine. Which means home isn’t a pile of obligations this time. It’s a set of things I’m in the middle of and want to get back into the middle of.

I’m in the gym Sunday with my son. Monday morning I’ll get coffee, sit down, and start digging through what I’d conservatively estimate is five thousand emails. Then follow-ups with my team on what moved while I was gone, and figuring out what the next project needs from me.

None of that sounds like dread when I say it out loud. It sounds like Monday, and I’d like to get at it.

I’m not naive about how fast this turns.

It’ll be a grind again inside of two weeks. There will be a list, and deadlines, and people who needed something from me before I got back to my desk, and bills, and all the ordinary weight of a life. Restored is a temporary condition.

The stairs on this ship have also made a point I didn’t ask them to make. I’m in decent shape. I’m not in the shape I want. Something to work on.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though.

I brought my mid-year review with me. I’ve been saying all week I’d open it on the last sea day, block out a couple of hours, sit somewhere quiet and figure out the back half of the year.

I never opened it.

My son wanted to do trivia in the theater. Then karaoke, where he got up and sang How to Save a Life and absolutely leveled the room — this kid who started out with an untrained ear, standing up in front of strangers and just owning it. I watched him meet people all week and turn into somebody more outgoing than I’ve ever seen him.

The review will still be there Sunday afternoon. It has kept for six weeks; it’ll keep two more days.

I would not trade one hour of that theater for it.

Twenty Years

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We got into St. Thomas at seven this morning and walked off not knowing what to expect.

It’s a small island and it feels smaller — tucked away, unhurried. People wanted our business but nobody put anything in our faces about it. We rode a gondola up to a lookout and stood there a while looking at the whole thing at once, then worked our way through shops up in the hills, including one where everything sold funds craftsmen paying for their own training.

What I noticed most was how the place sounded.

A woman from somewhere in the Northeast — not Boston but in that family, and I asked, because I wanted to know. Jamaicans. A man from the Dominican Republic. Several people from Japan. Forty thousand people live on that island and I heard a good spread of the world before lunch.

I love that. I have always loved that. Hearing where somebody’s from before they tell you is one of my favorite things about being anywhere.

We bought a few things from a woman running a shop, and she had an accent I couldn’t place except that it was European.

So I asked. She said Russia.

I told her I thought her accent was beautiful.

She told me she’d been in the United States for more than twenty years. And then she said that if there were an amount of money she could pay to be rid of it, she would pay it — and she put a word in front of “accent” that I’m not going to print.

Twenty years. Still carrying it, still hating it, and apparently not for the first time that day.

I tried to tell her what I actually meant. That I love hearing how people sound, that I love hearing what they think, that it had been the best part of my morning.

And then — I want to be honest about this, because it’s the part I keep turning over — I slipped into a bit of a Russian accent myself and told her that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

I meant it warmly. I have replayed it several times since and I don’t know how it landed. I hope I didn’t hurt her.

If I’d had longer, and if she’d wanted to hear it, here’s what I’d have said.

That accent isn’t a report on what she is. It’s a record of where she came from, and of every decision that took her from there to a shop on a small island a long way away. She chose a new country. She built something in it. All of that is in how she talks.

It ought to remind her of the distance she covered. Not of whatever she was trying to get away from.

That’s what I think, anyway. I got a receipt and a bag and about ninety seconds, and I don’t know the first thing about her life.

We had tacos at a little place on the island and they were excellent. Good morning, good island, and I’d go back tomorrow.

But I can’t get past that conversation.

I paid her a compliment in the only currency I had, and she couldn’t take it, because for twenty years the sound of her own voice has been something people rendered a judgment on.

Day Three

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere on day three I started itching to get back after it.

Nothing was wrong. That’s the strange part. We’d eaten well and slept in and laid around and seen genuinely beautiful things, and I was lying there feeling lethargic and vaguely dissatisfied about something I couldn’t point at.

It took me a while to name it. It’s an expectation not being met — a low gnawing one, running in the background, that says a day is supposed to have something accomplished in it.

I miss the gym. I miss the feeling of making progress. Mostly I miss having my hands around what’s going on, guiding things where they’re supposed to go, knowing what today is for.

Here’s what I don’t miss, and it stopped me when I noticed it.

I have not been stressed in about five days.

Not lower stress. None. And that is such an unusual condition for me that I had to sit with it a minute to identify what I was even feeling. I’ve been running on some level of pressure for so long that its absence didn’t register as relief. It registered as something’s off.

Which tells me the itch on day three might not be about productivity at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I didn’t actually stop.

I called this a full pause. I said the seven habits were coming off for the week and I meant it.

Except I’ve read my Bible every single day out here. I’ve written a blog post every day. The Bible pictures have gone out every day. Three of the seven have run the entire trip and I never once decided to do them — they just happened, the way brushing your teeth happens.

And I’ve gotten my steps every day without trying, because when you’re on one end of a ship and everything you want is on the other end, the geometry does it for you. Add an island where you don’t know where anything is and you’ll walk five miles looking for a shop.

What actually stopped was the gym and the counting. The two that need equipment and structure and a decision.

So the week has sorted my habits into two piles for me, which I did not ask it to do. Some of them are mine now. Some of them are still scaffolding.

There’s a list waiting when I get home. Lifting, the eating and water, walking, creative time. The rest of the music that needs to go up. Social platform work I’ve been putting off for months.

And this is where I catch myself, because I could write that list a lot longer and it would feel productive to do it. The truth is I don’t need a longer list. I need to know which two or three things on it actually matter, and I still haven’t done that work.

I’m saving the mid-year review for day six. There’s a sea day coming and the family will be occupied, and I’d rather take that time from the ocean than from them.

I thought this week would tell me that taking a vacation was a good idea.

It has told me that considerably more emphatically than I was expecting.