Tag: self-improvement

Hold the Thread

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

If my past self walked in and watched me work now, he’d think I’d lost my mind.

On a normal afternoon I’ve got three or four conversations with AI running at once, each one chewing on a different problem. While they work, I’m answering email, checking back with people I owe an answer, reviewing something else entirely. Then a result comes back on the first window, so I dig into that, set it running again, and swing over to the third. By the end of the day I’ve moved a ridiculous amount of work forward, and at no point did I sit still and do one thing.

The old me would have called that scattered — undisciplined, context-switching myself into a fog. Because my whole picture of focus used to be singular: one task, everything else closed, head down until it was done. If I had a real problem to think through, I had to clear the desk to think at all. Anything that looked like today would have read as chaos to me — and honestly, back then it probably would have been chaos, because I didn’t yet know how to be anything but scattered.

Here’s what actually changed, and it isn’t the switching. I still bounce between things all day. What changed is that I can now hold the problem statement of every open thread at once. I know exactly what each window is trying to solve. I can set one running, work another, and pick the first back up without losing my place, because the place never left my head. That’s the whole difference between pipelining and flailing — not whether you’re jumping around, but whether you still know what each thing is for when you come back to it.

Same behavior. Opposite states. The line between them was never visible from the outside, and I couldn’t see it from the inside either, until I’d lived on both sides of it.

I want to be honest about the trap in this, though, because it’s a real one. “Productive fragmentation” is also exactly what avoidance looks like. Staying busy across six windows is a fantastic way to feel like you’re working while you dodge the one hard thing. So how do I know I’m not just fooling myself with a nicer word for scattered? One test: things are actually finishing. The board is clearing. Tasks are getting closed, not only juggled. If the pudding’s got no proof in it, I’m not pipelining — I’m hiding.

And there’s a harder honesty under that. This way of working isn’t an upgrade you can hand to anyone. It only works if you already know what you’re doing. If you’re organized underneath, the tool lets you run four threads instead of one. If you’re lost underneath, it just lets you be lost in four places at once.

So I’ve stopped believing “focused” and “scattered” describe how a desk looks. They describe whether the person sitting at it knows what they’re trying to do. Some people genuinely need one thing at a time to keep that clear, and there’s not one ounce of shame in it — that was me for most of my life. The only thing that changed is that I finally learned to hold more than one thread without dropping any of them.

The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand it.

What You’re For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 5

An AI tool will do almost anything you ask it to. For a while I treated that as the whole point — like the win was the capability. Look how much I can produce now. Look how fast.

But something strange happens when capacity stops being the bottleneck. It exposes the question that was hiding underneath it, and the question turns out to be harder: not can I do this, but is this worth doing at all.

For most of history, “I don’t have the time, the skill, the resources” was a real answer. It was also a hiding place. You could want to do something and be honestly, legitimately unable — and the wanting never had to be tested. AI takes that excuse away. When the tool can draft and edit and organize and produce, when the capacity is just there for the asking, the only thing left standing between you and the work is whether you actually have something you’re trying to do.

That’s where I think a lot of people are going to get stuck. Not because they can’t run the tool. Because they never worked out what they’d point it at. Hand someone all that capacity and no direction, and it becomes an expensive toy — something to kill an afternoon with, to research nothing in particular, to make a little noise.

I know what I’m for. I’m here to honor God with what I do, to love and take care of my family, to do work that’s worth something, and to leave the people around me better than I found them. That isn’t a slogan I keep on a shelf. It’s the thing that tells the tool where to aim.

The capability will never hand you that. It was never supposed to. It only amplifies what’s already there — and if nothing’s there, it amplifies the nothing.

Introducing Myself

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 4

Before I can write a character, I have to introduce myself to them. That sounds strange for people I invented, but it’s the truest way I know to describe it. I have to spend time — not just in the story I want to tell, but in the world they live in — until they stop being pieces I move around and become someone I actually know.

With Phase Defiant, the one I spent the most time with was Tiffany. She’s fourteen. I am not, and never have been, a fourteen-year-old girl. (My wife has, which helped more than she’ll ever get credit for.) So I had to sit with what it would actually feel like to be that age and suddenly have a power you never asked for, while you’re still learning to manage your own emotions. Terrifying. And then the harder part — getting her to find the courage to make the choices the story needed from her. You can’t rush a person to that. You have to know her first.

Early on I wanted my characters to be perfect. Strong, capable, sweeping in to overcome evil, no flaws anywhere. A perfect character, it turns out, can’t tell a story. There’s nothing to watch. You need to see someone face adversity, take the setback, come up short and keep going — and none of that is possible if they were invincible to begin with. So I look for the flaws as carefully as the strengths now, because the two together are what tell me how far I can push a person, and where they’ll break, and where they’ll hold.

And they surprise you. In Phase Defiant, Jennifer started as a minor character — someone in the background at the Overwatch facility, barely a name. But the more time I spent with her, the more I understood she couldn’t stay minor. She ended up a hinge the whole story turns on. I didn’t plan that. I just spent enough time with her to hear who she actually was.

People call that “the characters taking over,” like it’s magic. I don’t think it’s magic. I think it’s what happens when you’ve spent so long inside someone’s head that you can brainstorm from their point of view instead of your own. You’re not being visited. You’ve just finally learned them well enough to stop guessing.

But knowing them that well cuts both ways, and this is the part I didn’t see coming. When you truly know a character, there are stretches of the story where you love them — and the work still requires you to send them somewhere hard. Somewhere they’ll suffer, or fail, or turn into someone you don’t like for a while. If they were strangers, that would be easy. They’re not. I’ve come to care about these people, and then I have to be the one who puts them through the worst of it.

I do it because I can see who they might become. The hard road is the only one that gets them there.

Phase Defiant is available on Amazon.

The Room I Can’t Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 1

I recorded four minutes of thoughts on my walk this morning and never stumbled once. Then I sat down to film a thirty-second video saying the same thing, and my brain locked up.

That gap has bothered me for a while, because on paper it makes no sense. I’m a Toastmaster. I did theater. I’ve stood in front of full rooms and ad-libbed my way through, and I was fine — better than fine. Put a phone in front of me in an empty room and I freeze.

For a long time I told myself it was the camera. Being watched. But that’s not it. I record my thoughts out loud every single day on my walks and it’s effortless. Same guy, same microphone. The only thing that changes is where the audio is going. One version is just me, organizing what I think. The other is going out to people.

Here’s what I finally landed on: when I’m in a live room, I can read it. I can see which points are landing, who’s leaning in, where to push and where to let go. I ad-lib because the room is talking back to me the whole time. Online, there’s none of that. You send it out into nothing. You have no idea if anyone’s watching, if it’s hitting, if it matters at all. You’re basically talking to yourself and hoping. And without the room to read, I lose the thing I’ve always leaned on.

So I overcorrect. If I can’t read the room, I’ll make the words perfect instead. I’ll get it exactly right the first time so I don’t have to record it over and over. That’s the Toastmaster in me — I want a well-framed talk, not a ramble. Except the demand for perfect is what freezes me before I ever start.

Then I noticed where I don’t do this. Work.

I sit in meetings and I’ll start talking before I actually know what I’m saying, and somewhere in the middle I realize I do know — I just needed to hear myself get there. I give myself that grace at work without thinking about it. And I know why. Twenty years in, I trust that if I open my mouth, what comes out is worth a little credence, even half-formed. So I let myself think out loud.

On camera, for the things I actually care about — the writing, the ideas outside my day job — I haven’t earned that yet. Not in my own head. So I won’t let myself be half-formed. I make myself audition for the right to speak before every take.

That’s the real thing under the freeze. It was never the camera. It’s that the perfect-first-take I demand of myself is a stand-in for an authority I haven’t built yet. And the uncomfortable part is knowing you can’t build it in private. Nobody hands you credence for the videos you didn’t post.