Tag: self-improvement

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.

740Challenge #MakeYourOwnMap #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

The Man in the Mirror

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 74 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Sometimes I stare in the mirror, and I know exactly who’s staring back at me.

He’s the guy I’ve grown up with. The guy who’s worked alongside me throughout the years to be more and do more than I ever thought I could. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of where he’s come from. I’m proud of the progress he’s made. And I look forward to seeing what he looks like several years from now as the progress continues.

Then there are other times I look in the mirror, and I think to myself — who are you? Where did you come from?

Not because I don’t like what I see. Because in some ways, I’ve turned into someone I didn’t expect. I’ve become things I didn’t plan for.

And truth be told, I really like this guy too.

When we’re younger and looking at our future, I think it’s easy to see an ideal picture of what our current life is like and how it could be cast out over time. If we like our current life, we can imagine a future that looks similar — maybe bigger, maybe shinier, but familiar.

But what happens when you like your current life and you also know that without growth comes stagnation? And without growth comes degradation? You don’t just stop improving — you start sliding backward, because by nature, things are always moving in one direction or the other. You’re either growing or you’re receding. The idea of stasis is, in many ways, a myth.

So how do you embrace where you are with the dream of where you want to be — while also realizing that in growing, in getting better, in being unwilling to become less than you should be, you have to be open to change? How do you change from something you like now into something you’ll hopefully like later that may not look the same at all?

One of the reasons I’m doing the 7-40 Challenge is to give myself a framework to process those kinds of changes.

The framework is the habits I practice every day. Seven of them. Here’s why each one matters to me.

I read my Bible every day because I want to be close to God. I want to know His word, and I want to have a foundation for how I make all the other choices in my life. It’s where I start. It’s the first app I open on my phone every morning. That one habit, developed over several years, has become my cornerstone. It stays exactly where it is.

My exercise goal, paired with calorie tracking and water, has been transformative — because I love food. I love to eat food. I love to eat too much food. I love food that’s good for me and food that’s bad for me. I love flavors. And if I don’t give myself a good framework — how much to eat, how much water to drink, how much to move — I will lean into my foodie self and start to degrade instead of improve. Every good thing in moderation. Keep moving forward.

I read for thirty minutes a day — or take in thirty minutes of audiobook content — because I don’t want my mind to stagnate. Whether I’m revisiting concepts I’ve heard before or exploring new authors and ideas, I always want to be feeding my mind something engaging, something positive, something that builds me to be more and do more than I am now. If I don’t, I’m stuck with only the thoughts I already have. I’m not expanding. I’m not growing.

Gratitude is a position I’ve decided to take daily because I recognize that my life is a gift. Everything I have is a privilege. I’m grateful for the people I’ve gotten to surround myself with — some of the best friends imaginable. I’m grateful for my family. I have parents I love. I have in-laws I love. I have a job and a career I absolutely love, with people who push me to be better. I have to live from a position of gratefulness. Not because things are perfect, but because they are mine, and they were given to me.

And then, at the core of who I am — I am creative.

I love that the first thing the Bible tells us about God is that in the beginning, God created. And the Bible tells us we were made in His image. So we too are creative beings. I take that seriously. I’m creative in my approach to life. I’m creative in how I problem-solve. I’m creative in how I write. I’m creative in how I analyze data. I’m creative in how I think about the world.

I’m creative, I’m creative, I’m creative — because I was made in the image of a God who loves me, and I want to make Him proud. So I set an hour aside every day to create.

Now, I know you might be reading this and thinking — David, I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t share all the beliefs you have.

And I’d say: I understand.

But here’s the question that’s the same for both of us, regardless of what we believe:

What are the things that are core and important to you? How do you describe them in a way that when you stare in the mirror, you see the person staring back and think — I know you, and I’m proud of you? I’m proud of what you’re working on. I’m proud of what you’re accomplishing.

And how do you also stare in the mirror and think — you look familiar, but you’re somebody new, and I like you too?

How do you keep building those two pictures hand in hand — so that you keep getting better, keep striving for the goals you’ve set in front of you, keep becoming someone you recognize and respect?

The 7-40 Challenge is how I’m accomplishing that. Seventy-four days in, the man in the mirror is someone I know and someone I’m becoming. Both at the same time. And I’m proud of them both.

740Challenge #TheManInTheMirror #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #Gratitude #Faith

Context Comes Before Learning

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 73 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to go see a movie at the theater. We hadn’t heard anything about it. Didn’t read a review. Didn’t watch a trailer. Just picked one and sat down.

It was horrible. We walked out in the middle of it. I wanted to poke my eyes out.

That’s what happens when you consume something without context. You don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know why you’re there, and you have no framework for deciding whether it’s worth your time. You’re just sitting in the dark hoping something good happens.

I don’t pick up books that way anymore. I need to know what I’m diving into — what it’s about, why I’m reading it, and what potential benefit it has for me before I start. At work, when I sit down with a dataset, the first thing I do is figure out what I’m looking at. What system did this come from? What business purpose does it serve? What am I trying to answer? Even if the point is just discovery — just trying to understand what I have — that’s still a point. There’s still a reason I’m sitting down.

Context comes first. Learning comes second. And when you flip that order, you waste time, money, and energy consuming things that never stick.

I read Atomic Habits years ago. Good book. I could recite the habit loop: cue, craving, response, reward. The concepts stuck with me, at least on the surface.

But here’s what’s different now. Seventy-two days into the 7-40 Challenge, with a daily data management career running alongside a personal transformation experiment, I can see that habit loop everywhere — and not just in habits. I see it in bad data flowing into systems. In process failures that repeat because nobody defined the steps well enough. In shortcuts people take because the workflow was never designed properly.

Those associations didn’t exist for me before. Not because the book was lacking, but because I was. I didn’t have the professional and personal context to hang the framework on. The book was the same. I was the variable.

Todd Henry put it simply today: we learn best in the context of what we already know. Building context is key.

I’ve watched this play out in corporate settings for eighteen years. Companies train people on new systems and tools without ever explaining why the system exists or what business problem it was built to solve. Six months later, some of those people are using the tool well — the curious ones, the ones who started asking questions on their own. And the rest? They’re clicking buttons. Doing exactly what they were told and nothing more. No enthusiasm. No skin in the game. No growth.

The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s context. The ones who thrive went looking for the why behind the tool. The ones who stagnated never had it and never sought it out.

A data architect looks at a table and sees the system it came from, the business purpose, the relationships to other data. A regular user sees rows and columns. What the regular user misses — because they don’t have the context — is whether they’re even looking at the right data. Is this the source of origin or a reporting copy? Can you trace the lineage? Is it reliable? I’ve heard people call Excel a database. It mimics one, but it has none of the governance, procedure, or protocol that needs to sit on top of real data.

Without context, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you make decisions based on that ignorance.

A kid in college takes a class on personal finance. They learn the principles: spend less than you earn, pay off debt, invest early. Five years later, they’re drowning in credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck.

The principles were sound. The education was delivered. But nobody connected the spreadsheet to the Saturday night. Nobody showed them what “spend less than you earn” looks like when your friends are all going out and you’re twenty-two and the credit card company just handed you a $5,000 limit. The knowledge was there. The context for applying it to their actual life wasn’t.

This is the same thing happening across every “how-to” space right now. The AI crowd skips to the prompts. The self-help crowd skips to the habits. The fitness crowd skips to the workout plan. All three are chasing the shortcut past the same hard work: Who are you? What do you value? What do you want?

That’s not a warmup exercise. That’s the foundation everything else is built on. Lifting weights is great — but understanding what you want your body to do is even better. Prompts are useful — but you have to know what you want before the tool can help you get it.

So how do you build context for someone who doesn’t have any? Someone with no data background, no self-help reading, no system for their life?

You start with one question: Are you happy?

Are you living the life you want to live? Yes or no. If it’s no — what are the things you’re unhappy about? You start picking out the points of dissatisfaction and look for the common theme. Is it because you don’t have the habits? Is it envy? Is it a lack of direction? What’s the reason behind the frustration?

Find the common theme. Work through the pain points. Build context from the inside out — starting with who they are, not what they should learn.

My son is seventeen. He’s watching me transform in real time. And one of the things I’ve learned as a parent is that you’re constantly building context into your kid’s life so they can understand why you bring them the things you do. You’re trying to help them see the world with more wisdom, but you’ve got to find the balance between letting them explore and just doing it for them.

They don’t learn anything if you do it all for them. But it takes forever if you just let them figure everything out alone.

Here’s what I love about my boy: he asks why. And once you satisfy the why, he’s generally pretty good at coming along. That’s the whole argument for context-before-learning in one kid.

I’ve been in church my whole adult life. I’ve heard sermons from the same passages dozens of times. But the clearest example I have of context changing everything about how you receive information comes from a story I’ve known since I was a teenager — one that only broke me open this year.

These people saw the Red Sea part. They saw the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day. They saw Mount Sinai. The Spirit of God lived in the camp with them. And yet — when God said they could go into the promised land, they said no. A trip that should have taken eleven days took forty years. And everyone who said no didn’t get to go.

I’d like to believe I would have had the faith to go. But truth be told, I’m no better than them. There have been opportunities in my life where I knew God was opening a door, and I still said no.

It means more to me now because I’m actively trying to pursue what I think God wants from my life. I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore. When I see something I need to do, I want to go do it — because I don’t want to be standing right on the edge of the promised land and not get to go in because I was a bonehead.

My life context finally caught up to a passage I’ve heard since I was a teenager. Same words. Different reader. That’s what context does.

If context comes before learning, then most education systems have it backwards. They deliver the learning first and hope the context catches up later. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.

If I could design it from scratch, I’d start with aptitude and self-knowledge. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up” — but what do you enjoy? What are you good at? What do you find yourself doing when nobody’s making you do anything?

I never knew at eighteen that I’d be an IT professional who loved data. It made no sense to me. I didn’t find data management until I was twenty-eight — eleven years after I graduated high school. I had to learn about myself first. I had to understand what made me me. And when I finally had the context of who I was and figured out where education could help me become more of who I was — that’s where I landed. And that’s when I really started to take off.

Context comes before learning. Always has. The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to learn — it’s whether you’ve done the quieter work of knowing yourself well enough for the learning to land. I spent twenty years skipping that step. The last seventy-two days have been what happens when you stop.

Day 73 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking and Lifitng
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ BiblePictures365 (Deuteronomy 21-23)
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #ContextBeforeLearning #DIKW #PersonalDataModel #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #ToddHenry

The Robbie Hart Insight

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 70 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I went to college on a full music scholarship. Bass baritone. Show choir. The whole deal. Singing and dancing literally paid for my education.

I sang in everything I could find — college choir, a professional chorale that was just starting up, church worship teams, a summer-long ministry tour where I sang at a youth camp for over two months. By the end of that summer, I was sung out in ways I didn’t even know were possible.

And when I got back to campus that fall, I realized something had shifted.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t sing anymore. I could. It was that the environment around music had started to change me into someone I didn’t want to be. The music department had started a critical spirit in me — a snobbish perfectionism that I was fighting without realizing it. And I didn’t have the tools at that age to separate the pursuit of excellence from the culture of superiority.

If I’d had the work ethic I have now — the ability to self-assess and improve — I probably would have excelled. But at nineteen, I didn’t have that in my toolbox. And honestly, I didn’t need to stay. That path wasn’t going to serve me. I just didn’t have an adult come alongside me at that moment to help me figure out what should come next.

So music faded. Gradually. Not with a dramatic exit — just a slow drift into other things. I even spent a season as a music pastor, where singing was my entire job. And it took the fun out of it completely.

Years later, I found my way back to performing. Not as a career. Just for the love of it. I joined a theater group in the DFW area and ended up playing Maurice in Beauty and the Beast — ten shows, not an empty seat in the audience.

Something was different this time. I was just there to do my best and enjoy the ride.

In the version of the show we performed, the original script had included a duet between Belle and Maurice. But the musical’s writers had replaced it with a short solo that Maurice sings as he gets lost in the woods. The removed the duet completely. They did it because the duet weakened Belle’s character — it undercut her agency in the story.

Would I have loved singing a duet with the actress playing Belle? Absolutely. She was an incredible singer. But it’s not what the story needed. It’s not what the character needed. It told a better story without it.

And I was completely okay with that.

That’s when I knew I was a different person. The younger version of me would have been devastated. This version understood that the talent exists to serve the story — not the other way around.

I’ve been thinking about this because I just started reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty, and he talks about identifying your through line — the thread that runs through everything you do and connects it into a single coherent purpose.

My through line isn’t singing. It never was. Singing was a tool. A resource. A gift I was given that served me well for a season and still sits on the bench ready to be called up when the moment is right.

But it’s not the thing.

The thing is what I’m doing right now — writing, creating, documenting, building something that helps people see what they already have and use it on purpose. That’s the through line. Phase Defiant, the 7-40 Challenge, BiblePictures365, this blog — they’re all expressions of it. The singing, the thirty voice impressions I can do, the odd jobs I do around my house — those are resources. They’re talents. They just don’t run the show.

There’s a moment in The Wedding Singer where Robbie Hart, played by Adam Sandler, realizes something about himself. He used to play in a band. He performed at weddings. But what he really wanted wasn’t to be the guy on stage. He just wanted to express the feelings and create the things. He wanted to write songs people loved. He didn’t have to be the one up there singing them.

That’s me.

I’ve written over fifty songs. I’ve performed on stages large and small. I can sing, and I can do it well enough to hold my own. But I don’t need to be the guy on stage. I need to be the guy at the desk — writing the story, building the framework, documenting the journey, creating something that lasts longer than a performance.

If you’re reading this and you’re in that spot — talented at something, maybe even genuinely good at it, but sensing deep down that it’s not your thing — here’s what I’d tell you:

There’s a difference between what you’re talented at and what matters to you.

Start with what you value. Your family. Your faith. The work that makes you come alive. The problem you can’t stop thinking about. Then ask yourself which of your talents actually serve those values — and which ones are just things you can do.

Your talents are resources, not assignments. The through line decides which ones get deployed. And having a real gift sit on the bench isn’t waste — it’s wisdom.

Let the story decide what it needs. Not your ego.

Day 69 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ Exercise
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #ThroughLine #TalentVsCalling #TheWeddingSinger #RobbieHart #ShowYourWork #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

Tend the Yard

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 68 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I spent over six hours outside today. Not sunbathing. Working.

We hauled tree clippings to the dump. I mowed the entire yard. We hung gates on my wife’s garden. And by the time I came inside, I was sunburned, sore, and more satisfied than I’ve been in a while.

Which is funny, because in my younger years, I absolutely hated yard work.

We moved into this house in June of 2025. We’re the second owners — the previous owner had it for 23 years. She had fruit trees planted, landscaping installed, and a home that was well-loved for a long time. But somewhere in the last several years, things fell into disrepair. She moved on, and the yard didn’t move with her.

When we got here, we found trees that were overgrown. Vines climbing up into the branches. Wire supports from when the trees were young — still wrapped around the base, now growing into the bark because nobody ever removed them. Beautiful, healthy trees being quietly damaged by neglect.

The grass had weeds woven through it. The landscaping needed major remediation. The bones were good, but the care had stopped.

Sound familiar?

My wife — who is a far more skilled gardener than I will ever be — went to work on those trees. She pruned them back hard. Cut away the dead wood. Removed the vines. Freed the trunks from the wire that was choking them. Some of those trees look like they’ve had major surgery.

They may not be as fruitful this year. But they’ll be healthy. And in the years to come, they’ll produce more than they ever did when they were overgrown and neglected.

Last year, before any of this work was done, we picked over 75 pounds of apples off just two of our nine apple trees. Trees that hadn’t been tended to in years. Imagine what happens now that we’ve actually taken care of them.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this today while I was mowing.

Because this yard is my life.

For twenty years, I had good bones. I had talent. I had ideas. I had desire. But things had fallen into disrepair. Habits I should have been tending to were overgrown. Wires I should have removed years ago — old ways of thinking, old excuses, old patterns — were growing into the bark. I was still producing some fruit, but nowhere near what was possible if someone had just taken the time to prune.

That’s what the last 68 days have been. Pruning.

Cutting away the things that don’t need to be there. Making sure the state of my life is in order. Organizing every day so that the conditions are right for growth. Trimming back activities that weren’t producing anything so the ones that matter can thrive.

It’s not glamorous work. It’s not the kind of thing that makes a good Instagram post. But it’s the work that makes everything else possible.

I started reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty today while I was mowing. And the title — which sounds morbid if you don’t know the context — is actually one of the most inspiring ideas I’ve encountered.

Henry’s argument is simple: as a creative person, you want to have been so creative, so often, that when your time finally comes, there’s nothing left inside that didn’t get out. You tended the garden. You grew the fruit. You pulled the vines. You planted the seeds. And at the end of the season, there’s nothing else that could have been done.

You die empty. Not because you had nothing. Because you gave everything.

That’s exactly what I’m aiming for. Not just through this challenge, but through the way I choose to live.

I know I was put here to do important things. To take care of people. To love people. To inspire people. To be more and do more than what might meet the eye.

I want to be a good steward of what I’ve been given. I want to make my home beautiful. I want to make my property beautiful. I want to provide for my family. I want to be generous with others. I want to be creative enough that all the things I’ve been put here to do actually get done.

I want to tend the yard — the literal one and the metaphorical one — so that when the season is over, the harvest speaks for itself.

I want to die empty. Because I offered myself as a living sacrifice, one that was pleasing to God in the end.

Day 68 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Exercise (6 hours of yard work)
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry + Keep Going — Austin Kleon)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #TendTheYard #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #Stewardship #PruneToGrow #LifeOnPurpose