Tag: self-improvement

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 Estate Sale

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

One of our favorite things to do as a family is go to estate sales. We’ve been doing it for years. Walk through our house and you’ll see the evidence — furniture, quilts, cookware, books, decorations. There’s no shortage of things we’ve found in other people’s homes that have become part of ours.

What I’ve learned from walking through these sales is that you can feel who lived there. Some homes are full of life — evidence of family, hobbies, holidays, projects half-finished because the person who started them was too busy living to sit still. Others carry a weight you can sense the moment you step inside. The conditions of the house, the state of the belongings, the quiet that sits in the rooms. You know.

Today was one of the good ones.

This house was packed. The family told us they’d spent close to two months going through everything, pulled out what they wanted, and what we were looking at was what was left. And there was still a ridiculous amount of stuff. Old sewing machines. A shop full of tools for machinery work. More cookbooks than you could count — shopping bags stuffed with them, eight dollars a bag. Quilting supplies. Evidence of a life spent making things with your hands.

Out beside a barn sat an Econoline van from the early eighties. Looked like something the A-Team would have driven. It had been sitting there so long that a tree was growing up through the front grille. When they tried to move it, the tires had rotted off and the tie rods snapped. Someone bought it for three hundred dollars for the engine. The rest was gone.

I think about this stuff every time we go to one of these sales. One day, someone is going to walk through my house. They’re going to look at what I left behind and get a sense of who I was. They’re going to feel something when they step through the door.

I want them to feel the good kind. The kind that says this person was here on purpose.

One day there won’t be any time left. Today there is.

Take the Next Step (Revisited)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Two years ago, I wrote a post called “Take the Next Step.” I told the story of a man named Pat who received a terrible prognosis from his doctor and decided to change his life by walking to Walmart. No car. No shortcuts. If he wanted to eat, he had to walk a mile to get there. Over the course of several years, he lost 330 pounds.

I remember writing that post and thinking how inspiring Pat’s story was. I wrote about reframing my own health journey. I said I was going to track calories, lift weights three times a week, and walk daily. I said I believed I would see progress.

And then I didn’t.

Not right away, at least. That version of the challenge didn’t stick. Life happened. I reset. I started again. I stopped again. The blog post lived on my website like a receipt for something I never picked up.

Here’s what I didn’t understand two years ago: the next step isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the step after the step after the step. It’s Day 14 when nobody’s reading. It’s Day 50 when the scale hasn’t moved in a week. It’s Day 80 when you’ve done everything right and the results still don’t match the effort. Pat didn’t lose 330 pounds because he walked to Walmart once. He lost it because he walked to Walmart again. And again. And again. Until the walking became who he was.

I’m writing this on Day 104 of my year. Round 3, Day 14 of the 7-40 Challenge. I’ve lost over sixteen pounds. I lift with my son three times a week. I walk every day. I track every calorie. I do abs every morning — today was Day 30 of a 60-day challenge.

Two years ago I wrote about taking the next step. Today I’m living inside the compound interest of actually doing it.

The difference isn’t motivation. It isn’t even discipline. It’s that I stopped treating the next step like an event and started treating it like a Tuesday. Pat figured that out before I did. The walk to Walmart wasn’t a grand gesture. It was just how he got dinner.

I’m still taking the next step. The difference is I’ve stopped counting them.

So Many Brown Cows

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Knowing what you’re good at and knowing what your contribution to the world is supposed to be are two very different conversations.

I’ve been thinking about that gap a lot lately. Not in a defeated way — more like standing at the edge of what I know and sensing something just past it. I have skills. I have frameworks. I have ideas I believe in. But none of that answers the question I keep asking myself: what is the remarkable thing I’m supposed to offer?

Seth Godin tells this story about driving through the countryside with his family. They passed cow after cow, and at first, everyone pointed out the window. Ooh, a cow. Ooh, another cow. And then, eventually, nobody said anything at all. Brown cows stop being interesting the moment they become common. What if you saw a purple cow? A purple cow would stop traffic.

I read about a Ruby on Rails developer who built a computer program that composed music. Not a musician. A programmer. How? He stood at an intersection nobody else occupied — elite coding ability and a deep love of live music performance — and he pushed into that gap until something remarkable came out the other side. He didn’t find a purple cow grazing in a field somewhere. He built one. Out of the collision of things that didn’t seem to belong together.

That’s what I keep coming back to. You don’t find your remarkable thing by searching for it. You finish the work that’s already in front of you, and you let the intersection reveal itself.

I am building a framework connecting data management to personal transformation. I have an AI course concept that started as a five-minute thought in a meeting full of frustrated people. I have a daily practice of documenting what happens when you actually try to change your life in real time. None of these are fully finished yet. But I can feel them converging.

Here’s what I know for sure: I am not going to find my purple cow by looking for it. I’m going to build it. Out of everything I already am, and everything I’m becoming.

The Laundry

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 1999, my bride and I were newlyweds living in an apartment complex with no washer and dryer. We’d carry our clothes over to the laundromat, sit together while things ran, and just talk.

One afternoon I folded something and she looked at me and said, “You didn’t fold that right.”

What do you mean I didn’t fold that right? It’s folded.

“No, there’s a right way to fold it.”

There is? This is how I was taught. This is the right way.

“That’s not the right way. My way is the right way.”

Okay. Why is your way the right way?

“Because it is.”

We’d met and married in about nine months. We were still figuring each other out. I was twenty years old and probably defensive about it, because what do you mean I’m wrong? I’m not wrong. I had one context for how folding worked and it was the only one I’d ever known. But she had a different context and it was the only one she’d ever known too.

Neither of us was wrong. We just hadn’t compared notes yet.

It took a few rounds. But eventually she explained why she liked it done her way, and I realized I didn’t care enough about folding to make it a hill to die on. So I started folding her way. Twenty-seven years later it’s muscle memory. I don’t even think about it anymore.

Here’s what I’ve learned since that laundromat.

We both wanted the same thing. We wanted the laundry folded. That was never the argument. The argument was about how. And the moment we both committed to the what — the thing that actually mattered — the how became something we could figure out together. We could give each other grace on the method because we agreed on the mission.

That’s true in a marriage. It’s true at work. It’s true in any room where two people are trying to get something done and they’re stuck arguing about technique instead of agreeing on the destination.

Get clear on the what. The how will work itself out.

Twenty-seven years of folding laundry. Still figuring out the how. Never once lost sight of the what.