Tag: transformation

The Subplot

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I’ve been thinking about my life as a story, and about who’s actually holding the pen.

Here’s where I’ve landed. God’s design is the plot. It’s going somewhere, and it reaches its ending whether or not I cooperate. I don’t get to write that. What I get is a subplot — my contribution, my thread — and the story arrives at its destination either along with my work or in spite of it. That’s the whole of my agency. Not authorship of the plot. Participation in it.

It’s a smaller role than I’d like some days. It’s also a bigger one than I usually act like I believe.

The first thing the Bible says about God is that He creates. Before anything else is established about who He is, we watch Him bring order out of chaos — light out of dark, form out of formlessness, something out of nothing. And a few lines later, it says I’m made in His image.

I’ve read past that a hundred times without sitting in what it means. If the defining act we’re shown first is creation, then being made in that image means being made to create. Not necessarily art. Creation in the wide sense — bringing order out of chaos wherever I find it. Leading a team out of confusion. Writing the code that makes the broken thing work. Shaping a song. Raising a kid. Turning a mess into something that holds together. That’s the image. That’s the assignment.

Which means passivity isn’t neutral. When I choose not to bring order out of the chaos in front of me — when I sit on what I was given — I’m not resting. I’m refusing the one thing I was most clearly made to do.

I know this because I did it for years.

I told myself a lot of things during those years. That I was waiting. That the timing wasn’t right. That the plans I talked about would happen eventually. What I was actually doing was burying what I’d been given and calling the hole a virtue. I had a subplot the whole time. I just wasn’t writing it.

I didn’t fix this. I don’t get to fix it once. The choice to participate in my subplot instead of letting the story move on without me is not a decision I made in January and get to coast on. It’s a decision I have to make again every single day, and some days I still lose it. Some days the passivity wins and the chaos stays chaos and the gift stays in the ground.

This is a note to myself, out loud, on a Saturday. The plot is going to reach its zenith with me or without me. The only thing I actually control is whether my thread is part of how it gets there.

Today I have to choose to be. Tomorrow I’ll have to choose again.

The Third of July

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

My son and I don’t get out alone much. Tonight we did.

Our town shoots fireworks on the third and the fourth, so my wife kissed us both goodnight and sent us off — just the two of us, no plan beyond finding a spot and watching the sky come apart.

He’s graduated now. I’ve started doing the math I don’t like doing — how many of these are left before the evenings out are the ones he drives to on his own, in another town, with his own life pulling at him. Hopefully we have several left, but these are special. So I’m not going to waste this one narrating it. I’m going to go watch fireworks with my boy.

Happy Fourth. Go find your people while they’re still in reach.

The Spirit of the Thing

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I caught myself saying something today that stopped me mid-sentence. I was talking about my work, and I heard myself say I don’t just get to solve problems — I get to take care of people while I do it.

I sat with that, because it explained something I’d never quite been able to name: why I love a job I never planned to have.

I didn’t set out to work in data. I saw myself as a creative — someone who makes things, who helps people. A technical role wasn’t on my list. And for a while I carried a quiet assumption that I’d taken a detour, that the analytical work was a departure from who I really was.

I was wrong about that. The work wasn’t a detour from helping people. It was a vehicle for it. I just didn’t recognize the door when I walked through it.

Here’s what I mean, and I’ll keep it to the shape of the work rather than the specifics.

When you crawl into a hard problem with someone, something happens that doesn’t happen when you just hand them an answer. You isolate where the trouble actually stems from — not where it shows up, but where it starts. You trace it back through the logic, the structure, the places where one thing hands off to another. And to do that, you have to genuinely understand their world, not just your own. They walk you through what they know. You bring what you know. Somewhere in the middle, the two things join, and the problem gives.

That’s the part I love. Not the fix. The joining.

But I want to be honest about what’s actually happening in that exchange, because the noble version — “I selflessly serve, and knowledge flows to those I help” — isn’t the whole truth.

I get better every time I do this. Every problem I climb into that I didn’t create is a problem that stretches my range. The person I’m helping isn’t just receiving. They’re handing me the raw material my own skill sharpens against. I serve them, and the serving is also how I stay sharp. Both things are true, and pretending it’s only the first one would be a lie dressed up as humility.

That’s the difference between showing up to serve and showing up for a paycheck. It isn’t that one is virtuous and the other is greedy — everybody cashes the check. It’s that the person who’s only there for the check leaves the best part on the table. They solve the problem and miss the joining. They never find out that the fastest way to get better at your own craft is to spend it freely on someone else’s problem.

So that’s the thing I noticed today. The spirit you bring to the work changes what the work gives back. Bring the whole of what you’ve got — your skill, your attention, your genuine interest in the other person’s world — and you don’t just solve the thing in front of you. You build the people around you, and they build you right back.

I don’t have that fully figured out. But I know it’s why the work never feels like a detour anymore.

One Operating System

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

For many years I’ve run my work life on a system. At my day job, everything moves through a board — projects broken into tasks, tasks with deadlines and clear definitions of done, a daily rhythm of picking up what’s most urgent and moving it forward. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just how I work.

Recently, I realized I’d been running my creative life on a completely different system. Which is to say, no system at all. Inspiration when it came, guilt when it didn’t, and a pile of half-finished projects with no deadlines and no clear sense of what “done” even meant.

No wonder it felt harder than it needed to.

The problem wasn’t effort. I’ve been creative every single day this year. The problem was that I kept switching operating systems. Disciplined and structured from nine to five, then loose and inspiration-dependent the moment I sat down to write a book or build a course. Two different brains for two different parts of the same life.

Context switching is expensive. Every time you change systems, you pay a tax — you have to reorient, remember the rules of the new mode, rebuild your footing. I was paying that tax every single day, twice a day, crossing from one version of myself to another.

So I’ve stopped. I took the exact system I use at work and wrapped it around my creative projects. A board. Active projects with real deadlines. Daily operations that happen regardless of how I feel. Sprints I can pivot between based on what’s most urgent. The same muscle I’ve trained for professionally, pointed at the work that’s mine.

The relief was immediate. I already know how to run this system. I’ve run it for years. I just never thought to use it on the things that matter most to me, because I’d filed “creative” and “disciplined” in separate drawers — as if they were opposites instead of partners.

They’re not opposites. The most creative people I heard of are ruthlessly systematic about the unglamorous parts, precisely so the creativity has room to breathe. The system isn’t the enemy of the art. It’s what gets the art finished.

Jim Rohn said it cleaner than I can: discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons. The board, the deadlines, the daily reps — those are the ounces. They are so much lighter than the pile of unfinished work I’d be carrying without them.

Negotiating With Comfort

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I read a line today that stung: “You already know what to do. You are just negotiating with comfort.”

I sat with that one a while, because it caught me.

I know what to do. I’ve known all year. The Phase Defiant promotion plan has been written since May — sixty content ideas, a thirty-day blitz, the whole thing mapped out. The first post still hasn’t gone out. Not because I don’t know how. Because every day there’s a quiet negotiation happening, and comfort keeps winning.

The negotiation never sounds like quitting. It sounds reasonable. I’ll start the promotion once the framework is tighter. I’ll launch the product once the positioning is perfect. I’ll post the thing once I’ve thought it through one more time. Each delay has a respectable reason attached. That’s what makes comfort such a good negotiator — it never asks you to give up. It just asks you to wait.

Here’s what the quote made me see. The waiting isn’t a strategy problem. I have the strategy. It isn’t a knowledge problem. I have the knowledge. It’s a comfort problem wearing the costume of a strategy problem.

Refining the plan one more time feels like work. It feels productive. But a lot of the time it’s just the most sophisticated way I’ve found to avoid the part that scares me. I’m not preparing. I’m negotiating. And comfort is patient enough to take the deal every single day.

The cure isn’t a better plan. I’ve got plans stacked to the ceiling. The cure is doing the uncomfortable thing before comfort gets to the table to make its offer.

So tonight, I did. I posted the first piece of promotion for my book — the one that’s been written and waiting since May. It took five minutes. It wasn’t perfect. Comfort had a dozen reasons for me to wait one more day, and every one of them sounded responsible.

I posted it anyway. Fifty-nine to go. The negotiation’s over.