Tag: transformation

Three Days Out

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week, Day 8

Round 4 starts Monday.

I’ve spent the last ten days doing something I don’t do well: stopping. Not stopping completely — I’ve still been writing, walking, going to the gym, keeping the habits that needed keeping. But I pulled back from the pace that carried me through three rounds, and I let myself look at what I’ve actually built.

It’s more than I thought. A lot more. I wrote about that earlier this week — how twenty minutes of talking into my phone at a bus stop was enough to show me I’d been measuring myself against what I hadn’t done instead of what I had.

That realization changes what Round 4 is about.

Rounds 1 through 3 were about proving I could do this. Build the habits. Ship the work. Show up every day. I did. The output is real and it’s documented.

Round 4 is about something different. The question isn’t “can I keep going?” I can. The question is “how do I get what I’ve built in front of the people who need to see it?”

That’s a distribution problem, not a production problem. And it requires a different kind of discipline.

The daily structure is changing too. Not the seven habits — those stay. But where they live in the day is getting a redesign.

Bible study and BiblePictures365 go first thing in the morning. Walking happens before lunch. Reading rides with the walk. Gratitude goes early, because starting the day grateful changes the shape of everything after it.

Creative work moves to the afternoon and evening in shorter, cleaner windows. I’m still in the gym with my son three nights a week. And after that, I’m done. No heavy thinking after the gym. No grinding out a blog post at 11 PM when I’ve got nothing left.

The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to stop pretending I can do everything at any hour and have it all come out at the same level.

Three days. Then we go again.

What Twenty Minutes Will Tell You

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

It’s 80 degrees. I’m in jeans and a black shirt, walking downtown in full sunlight with a balding head, talking into my phone passing a bus stop at 12:45 in the afternoon. I’ve got about 14 things on my to-do list and I’m trying to unload my brain before it gets any fuller.

I’m equal parts grateful and overwhelmed, and I can’t figure out how both of those things are true at the same time.

I’ve been feeling behind. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart way. More like a low hum in the background — the sense that I should be further along, that I haven’t done enough, that time is slipping and I’m not keeping up.

So I started talking. Just listing things. What have I actually done this year?

I wrote a novel. Edited it from 105,000 words down to 60,000. Published it through Kindle Direct in March. Five months from manuscript to published book.

While I was editing that one, I wrote another one. 45,000 words. It’s in revision right now.

I’ve blogged every single day this year. Over 130 posts.

I’ve read 13 books and I’m working on my 14th.

I’ve written new songs and produced a companion album for my first novel.

I started a Bible illustration project on January 1 with zero followers. Instagram is at 6,300. One video hit 300,000 views.

I’ve maintained seven daily habits across three 40-day rounds. I’ve walked so much I’m on my third pair of shoes. I’ve lost over 23 pounds and gained 10 pounds of lean muscle. My metabolic age dropped 20 years.

I’ve worked with my wife to put together her garden, and she likes it. I’ve been in the gym with my son three nights a week. And I’ve done all of this while working a full-time job.

Somewhere around minute fifteen of this walk, I heard myself say it out loud: I think I’ve been seriously deluding myself that I haven’t been doing enough.

That stopped me.

Because the problem was never output. The problem was that I was so deep inside the work that I couldn’t see the shape of it. I was measuring myself against what I hadn’t done yet instead of what I’d already built.

Twenty minutes of talking into my phone at a bus stop fixed that.

So now the question changes. It’s not “am I doing enough?” I am. It’s “how do I get what I’ve built in front of the people who need to see it?”

That’s a different problem. A better one. But it’s still a problem. I don’t have the answer yet. I’m one person producing more than I can promote, and the gap between what I’ve made and who’s seen it is real. The overwhelm doesn’t go away just because I’ve named it — it just shifts from “I’m not doing enough” to “I don’t know what comes next.”

But I know where to start. And I know I’m not doing it alone.

Thank you, God. I am so grateful.

The Skill That Felt Like Thinking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

Chris Guillebeau wrote something today that stopped me mid-scroll. He said the skill that built his career was something he hadn’t labeled for a decade. It came so easily he didn’t count it as a skill. It felt like thinking.

I know that feeling.

Years ago, I’d come home from work frustrated. I had explained something to a room full of people — a workflow, a process, why certain data points mattered — and nobody got it. They didn’t see the connections. They didn’t understand why it was important.

Then I’d explain the same thing to my wife over dinner. She wasn’t in data. She was a stay-at-home mom. And she’d say, “Well, that makes sense, because this connects to this connects to this.”

She got it. Why didn’t they?

It took me years to realize the answer: the knowledge wasn’t the skill. The translation was.

I’ve worked in data for almost twenty years. A few years in, I started noticing I could see how workflows fit together — what connected to what, where things broke down, what was missing. I could look at a process and tell you not just what was wrong, but whether the problem was something that was there and shouldn’t be, or something that wasn’t there and should be.

And I could explain it two ways. I could talk about it in plain terms — this disconnects from this, this connects to this. Or I could go technical — this is why we do this part first, this is why we do this part second. The ability to move between those two languages is what made the difference. Not one or the other. Both.

I didn’t have a name for that for a long time. I just thought I was doing my job.

Here’s the part Guillebeau nailed: the things you’re best at often feel like nothing, because you’re not aware of doing them.

For a long time, I thought I was going to be a performer — singing, competitive speaking, the kind of work where people see you. What I actually became was the man in the chair. The one who helps everybody else do what they’re supposed to do. I don’t need the spotlight. I need the work to make sense to the people doing it.

My wife was the first person to name it. “You’re a communicator,” she told me. “This is what you do.”

I may not have felt that way at first. I do now.

I want complex things to be accessible. I want to break down how things work so that people can do for themselves what they couldn’t do before.

I spent five years doing it before I noticed, and another five before I took it seriously. Now, it is what I do.

Not All About Me (Fourteen Years Later)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

In 2012, I wrote a blog post called “It Is Not All About Me.” I was writing about collaborative leadership — about casting a vision and then letting other people help shape it instead of dictating every step.

It was a good post. It was also about half of the lesson.

The 2012 version of me had figured out that you can’t lead by telling everyone what to do. That’s real, and it took some humility to get there. But what I didn’t understand yet — what took another decade of leading teams, starting new roles, and watching how people actually respond to vision — is this:

Most people don’t want co-ownership. They want a playbook.

They want to feel heard. They want to know that someone is paying attention to their input. But at the end of the day, most people want to be shown what to do. They want clarity. They want direction. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The leadership lesson isn’t “invite everyone to the table.” It’s knowing the difference between the people who want to build with you and the people who want the rule book. There’s a place for both. But the builders — the ones who want to collaborate, who push back, who make your idea better or replace it entirely — those are the ones who end up influencing everyone else.

Find them. Build them. Trust them.

I started a new job in the middle of last year. I am very accustomed to leading meetings. I’ve done it for years — setting agendas, driving conversations, pulling people toward decisions. Almost from day one, I had to start actively reminding myself to observe. Pick up the lay of the land. Learn the room before trying to lead it.

It was very hard to do.

The pull to assert yourself in a new environment is strong. You want to prove you belong. You want people to see what you bring. But I took the other path. I chose to serve first and earn credibility before spending it. It’s the right way to enter someone else’s house.

The other thing I understand now that I didn’t in 2012 is what it costs to let your idea go.

Not every solution I bring to the table is the right one. Sometimes I have exactly what we need. Sometimes I’m just the spark that gets the conversation rolling. Either way, we moved toward the goal of being better than we were. That’s the part that matters. Not who got credit. Not whose version survived.

I’ve been wrong enough times to know that being right isn’t the point. Getting somewhere better is.

Fourteen years ago, I learned not to dictate. Somewhere in the years since, I learned something harder: finding the right path matters more than it being the path you started on.

I’m sharper than I was. I hope I’m sharper in another fourteen.

I’m Tired, and That’s Allowed

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m thirty-five days into the third round of a year-long challenge that has me running seven habits every day. Across the year I’ve kept a near-daily exercise practice, published two books with a third in proof, built and grown a daily Bible illustration project that’s reached a real audience, started writing songs again, held a demanding day job, and tried to be present for a marriage I take seriously.

Tonight I’m tired.

Not defeated. Not broken. Not in crisis. Just tired in the specific, accumulated way that catches up with you after four months of pushing the engine.

This post is about what to do with that.

What the Tiredness Actually Is

It’s physical, first. Four months of consistent training has produced real results — I’ve shed nearly ten percent of my body fat since June and gained skeletal muscle along the way. The body did what I asked it to do. It’s also asking for some recovery time, and it’s right to ask.

Some of the physical part isn’t training-related at all. Allergies have kicked up. The weather has shifted. The barometric whiplash that comes with changing seasons has me a little under the weather, in the literal sense. None of it is serious. All of it adds to the load the body is already managing.

It’s mental, in a way I notice when I sit down to write. Two months ago I was bursting with ideas faster than I could capture them. Lately I’m getting the needful done every day, but the creative shine has dimmed. Not gone. Dimmed. The fog isn’t blocking the work — it’s making the work feel like work, where for a stretch it had felt like discovery.

It’s emotional, in the lowest-key version of emotional. Not down. Not despairing. Just thinner than usual on bandwidth.

It’s not spiritual. The Bible study and the prayer have held. That’s the one input that hasn’t started to ration.

This isn’t burnout. Burnout has a specific signature — cynicism, dread of the work, joylessness, the sense that you’ve stopped recognizing yourself. None of that is here. What’s here is the simpler thing. I’ve been working hard, for a long time, and the body and brain are asking for some space.

What I’ve Already Quietly Adjusted

If I’m honest with you and with myself, I’ve already started conserving in places.

The other book projects have been getting fragments of attention instead of focused sessions. The Substack engagement has been scrambled. Brainstorming for the next round of work has shifted from intentional walks to whatever pockets of time I can find between obligations. I’ve been answering messages slower. The Bible illustration project and the daily blog posts are consuming most of my creative hour, which means everything else is competing for what’s left.

None of those slips are catastrophic. All of them are signals. The system is telling me where the load is too heavy, and I’ve been hearing it without quite saying it out loud.

Tonight I’m saying it out loud.

The Two Wrong Scripts

There are two stories the personal-development world wants to tell about this moment, and both of them are wrong.

The first is push through. The breakthrough is on the other side of the wall. People who quit are soft. Discipline means doing it anyway. That story produces broken people who think they failed when their body called the bill.

The second is honor your tiredness. Rest is sacred. You don’t owe anyone your hustle. Your body is wisdom. That story produces people who use self-care as cover for never doing the hard thing in the first place.

Both stories are absolutist. Both stories are wrong because they both assume the answer is universal. The actual answer is discernment — knowing what you can push through, knowing what you can’t, and being honest enough to tell the difference in real time.

I’ve spent four months pushing through. The pushing produced real results. It also produced this tiredness. The next discipline isn’t to push harder. It isn’t to collapse, either. It’s to look at what I’m carrying and decide, deliberately, what stays and what shifts.

The Streak Was Never the Point

When I designed the 7-40 framework, I wrote into the document that the streak isn’t the important part. The habit participation is.

I’m grateful to past-me for putting that in writing. It means tonight, when I’m tired and considering whether to skip something or shorten something or move a workout, I’m not breaking the system. I’m using it the way it was designed to be used.

If I decide to call Round 3 a few days early to take real recovery time, that might be the most important decision I make this round. Not because I’m quitting. Because I’m reading the data honestly and adjusting before the cost gets higher than the benefit.

The framework moves forward either way. Bible study stays. Gratitude stays. Eating and water stay. The workouts might slip a little. The reading might pause if my brain isn’t holding information well. The streak number doesn’t matter. The person I’m becoming by doing hard things consistently — that matters.

I am not worshipping the streak. The streak is a tool. Tools serve the work. When the tool starts asking the work to serve it, the relationship has inverted, and the honest move is to notice and correct.

What I Think Sustains This

Most people who try a 280-day personal transformation challenge don’t make it to Day 122. The ones who do come from a lot of different places — some run on extraordinary willpower, some on sheer momentum, some on a vision that pulls them forward, some on disciplines that were already in place before they started.

What’s sustained me here, I think, is honesty.

Not the absence of struggle. Not toughness. Just the daily practice of telling myself the truth about what I’m carrying and what it’s costing. I’m not pretending this is easy. I’m not pretending I haven’t been quietly cutting corners. I’m not pretending the streak is the prize. The journey is mine. The load is mine to design. And I’m no good to anyone — not my wife, not my son, not the work — if I run myself into the ground proving I can.

That’s what sustains it. Not toughness. Not surrender. Honesty about what I’m actually carrying and what it’s actually costing.

What I Tell My Wife at the End of Hard Days

There are days when my wife has worked herself to the edge — a long day of physical labor in the yard, or a stretch of caring for someone, or just a day where the load was heavier than she expected. At the end of those days, I tell her some version of the same thing.

You did an amazing job. You did everything you needed to do today. I’m proud of you. I admire you. Anything else that needs to be done, we can handle tomorrow. For today, it’s done, and you’ve done well.

I’m telling myself the same thing tonight.

I haven’t reached every goal I’ve set. I’m not in the shape I want to be in yet. There are projects in the queue I haven’t started. There’s work tomorrow and the day after.

But for today — for this evening, on Day 35 of Round 3, with seven habits done and one more day in the books — I’ve done what I was supposed to do.

I’m proud of myself. I’m grateful.

I’m allowed to rest.