Tag: transformation

Twenty Years

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We got into St. Thomas at seven this morning and walked off not knowing what to expect.

It’s a small island and it feels smaller — tucked away, unhurried. People wanted our business but nobody put anything in our faces about it. We rode a gondola up to a lookout and stood there a while looking at the whole thing at once, then worked our way through shops up in the hills, including one where everything sold funds craftsmen paying for their own training.

What I noticed most was how the place sounded.

A woman from somewhere in the Northeast — not Boston but in that family, and I asked, because I wanted to know. Jamaicans. A man from the Dominican Republic. Several people from Japan. Forty thousand people live on that island and I heard a good spread of the world before lunch.

I love that. I have always loved that. Hearing where somebody’s from before they tell you is one of my favorite things about being anywhere.

We bought a few things from a woman running a shop, and she had an accent I couldn’t place except that it was European.

So I asked. She said Russia.

I told her I thought her accent was beautiful.

She told me she’d been in the United States for more than twenty years. And then she said that if there were an amount of money she could pay to be rid of it, she would pay it — and she put a word in front of “accent” that I’m not going to print.

Twenty years. Still carrying it, still hating it, and apparently not for the first time that day.

I tried to tell her what I actually meant. That I love hearing how people sound, that I love hearing what they think, that it had been the best part of my morning.

And then — I want to be honest about this, because it’s the part I keep turning over — I slipped into a bit of a Russian accent myself and told her that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

I meant it warmly. I have replayed it several times since and I don’t know how it landed. I hope I didn’t hurt her.

If I’d had longer, and if she’d wanted to hear it, here’s what I’d have said.

That accent isn’t a report on what she is. It’s a record of where she came from, and of every decision that took her from there to a shop on a small island a long way away. She chose a new country. She built something in it. All of that is in how she talks.

It ought to remind her of the distance she covered. Not of whatever she was trying to get away from.

That’s what I think, anyway. I got a receipt and a bag and about ninety seconds, and I don’t know the first thing about her life.

We had tacos at a little place on the island and they were excellent. Good morning, good island, and I’d go back tomorrow.

But I can’t get past that conversation.

I paid her a compliment in the only currency I had, and she couldn’t take it, because for twenty years the sound of her own voice has been something people rendered a judgment on.

Day Three

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere on day three I started itching to get back after it.

Nothing was wrong. That’s the strange part. We’d eaten well and slept in and laid around and seen genuinely beautiful things, and I was lying there feeling lethargic and vaguely dissatisfied about something I couldn’t point at.

It took me a while to name it. It’s an expectation not being met — a low gnawing one, running in the background, that says a day is supposed to have something accomplished in it.

I miss the gym. I miss the feeling of making progress. Mostly I miss having my hands around what’s going on, guiding things where they’re supposed to go, knowing what today is for.

Here’s what I don’t miss, and it stopped me when I noticed it.

I have not been stressed in about five days.

Not lower stress. None. And that is such an unusual condition for me that I had to sit with it a minute to identify what I was even feeling. I’ve been running on some level of pressure for so long that its absence didn’t register as relief. It registered as something’s off.

Which tells me the itch on day three might not be about productivity at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I didn’t actually stop.

I called this a full pause. I said the seven habits were coming off for the week and I meant it.

Except I’ve read my Bible every single day out here. I’ve written a blog post every day. The Bible pictures have gone out every day. Three of the seven have run the entire trip and I never once decided to do them — they just happened, the way brushing your teeth happens.

And I’ve gotten my steps every day without trying, because when you’re on one end of a ship and everything you want is on the other end, the geometry does it for you. Add an island where you don’t know where anything is and you’ll walk five miles looking for a shop.

What actually stopped was the gym and the counting. The two that need equipment and structure and a decision.

So the week has sorted my habits into two piles for me, which I did not ask it to do. Some of them are mine now. Some of them are still scaffolding.

There’s a list waiting when I get home. Lifting, the eating and water, walking, creative time. The rest of the music that needs to go up. Social platform work I’ve been putting off for months.

And this is where I catch myself, because I could write that list a lot longer and it would feel productive to do it. The truth is I don’t need a longer list. I need to know which two or three things on it actually matter, and I still haven’t done that work.

I’m saving the mid-year review for day six. There’s a sea day coming and the family will be occupied, and I’d rather take that time from the ocean than from them.

I thought this week would tell me that taking a vacation was a good idea.

It has told me that considerably more emphatically than I was expecting.

Two-Thirds Down The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We missed a kayak rental this morning because of something printed on a piece of paper in our room.

It was there. That’s the part I want to say first, because it would be easy to write this as a complaint and the complaint isn’t honest. The information was in our stateroom, in a packet, on a page, and it explained exactly what we needed to do. We had it the whole time.

We just didn’t read down that far.

Here’s the shape of it. The island is a tender port, which means the ship anchors and small boats run you ashore. You need a ticket to get on a tender. We did not know that.

We showed up when we thought we were supposed to show up, without a ticket, and it took over an hour to get across.

The page that would have told us started with general information about being in port that day. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, tucked into the middle of everything else, was the one operational instruction that actually mattered.

I asked somebody. The ship was in full frenzy trying to move a few thousand people onto boats, so the answer I got was quick and incomplete, and I didn’t know enough to ask the follow-up. He had to go ask somebody else. We crossed the ship twice and stood around a long time.

We got ashore around eleven and were back aboard by two-thirty. Sunburned, worn out, and we’d swum with stingrays. It was a good day.

The kayak was thirty dollars.

So I’ve been thinking about the page instead of the kayak.

Years ago I worked somewhere that brought in a consultancy for a very large ERP implementation. Enormous project, enormous money. Their focus was functional design documentation, and they wrote it — hundreds of hours of it, genuinely thorough, full of exactly the information people needed.

It didn’t read like anything a user would ever want to open. So we ended up building training to teach people what was already written down.

As far as I know, every one of those documents got filed and never opened again.

I’ve spent twenty years around that problem. Information being available is not the same as information being findable, and the gap between those two things is where most of the real failure happens. It never looks like failure, either. It looks like documentation. Somebody can always point at the page and say it’s right there.

It was right there this morning too.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

This is our seventh cruise. It’s our first with this line.

I didn’t skim that page because I’m new at this. I skimmed it because I’m not. I know how a port day works. I’ve been handed a version of that packet six times before and it has never once contained anything I needed. So my eyes did what eyes do with a document they’ve already decided is boilerplate — took the top third, confirmed nothing had changed, moved on.

Something had changed. Different line, different ticketing, one paragraph two-thirds down.

Six cruises of experience is exactly what made me not read it.

If I’d been at work, reading that same page professionally, I’d probably have caught it. I’d have marked it up, pulled the actions out, made a list.

I was on vacation and I already knew how this worked.

That’s not a failure of the document.

Thirty Copies

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around 2013 I was very good at Excel, and Excel was slowly ruining me.

The job needed SQL. I had built SQL up in my head into a wall — I’m a business person, I’d say, not a technical person, and they’ve got me doing technical things. It’ll take too long. It’s too hard. I’m not getting enough help.

So I stayed in the spreadsheet, where I was fast and looked competent.

Here’s the embarrassing part. I was using Excel as a WHERE clause. Dumping data in and filtering it. I was doing SQL’s job, with SQL’s logic, in a tool that made it ten times slower, and calling that expertise.

When I finally sat down and wrote actual queries, the surprise wasn’t that it was worth the effort. The surprise was that it was easier. All that time, the entire barrier had been something I made up.

I wasn’t avoiding SQL because queries were difficult. I was avoiding it because learning it meant putting down the thing I was already good at and being a beginner in front of people.

That’s usually what stuck is. Not missing information — I knew exactly what to do. It was that doing it required becoming a slightly different person than the one I’d already built and gotten some credit for.

The proof is what happened afterward. The guy who insisted he wasn’t an IT person now thinks technically before anything else, has administered systems, and reads through thousands of lines of code to find where a record went missing.

But the belief came after. It always came after. I never once believed I could do the thing until I’d already been doing it for a while, and I have never gotten that order to run the other direction no matter how badly I wanted it to.

Which brings me to the part I’d rather not write.

I have published three books. I’m in the middle of a fourth and a fifth is finished, waiting on illustrations. I’ve sold about thirty copies of everything, combined, in total, ever.

And I have been treating “having my own business” like something mystical sitting out at the edge of my vision. Like it’s a thing other people know how to do and I don’t.

Here’s the problem with that. I sell every single day. It’s most of my job. I walk into offices and persuade people to do things differently, I sell ideas and standards and solutions to problems they didn’t know they had, and I’m good at it — good enough that it’s what they pay me for.

I just can’t do it for my own work.

I know what this is. I recognize every symptom of it, because I spent three years in a spreadsheet running the identical program.

It isn’t a knowledge problem. I don’t need somebody to explain marketing to me. I need to be a man who asks people to buy his book, and I am currently a man who writes another book instead.

Writing another book is the small step. It’s the productive-looking one. It’s the Excel of this whole situation — the thing I’m already good at, done faster and better, in service of not doing the thing.

I don’t have the ending for this one.

A year from now I’ll either have asked somebody to buy something or I’ll have four more books and the same thirty copies. I know which one I’d like to report. I also know that the guy in 2013 knew exactly what SQL was for, and could have told you at length why he should learn it, and sat in that spreadsheet for three more years.

A Grown Man On The Phone

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My voice dropped when I was thirteen and it dropped all the way.

There was a girl named Misty I’d met at camp. Louisiana, thick bayou accent, and we were friends — not dating, nothing like that, just a long-distance friend I thought was about the coolest person I knew. I called her house one night and her father picked up.

Hello sir, may I speak to Misty please.

She got on the line and the first thing she said was, you just freaked my daddy out. I asked why. She said, my daddy wants to know why there’s a grown man on the phone for me.

I was thirteen. I weighed about a buck fifty. And there was no version of me that could have gotten on that phone and convinced that man otherwise, because everything he needed to know had already happened in seven words.

The size came later.

I was six foot and a hundred and ninety pounds when I graduated high school. Slim, decent shape. Then I went to a summer arts institute that year, caught poison ivy, and got put on prednisone at the clinic.

Prednisone at a camp with three meals a day and all you care to eat. I gained twenty pounds in two weeks. By the end of that summer I was two-twenty, some of it water, some of it a late growth spurt, and some of it just the thing my family does.

Because we are not small people. I had a cousin, gone now, who was a mountain of a man — my dad watched him pick a car engine up off the ground with the headers still on it and set it in a truck bed by himself. His little brother is built the same way. My dad is thick through the chest and shoulders and always has been.

I’m six foot and built like a barrel. Forty pounds down would put me in the best shape of my life, and I would still not look like a man you’d want to startle in a parking lot.

Add a resting face that reads as annoyed when I’m thinking about nothing at all.

So this is the arrangement.

Nobody messes with me. That’s not nothing — I’ve walked through my whole adult life without ever once having to worry about a situation getting physical, and I know exactly what that’s worth and that not everybody gets it.

The cost is that the friendly part of me has a longer trip to make than it does for most people. I have to work to get it out where somebody can see it. There’s a distance to close before anyone finds out I’m not what the packaging says, and it’s on me to close it, every time, with everyone.

The stupid part is that I am the friendly one. That’s not a strategy or a thing I put on. It’s who I actually am, and I have to prove it for a living.

In 2022 I played Maurice in Beauty and the Beast.

The director told me later why he cast me. The young man playing the Beast was six-two and around three-fifty, and he wanted Belle to have been raised by a large, strong father — so that standing up to something enormous would be the most natural thing in the world for her. My size wasn’t incidental to the part. It was the reason for the part.

Somewhere in the run, one of the dancers rolled her ankle badly. She ended up sitting on the stairs outside the stage door with a half circle of people around her, everybody looking at everybody else, nobody moving.

I said hang on. Then I picked her up and carried her down two flights of stairs to where somebody could look at her.

That’s the other half of the arrangement, and it doesn’t come up nearly as often as the parking lot version.

I’ve thought about what I did with all that.

I sang bass. I joined Toastmasters and stayed thirteen years. I’ve spent most of my adult life in front of rooms, and the thing I’ve cared most about the whole time is communicating well.

A guy could look at that and call it compensation, and maybe some of it is. But I think it’s simpler. I got handed an instrument that arrives before I do and says something about me that isn’t true. So I learned to use it on purpose.

My son and I lift together, three nights a week.

Forty-seven years old and I am stronger right now than I have ever been in my life. That’s part of why I’m as thick as I am, and I’ve made peace with the trade.

He’s eighteen and he’s catching me. That’s the whole point of it.

Actually he is 6’2”. He already passed me.