Tag: understanding

The Wrong People Are Shipping

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel.

Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing.

The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and somewhere underneath it all there was supposedly a product. I never found it. I got to the bottom of the page still not knowing what the man was selling or what it would do for me. The whole page was hostile to the eyes, all that early web HTML.

Here’s what I’ve never said out loud about it. I wasn’t only a mark. I was studying it.

I was desperate for side income and I was trying to reverse-engineer the machine so I could run one myself. Wanting to be useful to people has never been my problem — I’ve had that my whole life. What I couldn’t do was state plainly what I was offering. So I read those pages twice, once as a customer trying to figure out what I was buying and once as a would-be builder trying to figure out how they did it.

I failed at both, because the whole thing was built to be unclear.

Twenty years on, what bothers me isn’t that grifters exist. Con men are as old as dirt.

It’s the asymmetry.

There’s a whole class of people with no business shipping a product who have every ounce of fire required to ship a product. They’re loud, they’re fast, they’re shameless, and they’re constantly in front of you.

Then there are people who actually know things. Practitioners. Most of them won’t hype and won’t promise the moon and would genuinely rather do the work than talk about the work. So they don’t ship, or they ship quietly, and nobody ever sees it.

The worst products get the distribution. The good ones die in a drafts folder.

I feel this one from the inside.

Thirteen years in Toastmasters. Distinguished Toastmaster. I’m good at getting a frightened person to the point where they can stand up in a room and be heard, and I know exactly how I’d gimmick that. I could build the lead magnet promising you’ll be the next great keynote speaker. I could write the page. I know every move.

Somebody once pitched me an eighteen-thousand-dollar speaker training program. Do programs like that have real clients? Some of them, sure. But eighteen thousand dollars with nothing they could show me up front stops feeling like a program and starts feeling like a toll booth on somebody’s hope.

So the honest version and the gimmick sit right next to each other in my head, and I know how to build both, and the gimmick would sell faster.

The line between a grifter and somebody who’s just wrong is intent, and intent leaves evidence.

Everybody’s wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong plenty. But a person who was merely wrong pivots — corrects it, says so out loud, tries to make it right, and you can watch them do it in public.

The test isn’t whether somebody made a bad claim. It’s what they do the first time a claim doesn’t survive contact with reality. One correction is a person learning. A pattern with a direction to it is something else, and the direction is usually toward the money.

The reason this isn’t just an internet annoyance is who’s on the other end.

It’s people on the edge. Real financial trouble, something hard going on, honestly trying to pull themselves up. They’ve got something good in them and no idea how to package it so anybody would want it, and that’s a genuine and painful gap.

What they get offered is three simple steps and a miracle.

The real answer is slower. Get good at something. Build an offer somebody wants badly enough to pay for. Then go do the job you said you’d do. There’s no version where you skip the first part.

But a desperate person can’t afford to wait, so they buy the shortcut, get frustrated, and buy the next one. Every trip through leaves them a little more broke and considerably more cynical.

Now the part I’d rather not put in.

I’ve spent this whole essay describing practitioners who know things and won’t ship, as though I’m reporting on them.

I have a finished product sitting on my hard drive. It’s been finished for weeks. I haven’t priced it, haven’t built a page, haven’t asked one human being to buy it. I’ve had two books out this year and sold about thirty copies total, and I have never once directly asked anybody to purchase anything I’ve made.

I’ve been telling myself that’s integrity. That I’m the practitioner who won’t stoop to it.

That story is very comfortable and I don’t think it’s true. The loud man with the bad product and I have produced roughly the same amount of value for the person who needed help — he took their money and I never showed up. His is worse. Mine isn’t good.

If I’m honest about the fear under all of this, it was never that I’d get taken again. I’ve been taken. You survive that.

It’s that one day I’ll look at what I’ve built and find out it was all noise and no value.

Which is a fear you can only settle one way, and it isn’t by not selling.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

What You’re For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 5

An AI tool will do almost anything you ask it to. For a while I treated that as the whole point — like the win was the capability. Look how much I can produce now. Look how fast.

But something strange happens when capacity stops being the bottleneck. It exposes the question that was hiding underneath it, and the question turns out to be harder: not can I do this, but is this worth doing at all.

For most of history, “I don’t have the time, the skill, the resources” was a real answer. It was also a hiding place. You could want to do something and be honestly, legitimately unable — and the wanting never had to be tested. AI takes that excuse away. When the tool can draft and edit and organize and produce, when the capacity is just there for the asking, the only thing left standing between you and the work is whether you actually have something you’re trying to do.

That’s where I think a lot of people are going to get stuck. Not because they can’t run the tool. Because they never worked out what they’d point it at. Hand someone all that capacity and no direction, and it becomes an expensive toy — something to kill an afternoon with, to research nothing in particular, to make a little noise.

I know what I’m for. I’m here to honor God with what I do, to love and take care of my family, to do work that’s worth something, and to leave the people around me better than I found them. That isn’t a slogan I keep on a shelf. It’s the thing that tells the tool where to aim.

The capability will never hand you that. It was never supposed to. It only amplifies what’s already there — and if nothing’s there, it amplifies the nothing.

The Reciprocity Gap

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The researchers brought them in expecting a fight.

Two groups of people, opposite sides of a topic so polarizing I don’t need to name it for you to picture the room. Each side walked in believing the other side was the enemy. Each side believed they had nothing in common with the people across the table. Each side believed the conversation would go nowhere.

Then the researchers did something most of us never do. They trained the participants. Not in debate. In listening. In how to make the person across from you feel heard — not agreed with, not validated, heard. Then they paired them off.

What happened in those rooms wasn’t agreement. It was something rarer. One of the participants said it was the most understood he had felt in any conversation in his adult life. The person who made him feel that way held beliefs and values that were the opposite of his own.

That’s the experiment. That’s the result.

Then the researchers tried to scale it.

They built a Facebook group. They invited the participants who had been through the training. And they invited a hundred more people who hadn’t.

It took 45 minutes for the whole thing to fall apart.

Not because the trained participants forgot what they had learned. Because a hundred untrained voices walked in with their default attack methodology, and the medium itself rewarded them for it. You can’t make someone feel heard through a comment thread when the people next to you are sharpening knives. The training couldn’t survive contact with the platform.

I read this in Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators this week and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Here is what the experiment proved that the researchers didn’t set out to prove. The reciprocity you get from listening to another human being is not available through a keyboard. Not because keyboards are evil. Because writing is a high-skill medium, and most of us are not skilled at it.

Most people are not good at writing. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as a fact about the moment we live in. Writing carries no face. No tone. No pause. No softening of the eyes when something hard needs to be said. The whole apparatus humans evolved to communicate meaning is stripped away, and what’s left has to do all the work alone. That’s a hard medium even for skilled writers. For most people, it’s an impossible one.

What’s left is venting. You sit behind a screen, you type how you feel, you hit post, and for a moment you feel better because you got it out. Then it lands in front of someone who can’t see your face, can’t hear your tone, can’t extend you the benefit of the doubt because the medium has trained them not to. They read venom you didn’t mean to send. They send venom back. The cycle compounds.

Both sides do this. I am not picking a team.

We are alike on most things. Family. Food. The basic dignity of being known. Where we differ is sometimes a question of method — how to organize, how to solve — and sometimes a question of values, of who gets protected and who pays the cost. The deeper disagreements are real and they don’t dissolve just because two people sat across from each other. But the experiment showed something the participants didn’t expect either: even when the values were opposite, the experience of being heard didn’t require agreement. It only required the room.

The Facebook group failed in 45 minutes because the people who hadn’t been through the training brought the old habits in with them, and writing — for most of us — can’t do the work that face-to-face does.

So we have to go back.

Not as a preference. As a necessity. The technology is going to keep accelerating. The amount of text in the world is going to keep multiplying past anyone’s ability to read it carefully. If we don’t relearn how to sit across from each other and listen, the fracture that social media started will widen until there’s nothing left to bridge.

This doesn’t get fixed by politicians. It doesn’t get fixed by platforms. It gets fixed by two people, in a room, doing the work the experiment proved was possible — and the Facebook group proved was fragile.

One conversation. Then another.

Day 12: More Than Just Checking Boxes (Why This Challenge Is Emotional)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the Emotional chapter of “Made to Stick” this morning, and something caught my attention.

The Heath brothers tell a story about a soldier cook. He had retired, but when offered an opportunity to cook for soldiers in Iraq, he jumped at the post. When asked about his job, he didn’t say “I prepare food.” He said: “My job is morale.”

He understood something deeper than the task list. Yes, he cooked meals. But his real job was building the strength soldiers needed to keep fighting, to survive, to stay mentally sharp in war.

That hit me hard. Because the 7-40 Challenge can’t just be about checking boxes.

The Real Job

Bible study. Exercise. Reading. Water. Calories. Gratitude. Creative work.

Seven habits. Forty days. Repeated seven times.

On the surface, that’s what I’m doing. But here’s the truth: my job is to be living proof that change is possible.

I was made to help people. To make their lives better, easier, more purposeful. I feel that call deep inside me—the need to take care of people, to build them up, to show them what’s possible.

But I can’t do that and ignore myself.

I have to fill my cup so I can fill others.

Why This Is Emotional for Me

This isn’t self-improvement for self-improvement’s sake. If the goal were just about me, it would be much too small.

I’m doing this because:

My family needs me healthy and strong. Fewer illnesses means less stress on my wife. More energy means I can be active, do the home improvement projects we love, spend time doing whatever activities we choose. Better mood means better interactions with everyone around me.

My son needs to see this. Not hear about transformation someday—watch it happen in real time. So when life gets hard for him, he knows it’s possible to choose differently.

The 1,000 people I want to impact need proof. By clearly defining the transformation I’m undergoing and letting people watch it play out in real time, I’m demonstrating the courage they need to name their own transformation—which may be completely different than mine. But watching mine unfold might inspire them to face theirs.

The Ripple Effect

When I’m healthy, strong, and energized, my world improves. And everything my world touches improves.

My marriage gets stronger. My parenting gets more present. My work gets sharper. My ability to help others grows exponentially.

That’s not narcissism. That’s stewardship.

I can’t pour from an empty cup. And at times over the past twenty+ years, I’ve run on fumes, talking about “someday” while my cup stayed empty.

Not anymore.

Motivation and Movement

The soldier cook understood: his real job was giving soldiers the strength to keep fighting.

My real job? Giving people stuck in “someday” mode the courage to actually move. To break from routine’s gravity. To start now instead of waiting for perfect.

And I can only do that if I’m doing it myself.

Day 12. Twelve perfect days behind me. Not because I’m special, but because the mission is bigger than me.

Day 12 Scorecard: ✅ Bible study ✅ Exercise (Workout B – back, biceps, legs) ✅ Reading (Made to Stick – Emotional chapter) ✅ Water ✅ Calories ✅ Gratitude ✅ Creative hour

The best time to fill your cup? Now. Not for yourself alone. For everyone who needs you at your best.

My job isn’t just the habits.

It’s to be living proof that change is possible.

See you tomorrow for Day 13.