Tag: writing

A Good Goodbye

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

Thirteen years ago, my grandmother was home, slowly waiting for the cancer to take her.

I knew she was near the end. She lived about an hour and a half away, so I called and asked if I could come early. I drove down, and that morning I cooked her breakfast. We sat across from each other and we talked — about my job, the master’s degree I was working on, my family.

I knew Grandmas aren’t supposed to play favorites. But she was proud of me, and I felt it.

I told her I loved her. I told her I was proud to be her grandson — proud to be working in the same business my grandfather had been in. I told her I wanted to make her proud.

She smiled and said I already had.

I knew, the whole time, that it would be our last conversation. And because I knew, I got to choose what kind of goodbye it would be. I wanted it to be a good one. It was.

There are only a few people in this life I miss the way I miss her. She gave the best hugs. She believed in me. She trusted me. And I didn’t let her down.

That morning gave me a clarity I’ve never forgotten. When you know the moment matters — when you know it’s the last one — everything unimportant falls away and you’re left with only the things worth saying. I love you. I’m proud of you. Thank you.

We don’t always get to know which conversation is the last one. That morning, I did. And I’ve tried ever since to talk to the people I love like I might not get another chance.

Editing Life

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | 6-22-2026

I cut almost half of my first novel in editing. Scenes I loved. Lines I was proud of. Whole subplots I’d spent weeks building. Every cut made the book better.

This round, I did the same thing to my year.

I started 2026 with a list of everything I wanted to build. Two novels became six books. A blog became a content machine. An AI idea became three competing products. A business, a course, a manifesto, a personal data model, a half-dozen story concepts. All of it good. All of it possible. None of it focused.

So I started cutting.

The Data Model book — cut. Three novel concepts I was excited about — pushed to next year. A product name I’d fallen in love with — killed when I found the trademark conflict. An entire AI course framing — scrapped and rebuilt twice. A round I wasn’t satisfied with — reviewed and reinvented.

Every one of those cuts stung a little. And every one of them made the year better.

The things you cut aren’t failures. They’re the cost of focus. A story that tries to be everything is a story about nothing. A year that tries to do everything accomplishes nothing.

The hard part isn’t adding. Anyone can add. Adding feels like progress — more projects, more ideas, more plates spinning. The hard part is looking at something good and saying “not this, not now,” because you’ve decided what the story is actually about.

My first novel got better when I stopped protecting the parts I loved and started serving the story. My year is getting better the same way.

Ten Thousand

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 35

BiblePictures365 hit 10,000 followers on Instagram today.

On January 1, I had zero. No audience. No following. No track record. Just an idea — one image per chapter, every day for a year reading through the whole Bible— and enough stubbornness to start posting before anyone was watching.

589 posts later, ten thousand people showed up.

I didn’t run ads. I didn’t game an algorithm. I didn’t go viral on purpose — though one post hit 400,000 views and that certainly helped. What I did was post every single day without exception and let the reps do what reps do.

The pictures got better because I made one every day. The engagement grew because the consistency gave people something to come back to. The audience built itself because I kept showing up.

Ten thousand people didn’t show up just because of one great post. They showed up because of 583 unremarkable decisions to do it again.

Less Famous, More Trusted

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 34

Seth Godin dropped nineteen points about marketing in the age of AI. Three of them stopped me cold.

“Stop trying to be famous. The goal is not to get more famous. The goal is to get less famous and more trusted.”

I’ve spent most of this year building things. The volume has been relentless. But the question I keep dodging is whether the people I’m reaching actually trust me, or whether they’re just watching me build.

Those are different things. An audience watches. A community trusts. I don’t need more people watching. I need more people who’d notice if I stopped.

“Stop trying to reach everyone. Start trying to deeply serve someone specific.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about looking for my Soho people — the small group of readers who’d grab my work and carry it forward. I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I’ve been looking outward for them when some of them are already here, reading this blog, following the Bible pictures, checking in on the challenge. I just haven’t asked them what they need.

Serving someone specific means knowing them well enough to build something they’d miss. Not something they’d scroll past — something they’d miss.

“How do I become the kind of business that people would genuinely miss if it disappeared tomorrow? That answer is your entire marketing strategy.”

That’s the only question that matters. Not how do I get more attention. Not how do I go viral. Not how do I crack the algorithm. Would anyone miss this if it were gone?

I don’t know the answer yet. But I know it lives deeper with the people who are already here — not louder toward the ones who aren’t.

Get Them Out

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 32

I went for a walk this afternoon with a small headache and vague tension in my chest — the kind that comes from knowing you have something to get out but not being able to see it clearly yet. By the time I got done, I had a complete framework for the communication course I’ve been circling for months. Ten principles. A product structure. A content engine. None of it existed in any organized form before I started walking.

The ideas were already in my head. They just needed out.

That’s the part most people skip. They sit with ideas swirling, waiting for the moment when it all clicks into place internally before they start. But it doesn’t click inside. It clicks when you get it outside — onto a page, into a voice recording, onto a whiteboard, into a conversation. The act of externalizing is what organizes the thinking, not the other way around.

I’ve written a blog post every day this year. The best ones didn’t come from sitting down with a clear idea. They came from starting with a half-formed thought and watching it take shape as the words came out. The writing did the thinking for me.

I left on the walk this afternoon with tension. I came back with details fleshed out. The only difference was getting it out of my head and into the air.