Tag: writing

Communication Is Not a Soft Skill

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 78 | The 7-40 Challenge

I was listening to Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and he referred to communication as a soft skill. I had to stop the book and take a voice note so I wouldn’t forget how frustrated I was.

Communication is not a soft skill. It never was. Calling it one gave people permission to not take it seriously for decades — as if the ability to clearly articulate what you want, what you need, and what you’re willing to give for it is somehow optional. Secondary. A nice-to-have you pick up along the way while you’re learning the “real” skills.

That was already wrong. Now, with AI in everyone’s hands, it’s catastrophically wrong.

Here’s what I mean.

Every bad AI prompt is a communication failure. Every bad email is a communication failure. Every meeting that should have been a five-minute message is a communication failure. Every project that runs over budget, over schedule, and under-delivers — trace it back far enough and you’ll find a communication failure at the root. Someone didn’t say what they meant. Someone else didn’t ask for clarity. And everyone moved forward on assumptions that weren’t shared.

I’ve spent eighteen years in data management watching this happen. I’ve sat in meetings that cost five thousand dollars an hour in personnel — and we had that same meeting three or four times before we reached a resolution that could have been handled in one email if someone had just said the thing clearly the first time. That’s not a soft-skill problem. That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar problem.

Take something as simple as a marriage. She says “let’s spend time together” because she wants quality time — just being with him. He hears “let’s spend time together” and thinks it’s time to tackle projects. Same words. Two completely different outcomes. Multiply that across every interaction in a workday, a business, a family, a community — and you start to see that communication isn’t the seasoning. It’s the main course.

I was my own first convert on this. Early in my career, my manager introduced new data entry standards. I thought they were stupid. I was doing data entry. I didn’t understand why I needed to add extra fields, follow specific formats, and standardize things that seemed fine the way they were. It felt like bureaucracy forced on me from above.

It took time — more than I’d like to admit — before I realized what those standards enabled. With clean, standardized data, I could actually connect records across sources. I could research with confidence instead of guessing. I could build a full picture instead of stitching fragments together and hoping the correlations were real. The standards weren’t slowing me down. They were giving me a language that worked.

Communication standards work the same way. When you define your terms, clarify your intent, and say what you actually mean — not what sounds close enough — everything downstream gets better. The research gets better. The decisions get better. The relationships get better.

And now we have AI.

If you put ambiguity into an AI prompt, you get ambiguity back. If you give it incomplete reasoning, it fills the gaps with confident-sounding noise. If you don’t tell it what you actually want — specific, clear, no room for guessing — it will fabricate something that sounds right but isn’t. The tool doesn’t fix bad communication. It amplifies it. Polished garbage is still garbage.

But here’s the flip side. Working with AI three to four hours a day has actually made me a better communicator with humans. Not because I treat people like machines — that would cheapen every interaction. But because the discipline of being clear with AI transfers. I write better emails. I ask sharper questions. I define problems before I try to solve them. The muscle you build prompting well is the same muscle you use communicating well. Clarity is clarity, whether the listener is a person or a processor.

Know your message. Know your audience. Keep it simple. Deliver it well.

That’s not a soft skill. That’s a discipline.

The era of winging it is over. Clarity wins.

Day 78 of 280. Two days left in Round 2.

Nobody’s Going to Tell You to Go

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 76 | The 7-40 Challenge

I started reading Seth Godin’s Tribes this morning. Early in the book, he draws a line between managers and leaders that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Managers manipulate resources to get a known job done. Leaders create change they believe in.

I’ve seen both. I saw it first in the churches I worked at in my twenties — people who would see something that needed to be done and just get up and do it, while some of the ministerial staff sat back and waited for someone else to move. I saw it in my insurance office years, when I realized that whether my manager wanted something done or not, if I knew it needed doing, I had to get myself to do it. It would get noticed later. And I’ve seen it across eighteen years of corporate work — the people without management titles who became the go-to people, who took on responsibilities nobody else wanted or even realized needed to be taken on. Looking back, I can see why some of them shot up through the ranks faster than others. They weren’t managing. They were leading before anyone gave them the title.

I spent twenty years filling notebooks with goals. “Someday I’ll write a book.” “Someday I’ll get in shape.” “Someday I’ll build something.” Same dreams, different handwriting.

Those notebooks weren’t the work of a manager trying to organize a life. They were the work of a dreamer who didn’t know how to lead himself. I wasn’t just trying to manage things — I was trying to blaze a trail in a direction I’d never been before. But whether through fear or apathy or something else I couldn’t name at the time, I wouldn’t let myself move.

Seventy-six days ago, I did.

Nobody told me to go. Nobody assigned it. Nobody was going to give me permission. That was the realization — if I didn’t tell myself to go, nobody was going to do it for me. I took the frustration I was feeling at the end of last year, the things I knew I needed to get done, and I leveraged the time and the tools I had at my disposal. I’m not where I want to be yet — not even close. But seventy-six days later, I’ve lost sixteen pounds, published a novel, built a platform, and written every single day. Not because I’m special. Because I finally stopped waiting.

Godin says there’s a tribe waiting for you to connect them and lead them. He says it’s easier than ever to change things, and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. I believe that. But here’s where I’d push back — or maybe push deeper.

You have to start at the desk.

Picture a man sitting alone at a desk with a computer, a notepad, and a cup of coffee. Nobody told him what to do or how he’d get paid. Just: get to work. That man has everything he needs. He has ideas. If he can get past the noise, he knows what he wants to do. He can see the people in his space who know what to do as well. But unless he’s done the deep discovery of who he is, what he’s here for, and what work matters to him, he’s not going to find the right tribe anyway. You don’t connect to others so they can tell you what work to do. You do your work, and then you find the people who sharpen it.

The tribe matters. But the desk comes first.

My wife told me she can see a major difference since January. She can see that I’m motivated and happy. That I have energy. That I’m going somewhere on purpose. That’s not management. That’s leadership — even if the only person I’m leading right now is myself.

Godin says leadership is about creating change you believe in. Here’s the change I believe in:

We were meant for so much more than living in fear and being frustrated. By learning how to clarify what’s important to us, communicate it to others, and leverage the tools we have — including AI — we can do the work we know how to do, better and faster, and make the world better around us.

But that requires the personal work first. If we can’t communicate clearly with each other, what’s going to make us any better doing it with a computer? The human has to get clear before the technology gets useful.

And clarity, for me, started with something that had nothing to do with technology.

I’ve discovered that there is a God and that I’m not Him. That shapes everything about the kind of leader I’m becoming. I have agency. I can make decisions. But I want to be the kind of leader who partners with the leadership above me — God’s leading me, and I’m doing my best to understand where He wants me to go. So I keep my ears open, my eyes open, and I stay ready to pivot when I realize I’m not headed where I’m supposed to be.

If you’re reading this and you’ve got your own notebooks — your own stack of “someday I’ll” goals in different handwriting across different years — I want you to hear this:

You’re further along than you think you are.

The things you’ve been writing down matter. They aren’t dead dreams. They’re evidence that something inside you has been trying to lead for a long time. If you’ll lean in, clarify what you want to accomplish, and actually start — you’ll move faster than you expect. Because the dreamer who filled those notebooks already did the hard part. You just haven’t given yourself permission to lead yet.

The notebooks were never the problem. The permission was.

Day 76 of 280. Four days left in Round 2.

Make Your Own Map

~ David Willis ~ 2 Comments

Day 75 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Nobody is going to hand you the plan.

I’ve only started realizing that this year. I knew if I wanted to be successful, I had to name my own goals — not adopt someone else’s and try to chase them with my own passion. That just doesn’t work. I don’t want somebody else’s dream. I want my dream. I don’t want somebody else’s body. I want my body to look the way it’s supposed to. I don’t want to write somebody else’s book. I want to write the books that are inside of me, about the things I’m interested in.

So I had to make the map.

Not a map someone gave me in a class. Not one I found in a self-help book. Not one my boss outlined for me. Mine. Built from scratch. Designed for the terrain I’m actually walking on.

I’ve been reading Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and his principles keep landing on things I’m already living. But the truth is, I didn’t need Henry to tell me these things. I needed him to name what I was already doing — so I could see it clearly and do it better.

I’m seventy-five days into a 280-day transformation experiment that I designed myself. Seven daily habits, forty-day cycles, daily blogging, a published novel, a Bible illustration project, and a philosophical manifesto in progress. Nobody assigned this to me. Nobody approved it. I just decided it was time to stop filling notebooks with “someday” and start building.

That’s what map-making looks like. Not waiting for instructions. Deciding what the terrain requires and drawing the route yourself.

Do your best work even when no one’s watching.

My blog gets ten to twelve views a day. Some days, one or two. I’m seventy-five posts in. Why do I keep writing for an audience that small?

Because I’m not writing it for them.

I’m writing it as my own content library — a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve been thinking. I know deep inside me that the questions I’m asking are good ones. The development I’m doing, whether publicly or privately, is still my own personal growth. It’s still interacting with my goals. It’s still getting things done.

And here’s the practical reason: if I don’t do my best now and have my rhythm down, and everybody shows up one day and I screw up — everything blows up. The time to get good is before the audience arrives, not after.

Say yes.

In the last seventy-five days, I said yes to publishing my book. I said yes to throwing myself out there and engaging online with people I don’t know. And from the limited feedback I’ve gotten, it’s all been positive.

What I’m discovering is that the real limitation was put on me by me. The limitations we live inside are self-inflicted most of the time. If we really wanted to get things done — put a plan together, build a system, and just said yes to doing it — we’d be so much further than we thought we’d be.

I’m finding that for myself, seventy-five days in.

But here’s the one that cuts deepest.

Take responsibility for your own progress.

Who was I waiting on for permission? Not my boss. Not a mentor. Not even a sign from God — although a finger is always welcome.

I was waiting on me.

Getting older has had an effect. The man I look at in the mirror these days is a whole lot grayer than he used to be. He’s having to work a whole lot harder to get back in shape. And I’m realizing that if I want to make a contribution to the world like I intend to, I have to do it right now. I cannot wait, in good conscience, for anybody else to give me permission to be the best version of myself.

I think it’s been a sin, in many ways, to limit myself from striving for excellence over the years. I’ve always tried to do my best. But I’ve let the fact that I didn’t know how to do something stop me from even wanting to learn how to do it.

I can’t do that anymore.

I was going through chemotherapy in 2005 for the first time. I would go back to work after my sessions, and I would sit in the office feeling like I’d been burned from the inside. Raw. Just as gross as you can feel. The guy I worked for was smoking cigars in there, and life was still moving at its regular pace. I just wasn’t.

And I remember sitting there thinking: I’m going to choose to take care of the things I’m responsible for, because I chose to. Not because someone’s making me. Because I decided that excellence was my standard, even when I felt like I was on fire inside.

That ability to choose excellence has served me for the rest of my life.

If you can choose it through chemotherapy, you can choose it at any other time.

You’re going to get well. You’re going to get better. And you’re going to come back with a map in your hand that you drew yourself — because nobody else was going to draw it for you.

That’s agency. That’s the yes that changes everything.

Day 75 of 280. Five days left in Round 2.

740Challenge #MakeYourOwnMap #DieEmpty #ToddHenry #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose

The Man in the Mirror

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 74 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

Sometimes I stare in the mirror, and I know exactly who’s staring back at me.

He’s the guy I’ve grown up with. The guy who’s worked alongside me throughout the years to be more and do more than I ever thought I could. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of where he’s come from. I’m proud of the progress he’s made. And I look forward to seeing what he looks like several years from now as the progress continues.

Then there are other times I look in the mirror, and I think to myself — who are you? Where did you come from?

Not because I don’t like what I see. Because in some ways, I’ve turned into someone I didn’t expect. I’ve become things I didn’t plan for.

And truth be told, I really like this guy too.

When we’re younger and looking at our future, I think it’s easy to see an ideal picture of what our current life is like and how it could be cast out over time. If we like our current life, we can imagine a future that looks similar — maybe bigger, maybe shinier, but familiar.

But what happens when you like your current life and you also know that without growth comes stagnation? And without growth comes degradation? You don’t just stop improving — you start sliding backward, because by nature, things are always moving in one direction or the other. You’re either growing or you’re receding. The idea of stasis is, in many ways, a myth.

So how do you embrace where you are with the dream of where you want to be — while also realizing that in growing, in getting better, in being unwilling to become less than you should be, you have to be open to change? How do you change from something you like now into something you’ll hopefully like later that may not look the same at all?

One of the reasons I’m doing the 7-40 Challenge is to give myself a framework to process those kinds of changes.

The framework is the habits I practice every day. Seven of them. Here’s why each one matters to me.

I read my Bible every day because I want to be close to God. I want to know His word, and I want to have a foundation for how I make all the other choices in my life. It’s where I start. It’s the first app I open on my phone every morning. That one habit, developed over several years, has become my cornerstone. It stays exactly where it is.

My exercise goal, paired with calorie tracking and water, has been transformative — because I love food. I love to eat food. I love to eat too much food. I love food that’s good for me and food that’s bad for me. I love flavors. And if I don’t give myself a good framework — how much to eat, how much water to drink, how much to move — I will lean into my foodie self and start to degrade instead of improve. Every good thing in moderation. Keep moving forward.

I read for thirty minutes a day — or take in thirty minutes of audiobook content — because I don’t want my mind to stagnate. Whether I’m revisiting concepts I’ve heard before or exploring new authors and ideas, I always want to be feeding my mind something engaging, something positive, something that builds me to be more and do more than I am now. If I don’t, I’m stuck with only the thoughts I already have. I’m not expanding. I’m not growing.

Gratitude is a position I’ve decided to take daily because I recognize that my life is a gift. Everything I have is a privilege. I’m grateful for the people I’ve gotten to surround myself with — some of the best friends imaginable. I’m grateful for my family. I have parents I love. I have in-laws I love. I have a job and a career I absolutely love, with people who push me to be better. I have to live from a position of gratefulness. Not because things are perfect, but because they are mine, and they were given to me.

And then, at the core of who I am — I am creative.

I love that the first thing the Bible tells us about God is that in the beginning, God created. And the Bible tells us we were made in His image. So we too are creative beings. I take that seriously. I’m creative in my approach to life. I’m creative in how I problem-solve. I’m creative in how I write. I’m creative in how I analyze data. I’m creative in how I think about the world.

I’m creative, I’m creative, I’m creative — because I was made in the image of a God who loves me, and I want to make Him proud. So I set an hour aside every day to create.

Now, I know you might be reading this and thinking — David, I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t share all the beliefs you have.

And I’d say: I understand.

But here’s the question that’s the same for both of us, regardless of what we believe:

What are the things that are core and important to you? How do you describe them in a way that when you stare in the mirror, you see the person staring back and think — I know you, and I’m proud of you? I’m proud of what you’re working on. I’m proud of what you’re accomplishing.

And how do you also stare in the mirror and think — you look familiar, but you’re somebody new, and I like you too?

How do you keep building those two pictures hand in hand — so that you keep getting better, keep striving for the goals you’ve set in front of you, keep becoming someone you recognize and respect?

The 7-40 Challenge is how I’m accomplishing that. Seventy-four days in, the man in the mirror is someone I know and someone I’m becoming. Both at the same time. And I’m proud of them both.

740Challenge #TheManInTheMirror #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #Gratitude #Faith

Context Comes Before Learning

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 73 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to go see a movie at the theater. We hadn’t heard anything about it. Didn’t read a review. Didn’t watch a trailer. Just picked one and sat down.

It was horrible. We walked out in the middle of it. I wanted to poke my eyes out.

That’s what happens when you consume something without context. You don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know why you’re there, and you have no framework for deciding whether it’s worth your time. You’re just sitting in the dark hoping something good happens.

I don’t pick up books that way anymore. I need to know what I’m diving into — what it’s about, why I’m reading it, and what potential benefit it has for me before I start. At work, when I sit down with a dataset, the first thing I do is figure out what I’m looking at. What system did this come from? What business purpose does it serve? What am I trying to answer? Even if the point is just discovery — just trying to understand what I have — that’s still a point. There’s still a reason I’m sitting down.

Context comes first. Learning comes second. And when you flip that order, you waste time, money, and energy consuming things that never stick.

I read Atomic Habits years ago. Good book. I could recite the habit loop: cue, craving, response, reward. The concepts stuck with me, at least on the surface.

But here’s what’s different now. Seventy-two days into the 7-40 Challenge, with a daily data management career running alongside a personal transformation experiment, I can see that habit loop everywhere — and not just in habits. I see it in bad data flowing into systems. In process failures that repeat because nobody defined the steps well enough. In shortcuts people take because the workflow was never designed properly.

Those associations didn’t exist for me before. Not because the book was lacking, but because I was. I didn’t have the professional and personal context to hang the framework on. The book was the same. I was the variable.

Todd Henry put it simply today: we learn best in the context of what we already know. Building context is key.

I’ve watched this play out in corporate settings for eighteen years. Companies train people on new systems and tools without ever explaining why the system exists or what business problem it was built to solve. Six months later, some of those people are using the tool well — the curious ones, the ones who started asking questions on their own. And the rest? They’re clicking buttons. Doing exactly what they were told and nothing more. No enthusiasm. No skin in the game. No growth.

The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s context. The ones who thrive went looking for the why behind the tool. The ones who stagnated never had it and never sought it out.

A data architect looks at a table and sees the system it came from, the business purpose, the relationships to other data. A regular user sees rows and columns. What the regular user misses — because they don’t have the context — is whether they’re even looking at the right data. Is this the source of origin or a reporting copy? Can you trace the lineage? Is it reliable? I’ve heard people call Excel a database. It mimics one, but it has none of the governance, procedure, or protocol that needs to sit on top of real data.

Without context, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you make decisions based on that ignorance.

A kid in college takes a class on personal finance. They learn the principles: spend less than you earn, pay off debt, invest early. Five years later, they’re drowning in credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck.

The principles were sound. The education was delivered. But nobody connected the spreadsheet to the Saturday night. Nobody showed them what “spend less than you earn” looks like when your friends are all going out and you’re twenty-two and the credit card company just handed you a $5,000 limit. The knowledge was there. The context for applying it to their actual life wasn’t.

This is the same thing happening across every “how-to” space right now. The AI crowd skips to the prompts. The self-help crowd skips to the habits. The fitness crowd skips to the workout plan. All three are chasing the shortcut past the same hard work: Who are you? What do you value? What do you want?

That’s not a warmup exercise. That’s the foundation everything else is built on. Lifting weights is great — but understanding what you want your body to do is even better. Prompts are useful — but you have to know what you want before the tool can help you get it.

So how do you build context for someone who doesn’t have any? Someone with no data background, no self-help reading, no system for their life?

You start with one question: Are you happy?

Are you living the life you want to live? Yes or no. If it’s no — what are the things you’re unhappy about? You start picking out the points of dissatisfaction and look for the common theme. Is it because you don’t have the habits? Is it envy? Is it a lack of direction? What’s the reason behind the frustration?

Find the common theme. Work through the pain points. Build context from the inside out — starting with who they are, not what they should learn.

My son is seventeen. He’s watching me transform in real time. And one of the things I’ve learned as a parent is that you’re constantly building context into your kid’s life so they can understand why you bring them the things you do. You’re trying to help them see the world with more wisdom, but you’ve got to find the balance between letting them explore and just doing it for them.

They don’t learn anything if you do it all for them. But it takes forever if you just let them figure everything out alone.

Here’s what I love about my boy: he asks why. And once you satisfy the why, he’s generally pretty good at coming along. That’s the whole argument for context-before-learning in one kid.

I’ve been in church my whole adult life. I’ve heard sermons from the same passages dozens of times. But the clearest example I have of context changing everything about how you receive information comes from a story I’ve known since I was a teenager — one that only broke me open this year.

These people saw the Red Sea part. They saw the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day. They saw Mount Sinai. The Spirit of God lived in the camp with them. And yet — when God said they could go into the promised land, they said no. A trip that should have taken eleven days took forty years. And everyone who said no didn’t get to go.

I’d like to believe I would have had the faith to go. But truth be told, I’m no better than them. There have been opportunities in my life where I knew God was opening a door, and I still said no.

It means more to me now because I’m actively trying to pursue what I think God wants from my life. I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore. When I see something I need to do, I want to go do it — because I don’t want to be standing right on the edge of the promised land and not get to go in because I was a bonehead.

My life context finally caught up to a passage I’ve heard since I was a teenager. Same words. Different reader. That’s what context does.

If context comes before learning, then most education systems have it backwards. They deliver the learning first and hope the context catches up later. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.

If I could design it from scratch, I’d start with aptitude and self-knowledge. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up” — but what do you enjoy? What are you good at? What do you find yourself doing when nobody’s making you do anything?

I never knew at eighteen that I’d be an IT professional who loved data. It made no sense to me. I didn’t find data management until I was twenty-eight — eleven years after I graduated high school. I had to learn about myself first. I had to understand what made me me. And when I finally had the context of who I was and figured out where education could help me become more of who I was — that’s where I landed. And that’s when I really started to take off.

Context comes before learning. Always has. The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to learn — it’s whether you’ve done the quieter work of knowing yourself well enough for the learning to land. I spent twenty years skipping that step. The last seventy-two days have been what happens when you stop.

Day 73 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer
✅ Walking and Lifitng
✅ Reading (Die Empty — Todd Henry)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ BiblePictures365 (Deuteronomy 21-23)
✅ Creative hour

740Challenge #ContextBeforeLearning #DIKW #PersonalDataModel #Agency #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay #LifeOnPurpose #ToddHenry