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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

Day 65 of 280 | The 7-40 Challenge

I started reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work today. To me, he sounds like a modern-day Seth Godin — an artist who’s figured out how to say, very poignantly, not just how he found success, but how he built it. And he shares it in a way that’s both relevant and timeless.

Three things hit me today.

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Maintain your flow while collecting your stock.

My flow is what I do every day. The habits. The routines. The framework. The stream of ideas, creativity, and writing that comes from showing up and doing the work. Flow is the engine.

My stock is what I produce over time because I stayed in the flow.

What have I produced over the last two rounds of the 7-40 Challenge? I edited one novel and got it published on Amazon. I wrote another novel and took it through its revision passes. I’ve blogged every single day this year — not just on challenge days, but during the assessment weeks too. This blog has become my daily creation habit — my response to how the habits are affecting me, how the reading is impacting me, and how I’m starting to put things together and see the world in ways I never have before.

Some of the visions and thoughts I’ve had over the years are coming back to me now and making more sense in the context of where I am and what I’m doing. The ideas didn’t change. I did.

Maintain your flow. The stock takes care of itself.

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Small things over time get big.

We know this. If you’ve ever put money into a bank account and watched compound interest work, small additions over time can get really big.

If you’ve ever thrown your clothes down in a room and kept throwing them down, something as small as a single shirt on the floor can end up being something as big as your wife not being happy with you and a whole lot of cleaning to do because you let it go too long.

There are so many examples. But here’s the one that matters to me right now: if I proactively practice my habits every day — if I put in my time writing, put in my time creating, put in my time connecting on social media — then I will see those things get big. The same is true for exercise, eating well, drinking water. As I put in the repetitions, my body is getting more fit. The pounds are going down.

Sixty-five days of small things. And they’re starting to get big.

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Your website is your own little corner of the internet.

I’ve heard this before. But Kleon added something that turned on a light bulb for me: your social media platforms — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok — can be taken from you. If the overlords of those companies decide to change the rules, your content lives on their land, not yours.

Your website is different. It’s yours. It’s where your content is stored, where your central hub lives, where you’re building the brand of you so you can speak on anything you want — and it’s a place you can lead people back to so they can see exactly who you are and what you do.

I saw a Gary Vaynerchuk video the other day where he said one of the things that’s working in social right now is making content about everything — not boxing yourself into one lane. I identify with that. I have interests in many different areas. I have many different things I want to work on. And having my own corner of the internet where all of that comes together? That’s the hub. The social platforms are the megaphones. The website is the house.

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Maintain your flow while collecting your stock. Small things over time get big. Your website is your own little corner of the internet.

Three good nuggets from today’s reading. And every single one of them confirms I’m on the right track and doing the right things.

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Day 64 Scorecard:

✅ Bible study and prayer (finished Numbers!)
✅ Walking
✅ Reading (Show Your Work — Austin Kleon)
✅ Calories tracked
✅ Water (100 oz)
✅ Gratitude
✅ Exercise (Workout B with Trey)
✅ BiblePictures365
✅ Creative hour

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740Challenge #ShowYourWork #AustinKleon #Flow #Stock #SmallThingsGetBig #Transformation #LivingProof #DayByDay