There’s a slight wind this morning. Not strong enough to alter my pace, but just enough to make every loose edge on my clothing flutter as I walk. It has me thinking about subtle resistance. When you can feel direction shift not through force, but through the way small things begin pushing back.
You’re joining me on The Ember Walk, where curiosity meets motion. I’m David Dysart. Together we’ll take a few minutes to step through one idea that shapes the craft of enrollment.
The most skilled smiths don’t watch for obvious weakness; they feel for tension. Where the metal pushes back is where the truth resides. Not where it breaks, not where it bends, but where it hesitates. Interpretation starts with noticing that point.
In our work, problems rarely identify themselves with clarity. Instead, they reveal themselves through recurring friction. It’s the requests that keep resurfacing, missing data people tactically avoid, systems everyone uses but nobody trusts. We waste time fixing symptoms because we’re too impatient to study resistance.
Pressure isn’t your enemy. Indifference is. Tension means something beneath the surface is asking to be understood.
When I mapped behavior patterns in my first real yield model, I found odd trends I almost dismissed because they didn’t validate my assumptions. But tension points are the valuable predictors. Listening is humble. Interpretation is courageous.
Today, identify one place where your work consistently pushes back at you. Instead of forcing compliance, try asking what it’s resisting. Let your spark speak, and let us know in the comments or DM me. What was that one thing? And how are you going to accommodate the forces underneath?
Move with the tension. Where resistance exists is often where the craft is trying to get your attention.
And that’s The Ember Walk. The forge is yours now. Go make something worth the heat.
