Here we go with day five of Operation Achieve Anything, making this the end of my first work week of this challenge. So far so good, but that might just be due to the fact that we are still in the early stages of this venture and all of the tasks are super easy. Though I can't wait to get into the meatier tasks in this book, I'm glad there is a slow ramp up since there are still 360 days to go after all.

Yesterday's assignment was to perform a random act of kindness. At first, I thought this was a silly contradiction because being assigned to do something random invalidates the randomness. Then, I reread the assignment to find that I must have inserted the word "random" in my head because the actual assignment was to do an act of kindness to anyone. 

Fortunately, all that this confusion led to was the fact that the actual assignment ruined my joke about how this kind of assigned randomness is contradictory. Other than that, my plan would have been the same either way since my interpretation of what the book was asking for was the same.

As I said yesterday, now that I live a shut-in life, I don't have that many people that I interact with who would be able to accept my act of kindness, and I try to be nice to the people I do see every day. It didn't help that yesterday was a "Me Day" since everyone in the main house (remember I live in a garage, not a boathouse or anything fancy) was out and about for the night leaving me alone to write. 

Since I knew that it would be a day of limited interaction, I decided that I would fulfill the assignment by performing an act of kindness for my dog. She's a bored old girl who really loves her treats to the point where I really have to limit her or else she won't eat her actual food. Yesterday, I decided to reward her with a cheat day and bought her a bunch of treats that I fed her all throughout the day which led to a lot of tail wagging between her full stomach naps.

Not only was I extra kind to my dog, while at the store, I actually interacted with the cashier by giving in to the small talk and adding some of my own instead of just doing the bare minimum, nodding and agreeing while waiting to pay for my purchase and go home. I usually avoid these cashier/customer conversations because I figure no one really cares and that they're rambling because they're bored at their job.

This assignment got me thinking, if this is the case, why not interact to lighten their day a little for that moment whether or not they actually care about my answers. I mean, it's not like I'm not bored myself. I don't think I'm now going to talk everyone ear off whenever I enter any store but as part of this continuing project, I'll at least try to not blatantly ignore the small talk from people who are just trying to do their jobs.

Today's assignment feels like a continuation of Day Three where I was supposed to pick a goal from my list of dreams and list several ideas for the first moves that you plan to take to achieve it. For this assignment, I'm supposed to take that list of potential moves and take the first step toward implementing the game plan. 

Again, I unintentionally cheated by already being several steps into the ultimate goal that I plan to achieve which is to get my novel Chuck Norris Would Never Write This Book, A Diary of Undiagnosed Disorders: Part One into a publishable state by the end of the year. So technically, I've already completed this assignment when I did a soft launch of The Self-Publishing Project on New Year's Day. 

That said, I still need to create the official The Self-Publishing Project page for this site. Unfortunately, I have plans for this evening so I may be able to start this page creation phase but I probably won't be able to share it until Monday. Even if that ends up being the case, the actual assignment is to start the process, not to have it done and ready by the end of twenty-four hours.

Oh well, we'll see how deep I end up getting into this stage of the assignment when I check in with tomorrow's update. Until then, it's now that time where I say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.   

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.