Hey Crickets. It’s day number fifty-six of Operation Achieve Anything and the fact that I’m writing this line means it’s also time for another one of my assignment updates. Today is also the end of The Winter Olympics which might be a good thing because I now think it might be another ingredient of the weird mood that I’m currently experiencing. That’s not to say that I feel that the actual games are creating any negative thoughts but the fact that they are always on, and I enjoy watching them so much, my schedules been flipped on its head.

Since the Olympics started, I’ve not only been stay in the house longer each day in order to watch the events with my family, I then go on to stay up super late as I bounce back and forth between my regular end-of-the-day routine and anything interesting that might pop up on my TV screen that’s been playing the games 24/7 since they started.

Staying up later has led to later wake times which I’m even surprised to find, now totally throws me off my game. In the past when I was a night writer, it didn’t matter what time I awoke because I had hours to kill before I would feel inspired. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I like to wake up and go in order to get my blog obligations out of the way in order to free up my day for paid work and/or other personal projects.

Even though, in general, I’m in complete control of my schedule so you wouldn’t think that these late starts would affect me as much as I claim but now that I’m waking around the time when I used to start my daily viewing of Saturday Night Live, I start my day panicked that I’m not going to get everything done with enough time left over to work on anything else which triggers a slight feeling of self-hate from not being able to stick to a schedule where I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time.

Hopefully, I’ll fall back into my old schedule within that next couple of days now that the Olympics are over and, by that time, we’ll be past my birthday which, as I pointed out yesterday, is another reason why I feel my mood’s been rather weird as of late.

Now that I’ve shared these thoughts, let’s now delve into yesterday’s Achieve Anything… book assignment where I was supposed to honestly assess myself as to whether I’m a person talks a big game or if I’m a person who actually gets things done. Well, the actual assignment was simple and dumb in that it simply told me to refrain from talking about myself and see where that gets me.

The assessment assignment that I made up was actually a hypothetical question that was brought up at one point in the book’s lesson which sounded more interesting to me so I thought I would go ahead and run with it. If I’m being super honest, I do have it in me to talk a big game about projects I plan to do only to take a long time to actually start but for the most part, with time, I do actually accomplish my goals. I may not be successful with them, but I do actually put in the effort.

Since it does take me so long, I could see how others could read my sharing of plans as a pathetic attempt to get attention because I did work in film for several years where everyone on every set had a dream that they were chasing with each and every person falling somewhere on the spectrum between the talkers and doers. To the few people who knew my work, they knew I would put in the effort but to everyone else, I’m sure they felt that I was just talking out of my ass.

Then again, I’m only talking about writing in this example of my abilities to get things done. When it comes to other aspects of my life, the results are all over the place. In general, I keep all of my non-writing dreams to myself as I secretly chip away at achieving them since I don’t have the same confidence in my ability to get things done.

Notice how, even with these blog posts, I mainly talk about my efforts that I have 100% control over, like writing a story or committing to a project, but I never even mention goals that require others to succeed. I don’t think that I’ve ever once talked with any confidence in any plans that I have to get my work out to the world since there are so many wild cards involved.

So, to fulfill my twist on yesterday’s assignment, I’d have to say that I fall almost dead center in the range between pure talkers and pure doers. As for the assignment from the book, I now only talk about myself and/or my projects when people ask what I’m up to which is no longer a current occurrence.

As far as today’s assignment goes, this is another thought one where I’m supposed to use my imagination by picturing a positive future instead of constantly focusing on the negative thing that may come. I feel like this assignment really dropped the ball considering the Mark Twain quote up above that started the lesson off.

As always, I will share my insights on the assignment when I check in with tomorrow’s and this time, I’ll also delve deeper into what I meant when I said this assignment had dropped the ball. I think this might be my best cliffhanger to date! With that, it’s now that time where I wrap this all up by saying, 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.