Operation Achieve Anything: Day One-Hundred-Seventy, Dateline 6-19-2018

No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley.
— Seneca the Younger

Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number one-hundred-seventy of Operation Achieve Anything. My paycheck arrived last night and though I still have to wait to get it cashed, just having it in my possession is enough to ease some of the stress that’s been building ever since I burned through my last bit of money. I don’t have as much to buy with this paycheck so I should be able to make it stretch until I get paid again and should be able to keep this paycheck to paycheck existence running smoothly, at least until I get fired from my job.

I say fired but what I really mean is laid off, which is a fun part of living as a part of this new gig based society where there is no such thing a permanence. I have no hopes for being promoted or seeing an increase in pay, all that I can hope for is that I wake up to find that I still have a gig, even if it’s just for one more day. No, the new wage earner has reverted to being a scavenger since the hunter/gather system just doesn’t quite work when the well-fed store all of the resources away for themselves just because they can afford the storage and make all the rules that will keep things this way.

Every morning, I wake up and then check the news only to become more and more disappointed with what we’ve become and where we seem to be going so I’m not really in the mood to delve into how the daily struggle is actually a good thing. Especially for three days in a row. Yesterday, I was supposed to contemplate on a quote about how tougher nut produces sweeter kernels, following a lesson on there being no pleasure without any pain, and yet another lesson about how things are all difficult until they become easy.

It’s all just a bunch of bumper sticker nonsense that is great in concept but you can only hear it so much before you want to start throwing thing through a window. It’s especially difficult when you live a life that feels cursed where you have ups and downs unconnected to any life events because you have a broken head but everyone just treats it like it’s a situational thing that can be solved with advice so cliché that it would be passed over by the people of Hallmark.

This is why I’m so frustrated that this turned out to be another self-help book and not the goal-oriented task-based challenge that I was expecting to get thanks to the title Achieve Anything In Just One Year, with 365 days of challenges. I thought I’d actually be putting in work instead of just pondering feel-good quotes on a daily basis.

Like today, instead of doing anything that deals with promoting my own novel, which is the whole reason that I started this thing, I’m supposed to draw a picture of the tree that I think that I am. This challenge would be great for a group therapy meeting, and I’m excited because it’s a change of pace, but at the same time, this book has wasted more time on this nonsense and has only focused on the actual goal during week one when I was assigned to determine said goal.

Again, I am pretty fine with this because it has led to a lot of interesting content but at the same time, I feel not one step closer to achieving the goal that the book inspired me to set over half a year ago. Oh well, maybe I’m just having a rough morning, I’m sure I’ll be fine by noon when the money from my paycheck gets converted into cash for my pocket.

Either way, I’ll be back tomorrow for my next update where I will be sharing my picture of a tree. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this thing up as usual 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.