Operation Achieve Anything: Day One-Hundred-Seventy-Nine, Dateline 6-28-2018

In every single thing you do, you are choosing a direction. Your life is a product of choices.
— Dr. Kathleen Hall

Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number one-hundred-seventy-nine of Operation Achieve Anything. Last night I went to bed feeling pretty bummed out because I felt that I ruined my nephew's fun earlier in the day. It happened because I was in the middle of watching the episode of Saturday Night Live that I had to review for the day which is literally the only time that I can’t have him out here because he is too distracting. Any other time I’m usually writing at my desk while he watches YouTube on my TV and jumps around on my couch.

What bummed me out was, he was growling like a monster when he approached my door which I usually respond by acting like I’m truly scared that there’s a creature around the corner, only yesterday I was too frustrated because he caught me with just twenty minutes left to my viewing so I simply asked, “What do you want?” I didn’t say this in a mean tone or anything but it broke my heart when he came in the room a bit disappointed asking, “How did you know it was me? You were supposed to think I was a monster.” This made me really sad because I felt like it could have killed the fun game that we usually play.

If he would have just come out twenty minutes later I would have been done with the last part of my day where I can’t work without any distraction. Then again, it also wouldn’t have been a problem if I wasn’t so frustrated by the idea of the five-minute delay that was about to come. I mean, once he was in the room I talked to him for a bit and asked him to come back later when I was done.

I guess my frustration came from when he was younger and saw the concept of “not right now” and a sign that I didn’t want to hang out at all and would then leave my room crying leaving me to feel like a complete jerk. Now that he’s older, he’s pretty good at understanding there are times of my day where I’m too busy to hang out even if what fills my day is pure nonsense to everyone else.

This sort of plays into yesterday’s assignment that was all about making choices in that I chose to react instead of play along with his little game. As I pointed out, I could easily blame him or his timing because twenty minutes later I would have been in a much better mood, but how was he to know I was busy. I also want to blame my mental disorders that can cause me to overreact before I fully think out how I truly feel. So I do get how we are actually in charge of our choices.

In yesterday’s post, I took issue with the assignment but that was because I reject the idea that it’s a choice to remain a failure. Some of this self-help style lessons make it seem like if you are not living up to your dreams it’s simply because you’re choosing not to succeed. I don’t know, this might be true of people with average goals, like people having unrealistic standards in choosing a partner to create a family with, or someone who wants to advance in a career when their foot is already in the door, but there are many dreamers like me who may never live their dreams because their goals do take luck to the point where the odds of success are almost equivalent to winning the lottery.

Even if I were to make nothing but perfect choices as a writer, that doesn’t guarantee a thing if I can’t get distribution or am unable to find an audience. I guess you could say that I could choose a more marketable genre but then that would be giving up on what I’m actually trying to achieve and would be more of an adjacent success than actually hitting the target that I am aiming for. So, I will opt to attempt to make better choices when it comes to things that I can control while keep moving forward in those with my goals that contain more gray areas.

As for today’s assignment, I’m supposed to take all of the choices that I made during this week with choices being the theme of the Achieve Anything… book and note whether or not they were right or wrong and if wrong how I plan to change things moving forward. As always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see what makes the list. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this thing 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.