Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-forty-four of Operation Achieve Anything. This week off from the day job has been great, but it’s also made me extremely lethargic since I’ve been taking advantage of the spare time to take a legitimate break. Having only this Daily Breaker post and one SNL review to worry about, I’ve been extremely casual with my efforts. I’ve also started a walking regiment that has me feeling extra burnt out since I’ve been so inactive over the past several of months.

With each day the walking gets easier, the recovery time seems quicker, and I feel more energy even if physically I feel the need for more sleep. I’m hoping that by Tuesday, when I get back to work, I’ll be set into this new schedule and out of vacation mode. I’m going to try to prepare for the return of my day job’s workload by doing some tedious behind-the-scenes work for this blog instead of using the downtime to lounge around and relax. I definitely needed this break though, so I have absolutely no regrets.

One of the behind-the-scenes projects that I plan to work on is to start adding customized affiliate marketing material to each of my blog pages to see if it will help to bring in more of an income than I’m getting alone with just ads. This actually plays into yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to stop with the wishful thinking and start to be more thoughtful with my wishes, meaning to aim for attainable dreams.

As I said in yesterday’s post, there was a point in my youth where I had big dreams of becoming a millionaire thanks to two instances where I came really close. One being, when I lucked out an landed a job at Amazon, way back when they were just selling books and my stock options, if fully vested, were worth over a half-million bucks and rising up until I got laid off during the first internet bubble burst. This happened at a point where my carefree, go with the flow, approach to life was so sincere that I thought I tapped into the secret where I would invariably find a way to fail up since I did this without even trying.

The second time took place only a couple years later, adding evidence that I tapped into a way to become a successful failure through fate alone. This was when I got a c-level celebrity attached to a script that I wrote. Granted, even if something did come from this deal, it probably wouldn’t have been close to being an instant millionaire, but, in my head, it was going to be the jump-off point for my screenwriting career since I already had ten other screenplays in my back pocket.

I have since spent the rest of my life trying to recapture the same type of unexpected success but have yet to have another close call. That’s fine though, because, up until my midlife meltdown, I had a lot of fun living as a starving artist and discovered that I don’t really need all that much to be happy with my life. I just need more freedom while making enough money to live a simple but comfortable life. That’s why my minimal goal is to earn enough through my personal efforts to replace the need for a full-time minimum wage job.

It seems like this should be easy to achieve considering everyone who offers advice on the subject makes it sound simple to generate a six-figure salary. Since I only seek a quarter of that, to me, it seems like an attainable dream and therefore fulfilling the task from yesterday’s assignment. Keep in mind, I also feel this is attainable not because it’s easy but because, as I’ve shown, I’m willing to put in the work, I just need to figure a few things out.

All of this plays into the assignment for the day where I’m supposed to practice living by the quote by the fortune cookie that’s posted at the top of this page and get back to living out of my imagination and stop living out of my memories. Once again, this blog itself is an example of how I’m fulfilling this task, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to read why I think this is. Until then, it’s now time 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.