Good afternoon crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-sixty-nine of Operation Achieve Anything. Last night I couldn’t stop thinking about how often these posts keep coming back to me trying to justify how I spend my time. Whether I’m claiming to need a break before I burn myself out, or beat myself up for not getting as much done as I planned, you have to remember I haven’t missed a deadline or bailed out on an obligation every since starting this site over five years ago.

The problem is that I beat myself up because I’m unable to see or accept my own achievements. Rather than be happy that I completed three projects in one day, I’ll think that I’m garbage for not doing four. I really need to stop looking at life this way and start celebrating accomplishments whether they be big or small. For example, last night, I was still running a little slow due to a cold that’s symptoms started to show on Sunday. Because of this, I had to call it quits early to get some rest, and I felt horrible for doing so even though I met all my goals for the day and even managed to complete cleaning my SNL reviews from season six on top of what I had to do.

Instead of feeling like a slacker, I should have felt satisfied with continuing to make forward progress. From here on out, I’m going to try to focus more positive energy on any accomplishment, big or small, that keeps me moving forward as opposed to beating myself up over what I wasn’t able to get to. In general, I need to stop defending myself for the way that I live my life because the only criticism that I ever receive comes from within my own head.

None of what’s written above has anything to do with today’s assignment where I’m supposed to share my thoughts on knowledge as a concept as the Achieve Anything… book continues this repetitive round of sharing why learning is so important. Again, I don’t mind this assignment, but I hate how it’s the third or fourth time it’s come up making it feel like self-help filler that’s more focused on the individual over the goal. Also again, I bought this book thinking it would be more procedural and goal focused than being so focused on bracing the self for success if it comes.

As far as the assignment goes, I think knowledge is essential but very frustrating thanks to all the filters that facts have to go through making it hard to sort through available resources to figure out who you can trust. Personally, I feel that people should be more open to learning more about things that they disagree with, not necessarily to switch your own views but to see how ideas you might think sound crazy are inarguable doctrine to those that do believe.

For example, I’m an Atheist who was raised with religion being a non-topic. I found out much later in life that both my parents were very religious, or at least spiritual but something happened to where my dad rejected organized religion and practiced his beliefs on his own terms. Thankfully he kept those beliefs to himself as did my mom. I only went to church on religious holidays with my mom and her parents, but it felt more like it was out of obligation and not faith.

In fact, since I saw religion as being so linked to these holidays, I started to see God and Jesus the same as Santa and the Easter Bunny, just something made up to provide incentive through rewards and fears to keep people in line. As I got older and started to learn about the ancient Gods, it only solidified my belief that religious belief is just a myth-based process that tries to promote doing good over bad. It took me years to realize that people actually believed all this stuff was real.

As I grew older, I started to research the history of religion in general, not because I wanted to be won over as a believer, what I wanted was to learn about how these beliefs came to be. The more that I learned, the more it solidified that religion just isn’t for me. That said, I still like to look into religion from time to time because all of them seem to have an apocalyptic promise to their practice, so knowing these beliefs provides an insight into the motives of those who want the man in the sky to return. Not that I think that they may be right, but I do believe that there are people out there who are actively attempting to fulfill prophecy which I  wouldn’t even know if I were to just close my eye to everything I disagree with.

That’s just one example, but in general, I think it’s important to learn as much as you can about anything because there may be connections that you didn’t even know were there. Like how, for example number two which is on a positive note, how I learned that my love of typing, in general, made me a good fit as a coder and I had lots of fun building apps. Not enough fun that I want it to be a career but fun enough that I do have plans to build a few apps for an upcoming site that I plan to develop.

This approach may make me a Jack of all trades and a master of none, but I’d rather have options than be stuck doing something that I already know that I’m good at. This actually plays into today's assignment where I’m supposed to explain if I would rather be correct all the time to where everything comes naturally to me or if I would prefer the struggles that come with learning as you go. If this site, in general, doesn’t answer this question, I don’t know what will.

Either way, stay tuned for tomorrow’s update where I will attempt to make something interesting out of this assignment. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this one 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.