Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Thirty-Two, Dateline 11-28-2018
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“Swallow your pride occasionally, it’s non-fattening.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-thirty-two of Operation Achieve Anything. Yesterday turned out to be an interesting one, where I woke up in the morning, amped, and ready to get a lot done, some time around noon, just after finishing my Daily Breakdown, I decided to go easy for the rest of the day. Though I do feel a bit rested from my Thanksgiving break, the fact that my mini-vacation was more of a ploy to drum up content, means that it wasn’t really a break at all.
This might be why I might feel like my body’s refreshed, but my mind is still exhausted. Writing ten to twenty pages a day for months on end is way more draining than one might think. I’m not saying it’s more difficult or demanding than any of the labor-based work that I’ve done throughout my life, but it’s also not the walk in the park the way it’s portrayed in the movies. Plus, at least with the physical work, no one ever questions your need for rest.
Another reason that my mini-vacation failed was that I spent the entire second day sleeping off the massive hangover from my Thanksgiving routine. I literally slept for seventeen hours straight, then woke to make my two deadlines for the day before crawling back into bed for more sleep, keeping in mind that I was also battling a cold throughout this entire process. Yesterday was the first day that I felt fully recovered from all of my holiday nonsense, and it was nice to meet my deadlines for the day and then just stop.
This stopping was more of the break that I desired when I busted my ass to build up a backlog of content to afford that holiday time off. It got me thinking how the month of December is going to be hectic as I continue to develop the ideas and build the websites for the project that I plan to debut on New Year’s Day. So, for the rest of this month, including the weekend, my new play is to just do the bare minimum and casually work through the rest of the day.
Yesterday, I did absolutely nothing once I finish my Daily Breaker post and SNL review. I don’t think that I’ll be able to go that easy for almost an entire week, so, instead of slacking any spare time away, I also plan to casually work through cleaning up the rest of this site. This really should be my strategy until the entire clean up process is done considering I’m waiting for editing process to be complete before moving on to actively promote the content outside of just casually sharing my progress on Facebook and Twitter.
The problem is, I keep wanting to get ahead of the game not realizing that I’ll always be lagging behind as long as I leave loose ends untied when moving on to my next projects. My biggest hurdle is that I’ve spent so much of the writer portion of my life moving from first draft to first draft with the intention of cleaning things up when I feel more confident in the way that I work with my words as a craft. Even though I now feel like my skills have improved by tenfold, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel good enough to go back and edit my work, but at the same time, learning to properly rewrite my work is probably the biggest hurdle that I need to overcome since nobody nails the first draft.
This actually plays into yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to share my thought on the way that I lean, meaning, am I a person who prefers to do it on my own or am I someone who prefers to seek out an expert. As with most of these assignments, and everything in life that gives only two options, I’m a bit of a blend of both. Though I would love to seek out the help of an expert, I’ve never had the resources to afford the support that I need. Classes can be fun, but I’m too shy to interact efficiently. I usually only chime in with jokes to lighten the mood in the room, or when I’m sure that I know the answer. I find that in classroom situations, I’m much better off working alone, but I need some sort of mentor that I just can’t afford or find one who would volunteer.
I think this is because I developed terrible techniques to hide the fact that I have learning disabilities since I was raised during a time where we were still treated like we were dumb and not that we needed a different form of learning structure. I’m not an idiot. I’m extremely quick at picking things up, but since I’m so self-taught, to an outsider, my unconventional approach can confuse them as we both get to the same answer using completely different math. That said, with the right type of instructor and structure, I actually thrive in the academic world. But again, I’ve never been able to afford the education I need thanks to the Catch 22 scenario where you need an education to get a job that pays well enough to afford said education, and my credit’s too shot to even think about a loan that I don’t want in the first place.
I’m pretty good at learning on my own, but the problem that comes with this approach is that I often develop bad habits from using ill-advised shortcuts, or patchwork to get by until I figure out how things are properly done, making the relearning process almost twice as difficult. This is probably the main reason why I’m always torn between going back and fixing old work or moving on to something new where I don’t have to deal with my rookie-ish issues.
This is why my goal is so incremental. Ideally, I’d figure out a way to start out making ten to twenty bucks a day through whatever advertising I add to any sites that I build over the next year. This would cover all of my bills and afford me the ability to take my time honing my skills while working on my many projects. Not having to worry about when and where my next paycheck will come will kill any distractions from any day jobs that kill my ability to focus on the task at hand. Then, once all of my shared work is clean, I could then put that money towards marketing in an effort to double my pay.
At around fifty bucks a day, I would be able to afford to live comfortably while I continue to hone my craft and then switch gears to really start focusing on adapting all of my screenplays into novels. If that area of my writing career ever takes off, I’d then be back to a place where I could get back out there and live on my own where I would write out the rest of my days in the most comfortable environment that I could afford. By this point, I should be able to work whenever the hell that I want, which is my ultimate goal.
So, there you have the answer to yesterday’s assignment, now let move on to today’s where I’m now supposed to share an example of a time where I had to swallow my pride and why it is essential to do so from time to time. As always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to read how I deal with this task. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off 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.
