Operation Achieve Anything: Day Fifty-Three, Dateline 2-22-2018
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“Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.”
Hey Crickets, how’s it going on this freezing morning also known as day number fifty-three of Operation Achieve Anything. Yesterday, I shared details of my latest drinking binge which now that I think about it, might have been inspired by the default rut that I fall into as my birthday approaches. This isn’t a usual rut, in that I don’t necessarily become depressed, but is instead, more of a reflective time where I would rather think back over the completion of one more year than actually work toward my goals.
If I were to come up with an excuse for this annual birthday slowdown, I’d say that it’s more about resting up to buckle down and work after my personalized celebratory day. Then again, as a leap year baby, I don’t really get my own special day for another two years from now. Either way, it must be instinctual because I’ve noticed this growing sense of contemplation for a couple of days but didn’t make the birthday connection until today.
Thankfully, yesterday’s assignment was a fun one in that it wanted me to treat life like a video game. At first, I wasn’t sure what to do with this task since the lesson seemed to be more geared toward trying something new minus any hesitation or fear by treating this new activity like a game where the objective is to just have fun. At least that was my interpretation.
After looking at it again, the aspect where my efforts must go to a new activity must just be something that I made up in my head as the actual lesson is an attempt to promote more fun in your life by not taking anything too serious by trying to find a way to make your responsibilities seem more fun. For example, how you might inspire a kid to clean their room by turning it from a chore to a game.
As soon as the actual message of the lesson replaced my interpretations, I decided to take the task more literal and as soon as I finished with my responsibilities, I fired up Rocksmith which is an actual video game that I’ve been using in an effort to learn how to play the bass. At first, I felt this was cheating but then when I thought about my history with the game, I now see it as the perfect example of what the lesson is trying to teach.
I bought Rocksmith years ago in an effort to learn how to play the guitar but being old with fat fingers, and having never played an instrument in my life, I couldn’t keep up with so many strings involved. I then bought a bass with the hopes that it would be easier to handle four strings instead of six. At this point, I was only using the games instructional features because I felt I didn’t know enough to even think about trying the rest of the game where you actually play riffs to popular music or play music based games in a virtual video arcade.
I felt that I needed to get much further along in my lessons before any of the game aspects would be any fun but I struggled to get past a very early instructional challenge that required the use of a sliding technique while also attempting to play with multiple chords. This lesson was so early on that I felt like I was hopeless if I thought that I would ever learn a song.
It wasn’t until I made learning to play bass via Rocksmith a task to fulfill an assignment from the Achieve Anything… book that I doubled down on my efforts and committed to not giving up this time. I went through the same lessons and got hung up on the same exact spot and wasn’t making progress for days. It wasn’t until I said screw it and attempted to learn a song with my limited knowledge that I not only started to have fun playing Rocksmith as the game that it is, but it was also at this point where I really felt like I was learning how to play the bass.
It turned out that Rocksmith is smart enough to follow your progress and adjust accordingly to where it keeps you challenged while still being easy enough to help you learn. So, it wasn’t until I started to find learning to play bass to be a fun experience that I really started to feel that I was making progress in my efforts to learn, which proves the major points of yesterday’s assignment and fulfills the task at hand.
As for today’s assignment, it seems like a slip back to the “less talk more rock” line of lessons that I was getting super annoyed with back when I was sick with the flu. Only this time, I’m not as irritated because the actual task has direction instead of the “keep on keeping on,” approach where I kept getting told to keep doing the same exact this.
Today, I’m supposed to take a page from my notebook and draw a line down the middle in order to make a list on one side of five things that I’ve been putting off due to preparation then, on the other side of the line, list what’s holding me back starting along with a plan on how to stop prepping and start achieving the actual goals.
As always, you’ll have to wait until I check in with tomorrow’s update in order to find out what I managed to do to fulfill the needs of this assignment. Until then, it’s now time for my usual sign off where I say, 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.
