Operation Achieve Anything: Day Ninety, Dateline 3-31-2018
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“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Happy Saturday Crickets!!! It’s day number ninety of Operation Achieve Anything and I am finally feeling like I am fully back in my groove. It’s weird how my mood can vary as much as it does, considering how consistent that my life has grown to become. Then again, last month, I was mainly just stressed out over the fact that my paycheck was delayed for almost a month which is extra rough now that I barely make enough to scrape by as it is.
Fortunately, I had birthday money to burn through but that only added to my depression because I really wanted that money to go to something more fun in honor of the rarely-existing day that I born. It’s okay now because my payroll issues have been worked out and I was able to replace the birthday money that was spent with the money from my paycheck. Now I’m back to my regular schedule where my financial struggles are just bad enough that I’m still worried but worried from within my comfort zone.
Speaking of schedules, yesterday’s assignment focused on the adage I’ve lived by for most of my adult life which is how it takes ten years to create an overnight success. I don’t know where I first heard this quote but it was over twenty years ago before I discovered my love for screenwriting. I know this because I used this quote to comfort my nerves as a reminder that I was still new to the game and had a whole lot to learn, especially since I didn’t learn of my love of writing until I was an adult, and due to my dyslexia, I never paid attention to my English classes when I was still going to school.
As I said yesterday when I introduced the task, the quote has also been on my blog's homepage from day one, as I noted that I was new to the medium and was going to give myself this ten-year time limit as my cut off point to figuring out how to turn blogging from a hobby into a money making career. I’m now somewhere near the halfway point and since I’ve had a daily blog task going back at least four years, I can see many major improvements.
The plan from here on out is to continue to use challenges to inspire daily content as I continue to hone my craft. This approach not only provided prose practice for me but the various themed content could also create more paths to get people to my webpage and if they like what they see through stumbling, they’ll be pleased as punch to see that I have a stockpile of projects for them to read.
Right now I have this challenge that you’re reading as well as the Saturday Night Live challenge where I am watching and reviewing at least one episode each day. The Operation Achieve Anything challenge is set up to end on the last day of this year and the Saturday Night Live challenge will be less intense about halfway through 2019 when I will finally get caught up to watching and reviewing the shows as they actually air.
For next year, I already have an idea for a challenge to replace the one that you’re reading but I also have a weekly challenge that I plan to start whenever I feel like I can commit to the time, and I plan to come up with another show to watch and review because that seems to be the only way that I really enjoy TV and movies any more.
For now, I plan to keep this routine up until I hit that ten-year benchmark and then reevaluate my progress and where I want to be. Granted, it would be awesome to make my goals more money oriented, but for right now, other than my persistence, ambition, and concepts, I don’t feel that I’m a good enough technical writer to get where I want to be anytime soon. I’ve grown to accept this as my fate, which can be sad but it’s also how I remind myself to be patient while I continue to improve.
The actual assignment from the book wants a literal timeline with everything mapped out but since most of my plans involve projects that I plan to announce in the future minus any spoilers, I’m going to hold off on creating any graphs and consider the assignment fulfill. I mean, I am already halfway through the plan so I don’t feel I need proof that I’ll stick to it.
As for today’s assignment, that’s day five of the Achieve Anything… books eight-day collection of lessons that all focus on handling success and failure. Once again, the inspiration for the task is the above quote of the day about how Edison never failed, he was just successful in finding new ways for things not to work. I think this task also plays into my favorite quote of all time, which is, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
Normally, I don’t like when the book as these themed segments that go on for days because up until now, they are usually very repetitive and focus on the self over the actual goal. Though these tasks still ultimately focus on self-help concepts, since the lessons to be taught are how to cope with success or failure with examples that I already use and take to heart, I feel reassured over being fed another line of flowery bullshit.
As always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see how I address today’s task at hand. Until then, it’s once again time for me to close 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.
