Operation Achieve Anything: Day Ninety-Two, Dateline 4-2-2018
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“Failure seldom stops you; what stops you is the fear of failure.”
Hey Crickets!!! Welcome to day number ninety-two of Operation Achieve Anything. I’m surprisingly enthusiastic considering that fact that it’s a Monday, and even more surprisingly, this enthusiasm was actually ignited by the Achieve Anything… book’s eight days of lessons with a common theme of exploring how a key to success is actually how you handle your failures. Usually, these long-running lessons annoy the hell out of me since they can often feel repetitive to the point where I feel like I am simply going through the motions without truly getting involved.
Since I have been failing for over two decades in my efforts to become a legitimized writer I learned very early on that in order to live a non-average life there may be more downs than ups. Granted, I may have gone a bit extreme to where my back up plan for if I continue to fail until the day that I die, my hopes are that the massive amount of content that I’m creating will successfully create an afterlife, even if that comes from a stranger sorting through my stuff to determine if it’s of any worth.
For yesterday’s assignment, I was supposed to reflect on what the phrase failing forward means to me. As someone who is self-taught at everything that I do since I didn’t pay attention in school, I feel like I’ve been failing for throughout my entire life whether or not we’re talking about my writing. I mean, even if you go back to my early twenties when I moved to Seattle to Leaving Las Vegas myself off this world, the first thing I did was land a job at Amazon.com in my efforts to afford the booze.
Keep in mind, this was 1997 when the internet was still pretty new and Amazon had yet to go public. My employee number was in the triple digits and at one point, if the stock options that were set aside for me were fully vested, I would have been worth over a half a million dollars while earning twelve bucks an hour working in a warehouse.
Then there was the time where I had a close call with the first screenplay that I actively tried to sell that may have ended up going nowhere but it did land me a literary agent for one year and the scholarship that made it so that I could afford to go to film school. When I actually started to work in the film industry, I failed my first role as an assistant director but I also met the right people to where I eventually got to have a really fun career doing lighting for film and television.
All of this seemed so effortless that I kind of started to count on the fact that I always failed forward as a bit of a safety net, that worked well in my youth but as I started to get older I noticed that I kept failing sideways, at least as far as my paychecks go. This assignment really got me to think about how even though I’ve been failing to figure out my life when it comes to jobs but as far as my writing goes, I’ve been making progress the entire time.
This reminded me just how much work I’ve put into the craft that I love even if I have yet to figure things out as far as finances go. This line of thinking ended up lighting a fire under my ass to where I want to put in more effort toward promoting my work, now that I have a better idea of the plans that I have for this site.
I was more active in promoting my work back when I first started this blog but at that time I barely had any content. Then I failed backward pretty hard when I gave up on my dreams of making it as a screenwriter, quit working in film, and lost all of my friends in the process as my entire world came crashing in and I felt that nobody cared.
At that time, I switched to only passively promote my work thinking that no one wanted to hear from me. I stopped sharing any links on my personal social media pages opting instead to only share through the site’s Facebook page and on Twitter where I am mainly followed by strangers. The fact that I didn’t really notice any change in views led me to feel like I had absolutely zero support from my friends when I should have been impressed by the fact that I was bringing in so many readers who didn’t know me from Adam.
Unfortunately, this mid-life crisis led me to completely give up for an entire year where I gave up on the challenge aspect of this site and purely used it as a personal journal as I tried to figure things out. This led my readers to drop off to the point where it may have been just me going to the website in order to copy and paste the link to the page I just wrote.
Now that I’m back to the challenges, I’m starting to see my readership grow again even with next to no promotion. With my newly found pride in the fact that I’ve actually been making progress this entire time, even as I fail, I started to look into more active ways to promote my work and am excited to give techniques that I found a chance, which I plan to start as soon as I complete my day.
This actually plays into today’s assignment where the lesson focused on the fact that failure rarely stops anyone from accomplishing anything but it’s the fear of failure that can lead to nothing but running into walls. This reminded me of back in the day when I couldn’t care less about what anyone thought about my efforts which got me to want to get back to that frame of mind. I think I can pull this off, especially if I stop thinking about how the people I used to know might see my efforts as pathetic and focus on strangers who’ve always seemed more interested in my work in the first place.
You’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see what I manage to do. Until then, it’s now time for me 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.
