Operation Achieve Anything: Day One-Hundred-Ten, Dateline 4-20-2018
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“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
Good morning Crickets. Welcome to day number one-hundred-ten of Operation Achieve Anything. It’s been about a week since I started the seemingly impossible task of going through everything that I own in order to sort out what I actually need and what is actually just clutter. The fact that I haven’t done more than tidy for multiple years has turned this into a much bigger project than I was expecting. It doesn’t help that the first step of a major cleaning session like this is to create a bigger mess by pulling literally everything I own into the middle of my place to sort through it.
At first, the mess was so overwhelming that I regretted my decision to start this process. Not only did the mound junk seem unmanageable based on the volume alone, I felt like this venture would take forever between my other obligations and the fact that I’m so out of shape that I could only manage to clean in small bursts before having to give in and take a break. To add to the fun, working on everything so low to the ground triggered my lower back pain.
Thankfully, the way my head works, where I’m unable to fully focus with any loose ends lying around, I continued to chip away at the mess whenever I had the energy while working on my other projects whenever I needed a break. I started at one corner of my room and meticulously worked my way around to the other building an even bigger pile in the process but at the same time, my space was becoming spotless as I moved which I found to be very encouraging.
This morning, I finished sorting through said giant pile, and now everything in my living space is something I plan to keep and off the floor. Now, I have everything up on my shelves and it’s now just a matter of sorting and organizing to put everything in its proper place. Though I’m not done, I am now to the point where it can look that way by closing the curtains that cover my shelves and closing any cabinet doors.
This is kind of a dangerous place to be because it would be super easy to just close everything up and consider it good. That’s why I’m going to leave everything open until I am done which is going to take a while as I am waiting for my paycheck to be able to afford a few storage containers and other organizing aids.
Unfortunately, I just realized that this intro is way more fitting for today’s assignment based on today’s quote about when things seem impossible and you consistently work on small chunks at a time, before you know it, the task will be done to your surprise. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be reporting on yesterday’s assignment about how attempting the impossible is an effective way to learn whether you succeed or fail.
I think I failed to focus on this task because I kind of already covered it yesterday since it was another case where the last two assignments were almost exactly the same. That said, here’s a quick recap of how I feel about the sentiment. First off, I fully agree with my writing in general as the evidence. As I said in the past, I’m slightly dyslexic and since I was raised to never seek help, I just floundered through high school and barely paid attention in English because I found it so hard to read.
Since I always thought that I was going to be a stand-up comedian, where my stories would be told orally, I felt that I only needed to write well enough to write jokes that would only be read by me, so all of the grammar and spelling never meant all that much to me. Then, after discovering that I have debilitating stage fright and social anxiety, I determined that writing was more fitting for me because I still had stories that I wanted to get out of my head.
I started to write short stories just to goof around where the feedback I received always focused on how horrible I was technically without ever getting any insights on my concepts or stories. Though disappointed, I was never discouraged, I just knew that it was going to take a little extra work. This is why when I stopped seeing writing as a hobby and more as a lifetime goal, I became so prolific, thinking that the volume of work alone would be enough to teach me the impossible.
I feel this helped me personally because even though I still feel that my writing is very technically flawed, it’s improved tenfold since I started. Unfortunately, I also feel that my prolific approach may have hurt me a bit as I feel it’s led many people to think that I think I’m more of an expert when the reality is, I still feel like I’m learning. Sometimes I feel like people mistake this quantity while learning quality approach with the idea that I think that I’m already an expert since I get very little of the mentor-style feedback that I need.
Either way, I do find that when I am interested in even the most impossible of goals, I’m not afraid to at least give it a shot because I do feel that it leads me to learn, and with that, I’m going to consider yesterday’s assignment to be done.
As I said up above, I accidentally already completed today’s assignment but I’m sure I’ll add more insights when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s time for me to wrap this 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.
