Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Forty-Three, Dateline 8-31-2018
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“Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishing.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-forty-three of Operation Achieve Anything. Between the summer heat that started my latest bout of inactivity and my most recent run-in with sciatica that had me bedridden for about a month, I’ve been feeling like complete garbage for most of this year as far as my physical health is concerned. That’s why when the Achieve Anything… book challenged me to start a new habit, I knew right away that it would have to be health based.
Right after finishing yesterday’s post, I dug out my old Fitbit in order to get back into a routine of walk ten thousand steps a day. A couple years ago, when I first got said Fitbit as a gift, I was very good at meeting this daily goal and lost about seventy pounds in the process. Then, summer hit and the heat killed any drive within me to be active leading me to put the weight back on over the past year and a half.
I hate being this size, but it’s hard to stay motivated enough to keep it off as a depressed shut-in whose only focus is trying to figure out a way to escape the nine-to-five world. I keep thinking, as soon as I earn enough to replace my part-time income on my own, then I’d shift my focus to health since I would then have a real reason to live and not just fulfilling my role as a cog. I know that’s a riskful way of thinking because at this age and weight, putting off health could lead to an early death, but up until recently, I was willing to accept this as an alternate option.
Since I started my latest SNL challenge, I’ve regained focus on what I want to achieve while I’m alive. Granted, this didn’t get me moving again, but it got my mind thinking of new strategies to develop my own paying work. At first, the pipe dream was to figure out a way to make money with this blog, but then I started to realize, this is more of a passion project/way to hone my skills that isn’t really marketable to a money spending audience.
I recently came up with an idea that would be more appealing to the masses where the goal wouldn’t be to fulfill my creative needs but instead would be one hundred percent about creating an income for myself. The hope would be that TheWickerBreaker.com would continue to satisfy my creative needs and the other site would allow me to fulfill more professional interest where making adjustments for the sole purpose of making more money will not break my heart.
Though I still love what I do with this site, I do feel like I started to censor myself when I first began to think of this less as a hobby and more as a potential job. Where I used to curse when I wanted or be very open about my use of medical marijuana, I now try to keep things clean in an effort to build a broader audience. That said, I don’t plan to now go crazy on this site as if the shackles are off, because I do feel the cleanliness does come across more professional, but I do hope to let down my guard just a bit when I need to express myself the way that I want to.
Now, getting back to the actual assignment, I figured I’d take advantage of the new line of optimism to focus on health so that I can live long enough to see if this game plan will play out the way that I hope it will. Last night, I fit in my first ten thousand steps in quite a while, and due to an ankle issue that stemmed from my sciatica, it took me about two hours to get there because I was walking so slow, but I did it.
This morning, I walked about seventy-five-hundred steps in about an hour. My ankle still hurts but just one day of walking loosened me up enough to where goal feels achievable. Last night, I was extremely worried because between the time that it took and the amount of pain that I was in, there was no way I would be able to keep it up. My sure I could physically, but mentally, I could see myself giving up with the excuse of using the extra time that would be freed up to focus on my work. Thankfully, not only is it getting easier already but the weather is starting to cool off, so I’m no longer as concerned as to whether or not I will be able to stick to the walking program.
To add to the accountability, I also created an account on this new challenged based site. I can’t see a way to search for specific profiles but if you join and are interested my username if fubunker. For this challenge, I’ll just be sharing screenshots from my Fitbit, but if I like the site, I’ll implement it into any new challenges moving on.
Now, for today’s assignment, I’m supposed to make a list of thoughtful wishes to replace any wishful thinking that I might have, meaning, only to focus on making wishes that are legitimately attainable. Though I may have been more of a wishful thinker when I was young, daydreaming of being a millionaire, that’s just because, when I was twenty-one, I worked at Amazon.com and at one point had over a half a million dollars worth of stock options if I was fully vested and I was just a warehouse employee. This might have warped my worldview a bit since I was raised to be trapped in the lower classes.
I’ll delve more into these achievable dreams… or should I say “thoughtful wishes,” when I check in with tomorrow’s update. 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.
