Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Forty-Five, Dateline 9-2-2018
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“Long-range goals keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-forty-five of Operation Achieve Anything. Last night ended up being an amazingly productive night as I tripled down on the behind-the-scenes work for this website in an effort to ease me out of vacation mode. I was getting a bit worry that come Tuesday, I’d be so set into my downtime ways that I wouldn’t be able that I would struggle to keep up with my prevacation pace.
I think that I’ve been feeling like I was falling into a real slacker mode because this vacation wasn’t a planned break. As I said a few days ago, I think my job likes to hide the fact that they have a certain amount of tasks to dish out over the month and once they hit that number they pretend to have “system errors” until the first day of the next month. Rather than tell us to just take the time off, they tell us to keep checking back.
This uncertainty as to whether or not this theory is actually correct made it so that I was afraid to commit to a plan B, at least toward the beginning of the week when we first started to run out of tasks to work on. On day one, I kept checking back in all the way up into the evening because I was planning to start putting in the maximum amount of allowed work time which would pretty much lead to a fifty percent pay increase.
Considering the same exact thing happened at the end of last month, when I saw that the problem was persisting, my newly found enthusiasm for the job went right out the window. This might have turned out to be the kick in the pants that I needed to shift my focus back to figuring out a way to create my own income stream while putting in the bare minimum work into this crappy part-time gig until I’m no longer in need of their paychecks.
This sort of plays into yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to practice living out my imagination instead of living out of my memories. Part of me fears this new idea that I have to replace my part-time job because I’ve started similar projects in the past, but I didn’t quite have the skill set at the time to make it achievable. Over the years, I’ve been reading up more and more on the subject and now think I’m ready for round two. Again, my dream is to create a website where I enjoy putting in the work that will bring in enough money to replace a full-time minimum wage career.
I’m not shooting for six and seven figures, like I might have in my youth. I just want to make enough on my own to be free. This is one example of how I’m attempting to live out my imagination instead of chasing old memories. Another example would be this site in general, which may have saved my life as it’s been the perfect replacement for my earlier lifelong dream to make it as a screenwriter. Instead of hanging onto a failed career, in an industry that doesn’t like non-traditional stories like they might have in the early ‘90s when I developed my writing style.
I spent years holding on to this experimental period of film even as the indie world started to only market or the same mainstream audience. I used to argue with anyone who would listen that I’m wasn’t claiming that my non-traditional style wasn’t for everyone but that there was a place for it in this world. I never once won this argument, so I was forced to give up on that dream. I held on to this fantasy for far too long because I always felt that my concepts and stories were compelling, but technically, my writing was too weak from all the bad habits that came with self-learning that I’ve never been confident in how I articulate my thoughts.
Even now, as I read things back, there’s a disconnect between my inner thoughts and the words that end up on the page. This is why I used to see this page as a ten-year challenge to hone my non-screenwriting skills and not as a marketable product. Now I’m getting closer to changing this view as I start to clean up all of the writing throughout the site so that I can stop seeing this blog as a hobby because of past fears and begin to promote this plethora of content with the pride that it deserves, even if there are still several flaws.
Hopefully, this outlook change will also change the way that I look at myself. Speaking of this ten-year plan of mine, this actually plays into today’s assignment where I’m supposed to reflect on the quote of the day about how long-term goals relieve the pain of short-term failures. Again, I feel like this site is enough evidence that I’ve always put this concept into practice, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s post for more details on the topic. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your project.
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.
