Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Forty-Six, Dateline 9-3-2018
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“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass - it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-forty-six of Operation Achieve Anything. It’s weird, but ever since I started to think of this next project that I want to start that will run alongside The Wicker Breaker, I’ve been feeling a sense of building momentum toward this site and my life in general. Though it might night be apparent to an outsider, to me, it feels like the decades worth of puzzle pieces that I’ve been sowing about are finally piecing together.
Part of me fears this will trigger another manic episode, but for now, I feel that it’s a healthy amount of enthusiasm over an attainable goal and not just me being over excited about a potentially life-changing deal, like back in the day when I’d get the slightest bite of interest as a screenwriter. Again, I feel a lot more grounded now that my new goal is to generate a full-time minimum-wage income by doing what I love.
As I said a couple of days ago, this new idea is aimed at a much broader audience than any of my projects from the past. That said, if this idea goes as planned, I’ll be able to allocate my time to be able to work on both, with way less pressure put on my creative/passion project, like this blog. Either way, the potential has been enough to light a fire under my ass as I wait for my paycheck to get started.
Just days after fully committed to this new concept, I started to think about my health. If you follow this section at all, you may know that I’ve been spending the past couple month battling with a bout of sciatica and screwed up my ankle thanks to the weird gait that I developed when I was too injured to properly walk. This led to weight gain that only added to the ankle pain creating an endless cycle of inactivity.
Since I have about two weeks until my paycheck gets in, I figured I’d focus on my health while I wait, in hopes that I’d work through the pressing inactivity based issues that were also starting to affect my mental health. Right now I’m just pacing back and forth in my room until I meet my ten-thousand steps Fitbit based goal. I’ve only been at it for less than a week, and I’ve already cut the time that it takes by almost half.
While I pace, I also think, and about halfway through day number two I got to thinking that, if this new idea does work out it could potentially draw more attention to this site. Though this would be nice, I’ve been meaning to do a massive blog cleaning project for a couple years now, where I would go through and tidy up the site’s many typos that stemmed from a third party spell checker issue where it wouldn’t commit the changes I made whenever I’d hit the publish button.
This went on for a couple years without me noticing because, by the time I hit publish, I was so burnt out from reading my own words throughout the proofreading process that I never go back once I’m committed enough to hit publish. This really sucks in my case because my dyslexia leads to enough typing errors without having my spellchecker working against me and, being very prolific, this cleaning project would lead to months worth of work.
I kept putting this off, thinking that one day, whether I earned enough money through the site or through my day job, I’d hire myself an editor. Unfortunately, my readership is already starting to grow, and though the newer content is mostly clean, these new readers are also looking at my older work. The thought of this changed my priority to where I now want to tidy this entire site by cleaning all of the significant typos and making needed adjustments to the content to make this page look more professional before I move on to the new project.
I started the cleaning process the just the other day and just looking at the changes has me feeling that this could actually be a money making website as well, and not just my training ground. All of this plays into yesterday’s assignment that was focused on how long-term goals make short-term failures much more easier to handle. Luckily, I discovered the phrase, “It takes ten years to make an overnight success,” early enough in my life that having it as my life motto has turned out to be a real saving grace.
If I didn’t have these long-term goals, I have no idea where I would be at this time, but I doubt that I’d be in a place good, considering how miserable I am while having this optimistic outlook. It seems that all I’ve ever felt was potential and failure but kept telling myself that I’d eventually get a win and if/when this would happen, I would have a crazy backlog of completed work that would keep me self-employed for the rest of my life, giving me the freedom to do what I love.
As for the task from yesterday’s assignment, I was supposed to create a graph showing my progress over the last year. I think that the book wanted a hypothetical/hand-drawn image, but my blog's stats run parallel to how I feel that I’m doing, so I’ll just share a graph of last year’s The Wicker Breaker progress. Keep in mind, there was a major dropoff in my readers during the year between my resolutions challenge and my current SNL project but now I'm breaking new personal records every month.
As for today’s assignment, I’m now supposed to practice dancing out in the rain instead of hiding from the storm. This is another one where I have a lot to say on this subject, but of course, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update in order to hear what that is. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this thing un 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.
