Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Forty-Seven, Dateline 9-4-2018
/
“When I go to farms or little towns, I am always surprised at the discontent I find. And New York, too often, has looked across the sea toward Europe. And all of us who turn our eyes away from what we have are missing life.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-forty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything. Here we are on a Tuesday following a ten and a half day break from my day job due to a system outage. At first, I was upset because the time off meant that I wasn’t making money, but now I am thankful for the random gift since it reminded me that I can’t count on the company as a reliable income stream.
Up until last week, I was planning on putting as much time as I could into my paid work so that when my contract dried up, I’d be able to live off of my saving while I shift my focus into making more money on my own. The reminders of the company’s instability made me realize that I should reverse my order of importance when it comes to my personal projects and job that provides me with an income.
If I were to put more time into my paid work, sure, it would bring in more money that would be spent before the next check came in since it’s still just a part-time job. Shifting my focus to my own project would mean that I could possibly pull off my escape even earlier than I thought, especially since I’m so used to struggling as a starving artist, when in a pinch, I can get by on five dollars a day. Sure it would be rough, but that’s pretty much what I lived on for a year before I landed this part-time gig.
That’s not to say that I’d quit as soon as I hit this five dollar a day benchmark, but it would definitely be an achievable safety net, since I’m already halfway there, making a dollar or two a day through the ads that I’ve added to this blog. I added these ads just three months ago, and now that I see that they work, even just a little, I now plan to go back and clean up the entire site to make it look more professional. Once it’s clean, I then plan to finally get more active in my marketing.
As of right now, my marketing has been very passive because I saw this site as more of a hobby/training ground with hopes to make it profitable the moment I could afford to hire the help needed to clean up my early rookie mistakes. This creates a snake eating its own tail situation because I will never earn enough for this through my part-time job, and I will never see my site as professional enough to promote until it’s all cleaned up.
I don’t know if I’m to the point where I have the time or the skills to make the site perfect, but I am to the point where I can take the entire thing to the next level to where making at least five dollars a day for my efforts isn’t a delusional thought. I’m kind of thankful for my chaotic upbringing because it trained me to just keep going no matter how tough times seem to get.
This transitions perfectly into yesterday’s task where I was supposed to learn how to love to dance in the rain, instead of hiding in corners to wait out a terrifying storm, meaning exactly what I just pointed out. Though I’m now more of a hider, in my youth, I not only loved to dance in the rain, I was a bit of a storm chaser. It was almost as if I was more comfortable in the chaos than I was when the world was at peace.
It was awesome during these days because people loved me when times got tough since I was the only one to constantly keep a level head. In fact, it was often pointed out that when times were the toughest, I looked like I was having the most fun. This was also during the phase in my life where I seemed to continually fail upwards. Looking back, I think I was successful in failing upwards because I was so calm in storms leading people to want me on their team for some of the tougher projects.
I really wish that I could have kept up this attitude, but there is a cutoff point where the constant chaos starts to kill you from the inside. This is why I now struggle to even want to interact with anyone because I’m done putting up with everyone’s nonsense or forcing them to deal with mine. I know this is a one-sided outlook, but my intentions stem from mutual respect for everybody’s time.
So I do fully get the point of this lesson and do recommend dancing in the rain, but I also suggest that if you do lead this type of life, it’s okay to at least hide under umbrellas from time to time. I’m pretty sure this fulfills the task for yesterday. As for today’s assignment, I’m now supposed to focus on living in the here and now and stop being jealous of those who are living the life that I want to live, in locations where I’d rather be.
This is a tough one because I often use these, “In the future…” thoughts as the motivation to stick to my goals while at the same time, I can totally see how this outlook is making the present less enjoyable. Then again, when you work out to lose the weight, there are a lot of present pains that you have to work through to reach your ultimate goal.
Of course, I’ll delve more into these ideas when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this one 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.
