Today is a day when I tend to self-reflect, so I’m diving back into my Future Authoring account.

I’m sad that there isn’t a date on it, because I would have LOVED to have known when I wrote this, but I think it was sometime in the summer of 2017. About six months ago, actually.

In six months, I want to be out of [my old job]. No more. This place is a shithole. In two years, I want to be making enough online that I could be considering cutting the cord and supporting myself only on my earnings. In five years, i want to have a comfortable routine writing and editing and publishing books

This makes me laugh (both in the “it’s funny” way and the “tell for cognitive dissonance” way), and I’m so very glad that I opened this back up at this moment in time.

First, the shithole comment. I love synchronicity like that. Sometimes I wonder if I wait too long to do a thing, but then when I do do the thing, it will reference something that I just learned about which would have been completely lost on me had I done the thing earlier. I can never figure out if it’s confirmation bias or if it’s evidence that I have a guardian angel or something. The prominence of the word shithole in my self-assessment and in the media today indicates, to me, that I’m still somehow on the right track.

Second, my five-year vision/goal/whatever scares the spit out of me. Which is funny, considering that the six-month goal is already accomplished and I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Looking back on what I wrote, it all rings true, but I don’t remember writing it. I never once thought about my FutureAuthoring profile as I interviewed for the job and moved to a completely different state. Not once.

Yet I accomplished my goal. And it was easier–once the time was right–than I thought it would be.

It astonishes me how much we can accomplish when we work toward something, even if that something is completely unconscious. When I quit my autoimmune medications, I never consciously made a decision to quit. I just started acting as if I had quit, with the option to reschedule my next infusion if we got to that point.

(Spoiler: we never got to that point.)

You have to do the work, there’s no getting around that, but if you do the work eventually you will look up and you’ll be out of the swamp into the mountains.

They say that the best way to build credibility is to make predictions in public, stand by them, and wait for them to come true.

Of course, that’s contingent upon one’s ability to ~~predict the future.

The next best way is to say you’re going to do something, and then do it.

It’s like predicting the future, but you get near-complete control over that future.

Instead of, say, trying to predict the stock market.

So it would make sense that I could list a bunch of New Year’s resolutions here, and then track my progress as I achieve them.

Truth be told, I am too chickenshit to throw my specific goals out for public consumption–or accountability.

Vaguely, my goals involve:

• Using writing to develop a secondary source of income
• Taking steps to further bolster my health and beauty

I’m sure I’ll chronicle some of my endeavors here.

Last year ended up being “year of macro,” in which I made some major changes in my life.

This year is “year of micro,” and I’m intending to focus a lot more on my individual actions. How the little actions accumulate over time.

That is the non-stressful way to get to goals. Don’t focus a lot on the decision, but focus more on the doing of it.

And, the volume of “doings” is convenient in letting one document extensively along the way.

Which feeds in to the credibility cycle.

Uncanny.