As I write this, it’s after midnight on Tuesday, less than ten hours before this post is supposed to go up. I briefly considered not taking the time to finish this, and instead just posting a “sorry, try again next week” message—but only briefly. Because I don’t do that anymore. I don’t fail just to see what the consequences will be.<\/p>\n
It took me a long time to realize that I was doing this. Any time I got into a new project or started a new job, I would always blow a deadline early on, or oversleep and show up late for work, or otherwise fail to meet expectations. I would never do it consciously, but looking back, I’m pretty sure there was subconscious intent. It wasn’t just random happenstance that caused me to underperform in such a predictable manner.<\/p>\n
I suppose part of me thought this was a valid, even scientific thing to do: how will you know the consequences for failure in a particular situation, whether professional or personal, unless you test the waters a little? And isn’t it better to miss a small deadline than to completely screw up a bigger project later?<\/p>\n
Perhaps it was also an immature defense mechanism, a way of telling people not to depend on me because I might let them down. But whatever caused me to behave that way, it was pretty stupid. And I don’t do that any more.<\/p>\n
I’m proud of the fact that while I was doing 512 Words or Fewer<\/i><\/a>, I did not miss a single one of the 256 consecutive weeks of posting flash fiction every Friday. True, sometimes it wouldn’t be until Friday afternoon, and sometimes I would schedule posts ahead of time—when I knew I would be traveling or otherwise engaged on Thursday—but even that required planning and dedication. I made a promise, and I kept it.<\/p>\n But even more than the promise, the 512<\/i>s were something that mattered to me. And I guess that’s the real lesson here. I’ve always been willing to slack off when it came to things I didn’t feel very passionate about, but when it’s something that really matters to me—The Game<\/a>, NaNoWriMo<\/a>, family and friends—I don’t make excuses for not getting things done. I figure out how to finish the job.<\/p>\n
![\"Curtis\"](\"http:\/\/snout.org\/HotSheet\/CKL.jpg\" "\\"Curtis\\"")
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