Thursday, April 25, 2019

Fifty And Failed!



I turned fifty yesterday, and that’s an important age to this blog. The reason this blog exists, the reason it’s called The One-Thousand (it's been hyphenated in the title for years. Live with it.), is that I set a goal when I was thirty-seven (I think) that I would write 1,000 stories (of the type to be submitted to editors for publication) by the time I was fifty. Here I am at fifty. I’ve written 167 stories. Youch!

I’ve tracked my output and have expected to fail for years, but that’s okay. As I’ve said many times before, I’ve written more because I set that goal than I would have if I hadn’t set it. Shoot for the stars and hit the moon. You wouldn’t have gotten to the moon otherwise.

So, make huge goals, and always keep them in mind, even when you’re way behind schedule. There will be times when those goals get you out of bed and get you moving toward them, when their absence would have left you uninspired.

I’m still shooting for one thousand stories. The game now is, how late will I be? At the current rate, it’s in the bag by the time I’m three hundred years old. There probably won’t be blogs then. They’re already passé now! You’ll just have to take my word for it now that I’ll have made it then.