Saturday, January 19, 2013

MM#3: Failure

Contrary to what you may have heard, failure is an option. It's actually one of the more prominent options, but people just want to convince themselves otherwise. There's also degrees of failure, or rather, conditional failure. Currently, my efforts here have resulted in some of the latter – good ol' conditional failure. I always knew I was fighting against inevitability, but I honestly thought I could make it more than two weeks before succumbing. Sigh. There's nothing like realizing you've underestimated your own futility.


Yes, I've already failed in my goal to have at least one new post a week. Part of it is because I start writing about something, and then I don't finish it. It might be because I've lost the inspiration for that particular topic, or because after reading what I'd written, I've decided it's no longer interesting or worthy enough to post. I have at least three posts sitting half-written and gathering dust. Hopefully they won't start to smell as they age.

Another part to my failure here can be blamed on GP. In hindsight, I think this could've been prevented, at least early on, by not launching the blog until both of us had a decent backlog that we could turn to in the event of a lull. However, that would've meant that I'd have had to have been consulted about starting this blog beforehand. In fairness to GP, I probably wouldn't have gone along with his venture had he not started it up before telling me, so fair play to him. That doesn't absolve him of the blame, though, but you could argue its mitigating value.

Most of the reason for my failure, it must be said, rests at the feet of that evil beast known as procrastination. She's a horrible plague that gets into your subconscious and affects your ability to rationalize. Her disease doesn't reduce your ability to do so; it heightens it. Nothing is safe from the knowledge that hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now. I literally own the poster that says as much.*

So, to finish, this is my apology for letting down the two or three of you out there who may have actually been foolish enough to think it was possible for me to meet that goal week after week … for two weeks.  You won't make that mistake again... well, unless you're dumber than I think you are. The rest of you likely learned your lesson long ago, so this bogey is actually par on this hole.

Going forward, I should have a proper post ready to go here in a bit, maybe even by tomorrow.  In the meantime, and due to the fact that I kept typing and this ended up about five times as long as I had planned, I went ahead and titled it as my third post.  Yeah, I'm taking credit for it.  It's my blog, I can do that.


http://www.despair.com/ I highly recommend this website. Everything about it is so well done and befitting of the subject matter. It's great for laughter and gift ideas, but horrible for the aforementioned procrastination.

2 comments:

  1. Here's a suggestion to you MM, post portions of or the entirety of some of the customer service related communications you have had in the past. Your wit always makes a complaint sound less complain-y. And, based on my count as of this post, you are tied with your golf-buddy, GP, at par for the course.

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  2. thanks. the only one that i feel is really worth a "re-post" is my interaction with comcast customer service. i'll have to dig/search around, though, as i'm not sure i even have it anymore. i recently reread some of the stuff i wrote about a decade ago, and most of it falls far short of deserving a re-post.

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