Medium.com: Target Missed. Medium.com: Target Acquired.

Unsplash would have you believe this man is an “old and wise man”. Wise I cannot speak of but old unsplash your ageist. Photo by christian buehner on Unsplash

A wise man once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, alter the parameters by which the test is administered until the end results suit your needs.” I believe it was Aristotle. It is unbelievable that he not only said this in English but also in such a modern way.

A plague descended on our house for about a week in October, as it’s been a month since I was ill. It seems right that I blame being sick for everything I haven’t done since I’ve gotten back on my feet.

Since October, I haven’t written much. It’s not because I haven’t wanted to. I’ve been having difficulty concentrating, and I was not good at concentrating before.

In September, I decided the best way to judge my success on Medium.com was to be based on an arbitrary number of posts by the year’s end. You won’t know, though, that I have fallen short and won’t hit my target, you also won’t know what the target was because, for reasons that make no sense, I didn’t put the target number in the article. The number I was aiming for was one hundred. It feels good to have that off my chest.

This is not mittens he has sold his image rights to another website and cannot allow his picture to be shown here. Photo by Bogdan Farca on Unsplash

As I write this, I have completed sixty-three articles. One hundred was always a tough but doable goal. Unless I missed a lot of days, which I did. We’re blaming Covid, and you should as well. I will also be blaming Covid for not cleaning my furnace air filter for ten years, not getting the oil in the car changed, which was due in June, and never teaching the cat how to do a Rubix cube. Mittens spends hours a day on it; he was really close last week. just a single yellow square out of place.

If I wrote really short articles four times a day, I would sail past the goal. But as you’ve probably noticed, editing is not my thing…..

That’s a possibility.

The purpose of the old goal was to practise writing regularly because, if practise makes perfect, it’s perfectly clear I need to practice. The goal of 100 published articles was set to keep me motivated as I hoped to improve.To give me a place to use ideas as opposed to my previous system of putting them in a note pad and never using them again or turning off the radio as I drive and regaling my steering wheel audience as I cruise down the road with no one else in the car.

That’s me buggerd then. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The new goal is to keep my daily views above ten. Once I have done this for a few months on the trot, I will change my goal to five reads per day. These goals are pretty easy to hit if I publish often. So it’s like training wheels to keep me on track.