A rut is a grave with the ends kicked out...

One of the courses I've signed up for on Udemy goes by the title of Fortune Favors the Brave: Ancient Lessons for Modern Success. I thoroughly enjoyed the content, and was pleasantly surprised when, near the end of the course, the curriculum veered from recounting stories of events from antiquity (e.g., the March of the Ten Thousand) to examining the "takeaways" of those ancient lessons.

The long and short of it is that the fellow who taught the course invited participants to engage in a 90-day personal productivity campaign that reflects the kinds of intense effort taken over a 3-month period that he had noticed cropping up again and again in ancient texts.

So I sent along my response, along with an outline of what I planned to do during my 90-day campaign:

When I first considered the proposed idea of the 90-day personal productivity plan set out by you, that primitive area in my brain that helped me survive working for a software publisher in Silicon Valley caused "death march" to flash across my mind's eye, recalling the grueling effort typically undertaken to complete a project within the constraints of a hard deadline. I am no stranger to death marches.

But it occurs to me that I've fallen into a rut, and that there are a pile of things--things both worthy and otherwise--I'd like to get done that, for lack of application, aren't getting done, and I'm not getting any younger. In fact, from a medical standpoint, this year has thus far been somewhat nerve-wracking for me, and although I am not facing one of those "you've got six months to live" scenarios that occasionally play out in all of or minds, my brush with mortality has made me acutely aware of the fact that eventually, every one of us will reach a point of having "six months to live," and almost all of us will be blissfully unaware of it. With that in mind, I'm far from viewing this 90-day plan as a "death march"; if anything, it's the complete opposite, an opportunity to expand horizons and live. A "life march," if you will.

And so I welcome putting some goal-seeking rigor back into my life, on top of that required by my work (I am a technical translator, working in Russian and French into English).

What am I going to do?

Well, as it turns out, during my recuperation from surgery, I took advantage of some good deals offered by Udemy to sign up for two courses that intrigued me, based on their stated goals of providing guidance in how to profitably create courses on Udemy and how to profitably write and market books on Amazon. I watched a few lessons in each course, but was not moved to action.

So the first thing I'm going to do is sit down and GO THROUGH the courses, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Whatever advice is given will likely not result in a monthly stream of money beyond dreams of avarice, but there should nevertheless be something I can take away and use in the courses.

Then I am going to identify areas of expertise that I can either teach or write about.

Then I am going to (a) create a Udemy course and (b) a short book I can market on Amazon, and then deal with the marketing aspects of each enterprise.

At the appropriate time, I will establish a goal representing the amount of income I expect to realize in each enterprise. I will refine the goal based on new information, if necessary. Should the effort required in either case lead me to achieve my goals early, I will apply myself to creating a second, third, etc. course or book.

In addition to these goals, I plan to more systematically apply myself to my tai chi form, the mastery of which will doubtless continue to elude me for many years, but the performance of which prior to my surgery was, in my opinion, instrumental in my recovery from that surgery.

This whole effort is in keeping with our household resolution for 2015 to develop income streams other than the one I earn through translation, which dried up for the period of time that surgery placed me hors de combat. I have no doubt that the courses I signed up for offer a lot of chaff, but I've got many years of experience in picking out the grains of wheat. If nothing else, I will have started to develop momentum.

More details as they arise.