Episode #202: Playing The Long Game Of '23/'24

A little summer to warm the frozen memories of today.

It's funny how playing the long game can monumentally affect your short game, no matter what your vibe is. I'll give you a couple of examples.

Example #1: Losing weight.

Back in mid October I decided, after seeing a photo of myself looking rather portly (now there's an archaic word you don't often hear), that I needed to lose weight. so I chose to pursue a non-Noom Noom diet (basically, not spending any money) diet, which basically meant that I needed to cut my caloric intake.

T.L.; D.R.: I dropped from 2300+ calories per day to roughly 1200+ per day.

Now the long game here was to lose weight, which I did, so far about 9lbs +/-, but there were some side effects to a very brutal short game. The most serious side effect in the short term was major sugar crashes.

In a nutshell, when you are reducing your caloric intake, you also have to reduce your (in my case) insulin intake. Thus, the brutal short game was about a month and a half of consistently tweaking my day time and night time insulin until I was able to find a happy melding of the tow that wouldn't make me sick.

Added bonus: Changing my diet also started giving me enough energy to tackle the distance I cover in my daily walks. Less calories equals more burning the excess weight. So while the short game was unusually brutal (e.g. bad lows and the side effects thereof, along with consuming certain edibles for the first time in more than three decades.), the long game has been sunshine and a wildflower valley. 

Example #2: Publishing a novella.

This is a little trickier to separate into the short and the long game, but I will give it the old technical school try.

Now, obviously enough, the long game is to publish this novella. But the short game has been just as maddening as the previous example. To whit:

I've had to, albeit reluctantly, pivot to another graphic designer for my cover, because the one that I normally use has been seriously m.i.a since early November. Their socials seem to be kaput with no activity whatsoever (and that includes advertising being sent out via e-mail).

Now this pivot to another graphic designer has created a cascade effect for everything else: I can't use my current formatter because I don't have a cover, so they're now on the back-burner; I had to solicit a few suggestions from the writer's group that I belong to, and having found a potential new one has brought a small litany of other issues, none of which are the potential new designer's fault whatsoever.

For example, while I was deciding on which package to purchase, I was pre-answering a question to their form (as in, getting my answers prepped prior to the purchase). While I was doing that, I discovered that I actually don't like the current title, so I had to come up with a brand new one (title #3). And, oh wait a minute, I found a few errors in the final draft that I now have to fix.

Plus, there are a myriad of other tiny issues that need to be addressed once I purchase the book cover, but before I actually publish. So while the short game for publishing this novella isn't fraught with drastic health issues as the first example, there's still a tone of short term aggravation that has to be addressed before we cross the long game finish line of self-publishing.

In summary, playing the long game often involves a plethora of short term headaches with minuscule rewards, but when you do finally succeed at the very end, it does truly seem that all of the short term aggravation really was worth it in the long run.

And in the end, that is all that rally matters.

Have a happy Monday and splendorous week!

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved