The Bottom Line: Desperate Times and a Dumb Horoscope
I’m not usually one for that star sign garbage, you know? Never have been. I’m a Pisces, sure, but I read that stuff like I read the fine print on a warranty—just skip it. But man, late 2019 going into 2020, things were hitting the fan, and my bank account was singing a very sad solo. I was stuck, really stuck, in a support role I hated, pulling in maybe fifty grand a year, and half of that was disappearing into rent and bills. I watched my savings melt like ice cream in August. I needed a jumpstart, but I didn’t know which button to push.
My wife was the one who actually found the garbage. She came across this totally silly-looking blog post—something like, “Pisces 2020: The Year You Grab the Steering Wheel and Floor It.” She printed it out, highlighted the “Boost Your Income Now” part, and taped it right to the fridge. I laughed, but I also kept reading it while waiting for the coffee machine to warm up. The main thrust wasn’t about the stars; it was about finding an ‘anchor point’ and going all-in. For Pisces, they were saying that meant pivoting into systems, organization, and anything that required deep, quiet analysis. Basically, getting out of the ‘people’ business and into the ‘process’ business. I was doing customer support; I was knee-deep in ‘people’ business. It clicked: maybe the stars were useless, but the underlying advice was solid. My people skills were burning me out and paying me peanuts.
The Great Reckoning of 2020: The Real Practice Begins
I didn’t quit my job right away, I’m not an idiot. I started small. My first step was probably the most crucial: I stopped talking and started auditing. I spent two months straight logging every single minute of my workday. Not what I should be doing, but what I was doing. I dumped it all into a massive spreadsheet. I found out I spent maybe 10% of my time on actual, high-value tasks, and 90% on firefighting and dealing with nonsense that should’ve been automated or documented five years prior.
The practice process unfolded like this:
- Step 1: The Skills Dump. I figured if I was going to pivot to ‘systems,’ I needed some actual system skills. I started watching free courses on basic SQL and data handling. It was tedious, but I committed to one hour every night, no excuses.
- Step 2: The Resume Massacre. I took my old, fluffy resume and cut out every single soft skill that sounded like I learned it from a motivational poster. I replaced them with verbs: “Automated X process,” “Reduced Y error rate,” “Implemented Z tracking system.” No lies, just reframing the little things I had done using my new, limited skills.
- Step 3: The Job Search Hail Mary. I started applying for ‘Analyst’ or ‘Coordinator’ roles. Not manager roles, those pay better, but I wasn’t there yet. I focused on titles that sounded boring and process-heavy. I figured boring paid better than draining.
- Step 4: Interview Hell (and the Screw-Up). I bombed four interviews straight. I was trying to sound smart and use jargon I barely understood. It was a disaster. I was ready to quit.
This is where the real Pisces/process advice came back into play. The horoscope said, “Your strength is silent observation.” I stopped trying to sell myself on big ideas and started focusing only on the small, quantifiable problems I could solve. In the fifth interview, I changed my strategy entirely. They asked me about a hypothetical problem, and I didn’t try to solve it with a grand strategy. I said, “First, I’d spend two weeks documenting the failure points, then I’d build a small script to track the input data, and only then would I propose a fix.”
The Real Win: Not the Stars, But the Strategy
They hired me. Just like that. It wasn’t my dream job—it was a Database Coordinator role at a mid-sized logistics company—but it was an almost 40% jump in salary. They wanted someone who was stable and methodical, not flashy. All that time I spent logging my own tasks made me sound like I knew how to run a process, even though I was just fresh meat.
The ‘success’ part wasn’t about being a Pisces in 2020. It was about desperation leading to a weird, actionable plan. That cheesy horoscope gave me a focus point—systematic thinking—that pulled me out of the career hole I was digging. I stopped trying to be the loud, problem-solving hero and became the quiet guy who just made sure the trains ran on time. My income jumped that year, and it wasn’t the stars doing the heavy lifting, it was me following through on a dumb piece of advice that forced me to be methodical. I went from burned-out customer support to a stable analyst role just because I needed a break from people and found an excuse—a silly planetary excuse—to make the pivot. That’s the whole story, start to finish. I went for the money, and the process got me there.
