Okay, so let’s talk about that stupid Pisces quiz thing. You saw the title. I honestly just needed something to keep my hands busy back then. Everything was slow, dead slow. Early 2021 felt like one long sigh, and my regular paying work had dried up to nothing. I was home, sitting on the couch way too much, and needed a distraction, something productive maybe, but mostly just something that moved the needle.
The False Start: Overcomplicating Everything
I decided to build this career finder, right? Not because I believe in astrology, but because people click that stuff, and I figured I could drive a bit of traffic to my site. I pulled out a spreadsheet and brainstormed a bunch of ‘ideal’ Pisces careers—therapist, artist, marine biologist—you know, the dreamy ones. Then I sketched out a scoring system.
My first mistake? I tried to use my expensive, fancy survey software. I thought, “This has to be robust.” I spent hours mapping points, trying to assign a weighty algorithm based on personality traits. If you like quiet places, you get points for ‘Librarian.’ If you hate conflict, you get points for ‘Gardener.’ I programmed in maybe fifty questions, all with weird, custom logic. I wanted a true, 100% accurate result, which is just insane for a quiz you take to procrastinate.
That expensive tool was an absolute piece of junk for this kind of branching logic. Every time I hit ‘preview,’ the scores were off by four points. I tried rewriting the conditional rules three times. I deleted and re-entered the point values, thinking I’d typed a five when it should have been a zero. Nothing worked. I wasted an entire afternoon and deep into the night trying to tame that complex beast. I swear, around 2 AM, I was ready to throw the whole damn laptop across the room. I shut it down in a huff and just walked away.
The Pivot: Simple is Better
The next morning, I looked at the mess I had created. Fifty complex questions, $100 software, zero working product. It was a classic case of over-engineering something simple. I scrapped the whole damn thing without looking back. All of it. The score sheets, the complicated rules—gone.
I went back to basics. I grabbed a free Google Forms account. Yeah, basic, I know. But it works. I boiled down the content to just ten simple questions. No complex scoring. No branching logic. It was purely linear. Question 1: Pick A, B, or C. At the end, I used a simple script in the backend to tally the letters. If you picked mostly ‘A’s, you got ‘Therapist.’ Mostly ‘B’s, ‘Artist.’
The process went something like this:
- I rewrote the ten questions to be extremely direct and easy to answer.
- I set up the Forms page with minimal design—just big text.
- I created the result page options and wrote a short, generic response for each career path.
- I tested the sequence three times with different answer patterns to make sure it didn’t crash.
- I hit ‘publish’ and just let it sit there.
It took maybe two hours from when I opened the new tab to when I pushed it live. The final product was rough. The results were silly. But it was done.
The Real Takeaway: It Wasn’t About The Quiz
The quiz itself? It drove some traffic. It got a few shares. It certainly didn’t make me famous or pay the bills. My brother-in-law, who’s an accountant, took the quiz and got ‘Forest Ranger.’ Total nonsense.
But the real thing I walked away with? It had nothing to do with Pisces or my career.
Around that same time, I was trying to land a huge corporate contract that involved months of complicated planning, multiple software integration APIs, and pages of legal jargon. I was chasing that contract hard, spending all my energy trying to look indispensable by pitching the most complex, bulletproof, over-engineered solution possible.
I never got the contract. They kept arguing over terms, kept stalling, kept adding more requirements. Total dead end after months of stress.
This stupid little quiz, the one I built in two hours on a free platform, the one I made simple enough for a child to use—that’s what slapped me in the face.
I realized I was applying the fifty-question logic to my actual work and the ten-question logic to my passion project. I was making everything too damn hard. The lesson I learned from this failure was huge: I need to stop chasing the perfect, complicated solution that never ships, and start delivering the simple, 80% solution that actually works and goes live. That’s what paid the bills eventually—not the fancy tech, but the ability to cut through the bull. That little Pisces quiz, which was just a distraction, actually changed how I approach work ever since. Go figure.
