You know, for years I was chasing the look of things. Not just chasing it, I was running full speed toward the fanciest, shiniest version of whatever I was doing. That’s the grind a lot of folks fall into, right? You think the big bucks and the respect come from the glossy exterior, the slick pitch deck, the noise you make on social media.
I was in this startup thing that was supposed to change the world. We rented the most expensive loft space downtown, got those ridiculous ergonomic chairs, and spent a fortune on branding—custom coffee mugs and all that nonsense. We looked like a million bucks. Visitors would walk in and instantly think, “These guys are crushing it.”
The Burnout and the Brass Tacks
But the truth? We were barely holding it together. The code was a spaghetti mess. The main product feature was vaporware, literally just a Figma mock-up that we kept selling as “coming next quarter.” The stress was killing me. I was clocking seventeen hours a day, not on building or coding, but on raising money and making sure our public image was flawless. I looked good in the suit, I talked the talk, but every morning I woke up knowing it was all a house of cards.
It was a Saturday night, maybe 2 AM. I was just staring at the wall of my apartment, totally burned out, feeling like a fraud. I had this old, beat-up copy of the I Ching I picked up in a thrift store years ago. Never really took it seriously, just kept it on the shelf like a weird decoration itself, ironically.
I needed an answer, not a therapy session. Something brutal and direct. So I dug out three old pennies and shook them around in an empty coffee cup. I didn’t bother with the whole purification ritual thing. I was too tired for grace. I just dumped those coins six times onto the cheap folding table I was using for a desk.
Casting the Shadow
When I finally sketched out the lines, it hit me. I got Hexagram 22. It wasn’t changing or moving; it was the solid, static hexagram. Bì. Adornment. Grace. Form.
My first thought was, “Great, the universe thinks I should buy a new suit.” That’s how shallow my brain was at the time. I was looking for external validation even in the ancient texts. I read the general judgment, the image, all the classic bits. But one line stuck in my throat like a fishbone:
- It talked about the necessity of form, sure. You can’t just be a lump of clay.
- But it also screamed that the form must serve the essence.
- It was a huge, cosmic warning against being so obsessed with the wrapping that you forget what’s inside.
I remember sitting there and feeling like I’d been sucker punched. The text wasn’t telling me to buy a new suit; it was telling me the suit was what was killing me. My entire company, my entire life for the past two years, was pure Adornment, zero Essence.
The True Inner Form Emerges
I went into the office on Monday morning and started hacking away at the decoration. Not the business, but the fluff that was hiding the business. The whole thing was brutal.
First thing I did? I broke the lease. That expensive downtown loft? Gone. We moved everything into a cramped, dusty co-working space that smelled like burnt toast, but it was cheap. The team complained, especially the folks who only joined for the trendy office vibe, but I didn’t care. They quit, and honestly, good riddance. They were part of the Adornment problem.
Next, I killed the expensive marketing campaign. The whole thing was based on smoke and mirrors anyway. I took the money we saved and bought a bunch of better development tools and actually hired a solid junior dev who knew how to write proper Python, not just talk about it.
The immediate result was that we went from looking like a successful tech empire to looking like two guys and a whiteboard crammed in a corner. We had no grace. We had no visible charm. Our website was ugly; I stripped all the fancy animations and just left the plain text explaining what the product actually did.
But that’s when things started to change. Because suddenly, the money we were spending was going into the foundation, the structure, the true inner form of the product. No one was impressed by our office anymore, but people were starting to actually use the bare-bones functionality that was finally solid.
The hexagram wasn’t advice; it was a diagnosis. It showed me my own vanity. It’s been three years since that night with the pennies. The business is now profitable, not just presentable. It’s still ugly as sin, the website is still mostly text, and the co-working space still smells like burnt toast. But it works, and it’s mine. I stopped chasing the Adornment, and the substance just showed up instead.
