Man, so back in April 2017, I was just spinning my wheels, you know? My career felt like it was going nowhere, and I needed some kind of push. I stumbled across this Pisces horoscope thing—yeah, I know, but I was desperate—and it talked about focusing on specific work areas. I figured, what the heck, let’s try it. I needed to
shake things up.
The main takeaway from that reading was really simple:
communication and collaboration.
It sounded like cheesy corporate talk, but when I actually thought about my job, it made sense. I was always the guy who just put his head down, did the work, and rarely talked to anyone outside my immediate bubble. Big mistake, apparently.
So, I decided to run an experiment. For the whole month of April 2017, I made a conscious effort to actually talk to people in different departments. Before, if I needed info from Marketing or Sales, I’d just send a quick, dry email. Now, I actually walked over there. Initially, it was awkward as hell. I’d be hovering near the coffee machine, trying to look casual, but my hands were sweating.
The Collaboration Overhaul
- I started scheduling quick, informal 15-minute chats with people I barely knew, just to understand their project bottlenecks. I didn’t even call them “meetings”; I called them “brainstorming coffee breaks.”
- I remember this one project with the Ops team that was completely stalled. I realized we were using completely different terminology for the same thing. I sat down with their lead, Frank—a guy I’d exchanged maybe three words with in two years—and we literally drew diagrams on a whiteboard. We spent an hour just clarifying what “Phase Two” actually meant to both of us.
- That conversation with Frank was a game-changer. We untangled that mess in one afternoon, something the email chains had failed to do for three weeks. I realized the horoscope wasn’t necessarily magic; it just pointed out where I was being lazy. I was relying on text when I needed face-to-face interaction.
Another area the reading emphasized was
creativity and problem-solving beyond the usual scope.
My job description was pretty rigid—maintain the backend, fix the bugs. But I started looking for problems that weren’t technically mine. One day, I saw the UX team struggling with user flow analysis because the data wasn’t being logged properly on our end.
Before April 2017, I’d have thought, “Not my problem, they need to log a ticket.” But now, I thought, “How can I make this better?”
Diving into Unrelated Problems
I spent two evenings after hours digging into the logging architecture. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I just wanted to see if I could write a cleaner module that provided more granular user interaction data for the UX folks. It was slow going, but I managed to build a quick prototype.
When I finally showed it to the UX lead, she was stunned. She told me the data they were getting from my simple prototype was better than what they’d been getting from a costly third-party tool we were paying for. That’s when things really took off.
Suddenly, I wasn’t just the backend guy; I was the guy who fixed problems nobody else saw coming. My profile completely changed. I went from being reactive to proactive, just because I started actually talking to people and looking outside my own silo. That horoscope, weirdly enough, gave me the permission I needed to break my own rules. By the end of April, I wasn’t just fixing bugs; I was shaping how the company approached cross-departmental data sharing. It was a massive mental shift.
