The Desk and the Dread of 2016
You see, by the end of 2016, I was absolutely cooked. Not burnt out in the dramatic, TV-show way, but slow-roasted and dried up. I was a Senior Widget Manager, or something equally meaningless, at a massive, gray-walled tech company. The pay was great, the benefits were fat, and every single day felt like I was punching a time card for my soul. I was a clock-puncher, shuffling paperwork and attending meetings where nothing was ever decided. My job, for all its glossy titles, was just moving pixels around and arguing about the font size on a report. I was financially secure but creatively bankrupt. It sucked. Everything was predictable, and predictability, I was realizing, was my personal kryptonite.
I knew I needed a change, a massive tectonic shift, but I was paralyzed. Leaving that steady paycheck felt like willingly jumping off the Empire State Building. I kept thinking about it, drafting plans, and then shredding them before I even touched the ‘save’ button. I felt physically stuck to the office chair. My wife was watching me turn into a corporate zombie, and frankly, so was I.
The Pisces Horoscope, Seriously?
Then came January 2017. And the ridiculous trigger. I am not a Pisces. I don’t read horoscopes. I’m a pragmatic, feet-on-the-ground, “show me the data” kind of person. But a friend of mine, a total flaky, crystals-in-his-pocket kind of guy, sent me this link. It was titled: Career Horoscope Pisces 2017: Why That Year Was Actually a Game Changer!
He sent it with a note saying, “Read the damn thing. It sounds like the push you need.”
I snorted coffee onto my keyboard, but I clicked it anyway. The Pisces section, which I was definitely not, screamed something about: “The waters are choppy, but you must leave the stagnant harbor. The universe is forcing you to swim alone. Ditch the comfort, embrace the current.”
It was insane. It was generic hippie garbage. Yet, I printed that ridiculous, poorly formatted horoscope out. I laminated it with the cheap office laminator. And I taped it right above my monitor, next to the company values poster. It stopped being a prediction and started being a ridiculous, self-imposed dare. Every time I looked up to check my Slack messages, I saw “Ditch the comfort.” It mocked me.
The Process: Breaking the Concrete
Looking at that laminated paper every day started eroding the fear. I started moving.
- I scraped together every dime I had and moved it into a separate, “burn-rate” account. I calculated how long I could survive if I earned zero dollars.
- I spent my evenings designing a completely new portfolio, completely unrelated to my corporate job. I wanted to do real design work for small businesses.
- I walked into a meeting with my mentor, not my manager, and confessed my plan to quit. He didn’t scoff; he offered me my first three freelance clients. That was the first domino.
- I drafted the resignation letter for the final time. It was short. Just two sentences.
The day I handed that two-sentence letter to my manager, I felt like I had just defused a bomb. He literally choked on the lukewarm black coffee he drank, staring at me like I had suddenly grown a third head. I spent the next three months training two different people to do my job, documented every single stupid procedure, and cleared out my desk of seventeen years of junk. I walked out of that gray building in June 2017 with two boxes, a cheap laptop, and that laminated horoscope folded in my pocket.
The Real Game Changer and Why I Know This
The first six months were brutal. I was working 18 hours a day, drinking instant coffee that tasted like swill, and eating rice and beans. My initial consulting business was a slow, agonizing death. I was broke and scared by December 2017. I almost crawled back to the corporate world. I even edited my resume.
But here’s why that ridiculous, accidental jump became a game changer: I know this because if I hadn’t made that stupid, horoscope-fueled jump, I would have absolutely ruined the next few years of my life and the lives of my family. See, in early 2018, just as I was about to hit rock bottom and call my old boss, my father was suddenly diagnosed with a severe illness that required full-time caregiving and expensive travel for specialist doctors.
Had I stayed at the corporate job, I would have been tied down by the pathetic two weeks of vacation, mandatory in-office hours, and the rigid, unbending structure. I would have had to choose between my career and my family. Because I had forced myself into the struggle, because I was already self-employed, broke but free, I had the flexibility. I could work two hours a day on my laptop from a hospital waiting room. I could be there. The horoscope didn’t predict the money, it predicted the necessity of freedom. It forced me to leave the harbor so I could actually navigate the storm when it mattered most. That freedom I bought in 2017 with that ridiculous scrap of paper changed everything.
