I’d been kicking around ideas for what felt like forever. Left the big corporate gig a few years back thinking I was finally going to be my own boss, right? Turned out, “being your own boss” mostly means “doing four jobs for the price of one” and stressing way more than I ever did punching a clock. I figured I had the hustle, but the direction? That was completely missing.
The last six months had been a complete disaster, a slow-motion car crash of failed pitches and clients evaporating right when I thought I had them locked down. My savings account was looking thinner than my patience, and I was staring at the same blank screen every night feeling totally useless. I had tried all the standard business books, all the productivity apps, all the networking events. Nothing was clicking.
Then I was chatting with an old colleague—a guy usually sharp as a tack—and he started going on and on about how he only signs major contracts when his moon sign is aligned with Jupiter or something equally ridiculous. Sounded completely crazy, I know, but I was at that point where you’re so desperate for a sign, any sign, that you start listening to airport mystics. My brain had totally checked out, and I needed some external force to just point me in a damn direction, even if it was stupid.
That’s how I landed on this * thing. I was literally searching for “Pisces career failure help” late one Tuesday night, and it popped up. I needed a strategy, a step-by-step guide, and instead I got a promise of “Career Success Tips Inside!” It wasn’t about believing it, it was about getting the permission slip to try something, anything, different.
Wrestling with the Weekly Prediction
My first task was just finding the specific page without clicking on eleven banner ads or signing up for some newsletter. Man, these sites are always a total labyrinth. I eventually wrestled my way to the Pisces section for the current week, ignoring all the stuff about relationships and inner peace. I was hunting specifically for the ‘Career Success Tips’ part that the prediction promised.
It was always buried way down near the bottom of all the emotional nonsense. The ‘tip’ for that specific week was something vague and annoying, like ‘embrace an unconventional path’ or ‘seek counsel from someone older who has overcome a similar struggle.’ I couldn’t ‘unconventional path’ my way out of overdue bills, so I focused hard on the second part. The ‘counsel from someone older’ angle. I decided I was going to treat this completely silly piece of advice like a concrete, mandatory task assigned by my own personal, invisible board of directors.
The Forced Three-Phase Implementation Test
I decided to turn this vague star-gazing advice into a serious, three-phase practical project. I had to prove whether any external motivator, no matter how ridiculous, could force a beneficial action in my real-world hustle.
- Phase One: The Contact List Drill. I spent an hour going through my entire professional contact list. The rule was simple: I had to pull out three people who were at least fifteen years ahead of me in terms of their career stage. People I hadn’t talked to in ages, either because I was intimidated or just too lazy. I forced myself to write those three cold-but-not-really-cold emails, not asking for a job, but straight-up asking for fifteen minutes of their time for advice on my current rut. I hit send before I could talk myself out of it.
- Phase Two: The Lunch Meeting Hustle. Two of the three got back to me. Immediate and surprising success. I didn’t mention the horoscope, obviously. I just laid out my current problem: too much effort, zero traction, feeling burnt out. What would they do if they were starting over today? One of them, a guy who built a massive consulting firm from scratch, just looked at my pricing and laughed. He told me my current pricing model was utterly insulting to my own high level of expertise. It was a rough twenty minutes, but I listened and scribbled notes on a napkin, totally stunned by his bluntness.
- Phase Three: The Immediate Pivot. The minute I got home, I shredded my old price sheet. I mean, literally tore it into strips and tossed it in the bin. I restructured my whole service offering right there, implementing the cold, hard, commercial critique I’d just received at lunch. The horoscope told me to seek ‘counsel,’ but the actual ‘career success’ part came from forcing myself to hear a painful truth from someone who’d already won the game. I put together three new, much higher-priced proposals for the clients I was trying to land.
It’s not about the stars. Never was. It was about kicking myself out of my own stale thought pattern. I needed that ridiculous, external permission slip—the stupid “seek counsel” tip—to go bother those senior, successful people. That same week, after sending out those new, much higher-priced proposals, I closed the biggest client I’d had all year. Did the planets align for Pisces? Nah. I just finally asked for help and stopped dramatically undervaluing my own damn time. Sometimes you have to follow the stupidest instructions just to force the right movement.
