Alright, so you saw the title, right? Pisces 2019 and success tips. Look, I’ll tell you something. I was born in March, so I’m a fish, whatever. But that whole year wasn’t about stars or planets aligning and whispering sweet nothings in my ear. It was about needing cash and being absolutely sick of the same old crap every single Monday morning.
I was sitting at this place I called DataCorp, this massive, old-school IT setup. Pay was decent, enough for beer and the mortgage, maybe a cheap vacation once a year, but I was doing the same stupid spreadsheet and monitoring garbage every single day. Waking up felt like a chore, like lifting a lead weight off my chest. I felt like one of those forgotten machines rattling away in the server room basement, just waiting for some maintenance guy to finally show up and pull the plug. You know the feeling—comfortable enough to stay, miserable enough to hate it.
2019 sucked, mostly because I was in that rut. But then, in April, the big axe fell. Not on me, thankfully, but close enough to splatter blood on my desk. They announced this massive, company-wide “strategic realignment.” Translation: half the floor was getting canned because their skills were suddenly obsolete and the company found some shiny new automated tool to replace them.
My buddy, who just bought a new truck the month before, was on the list. I watched him clear his desk. That messed me up more than any bad luck day ever could. That was my cosmic sign, not some horoscope I read while waiting for a coffee. I realized waiting around for a severance package was professional suicide.
I needed to become indispensable, and I needed it fast. My current job was going nowhere, so I picked one thing, and I went all in: Cloud Security. Everyone was moving their precious stuff to the cloud, but nobody knew how to keep it safe. It was a massive gap in the market, screaming for someone to fill it, so I decided I was going to be that guy. I started the jump right then and there.
My Actual Process (The Painful Reality)
I didn’t ask for permission, I just started. I pulled most of my life savings out and paid for the nastiest, most boring certification boot camp I could find. It cost me an arm and a leg, and I had to tell my wife—I mean, my girlfriend then—that we were going dark for three months. No weekends, no big nights out, absolutely no gaming, just study and work. I had to make the old life disappear so the new one had room to breathe.
- I bought the thickest textbook they had and carried it around like a useless shield.
- I took the first practice exam cold, and I failed it. Spectacularly. I scored something ridiculous like 40%. I felt like a damn idiot who’d just wasted thousands of dollars and promised his future away for nothing.
- I didn’t stop, though. That feeling of failure just made me angry. I bought more books, watched those godawful, blurry YouTube tutorials at 1.5x speed, and just hammered away at the concepts until my eyes were burning and I tasted metal.
- My social life completely vaporized. My old coworkers stopped inviting me out because I always said no, or I’d show up with my laptop. I didn’t care. I had a target.
- I finally passed the real, expensive exam in August. I made it by the skin of my teeth. It was the most exhausted and relieved I’d ever been.
But here’s the garbage they don’t tell you: the real job jump wasn’t immediate. That’s the shiny lie they sell you online. I applied for maybe twenty jobs with my fancy new certificate. I got three interviews. And what did they say? They all told me I lacked “practical enterprise experience.” Which meant they wanted the certificate and ten years of doing the job already. It made zero sense. I felt cheated. I almost gave up and decided to just go back to the safe, boring spreadsheets.
I quit DataCorp in October anyway. Just walked out the door and didn’t look back. My boss was confused, the HR lady tried to scare me about my health insurance ending. I didn’t care. I felt free for about ten minutes, and then the real panic set in when I looked at my bank balance.
I had no safety net. So I started doing small, crappy, freelance gigs on the side. Just whatever I could find to build a portfolio. $50 fixes for small businesses with terrible firewall setups I found on local forums. $100 audits for the local dentist and the dry cleaner down the street. It was humiliating work and the pay was barely minimum wage, but I needed the stories for the next interview. I was meticulously logging every minute I spent and every mistake I made, because I knew that was the real experience they wanted.
December 2019 rolls around. My bank account is frighteningly, dangerously low. I get a call from a recruiter I’d mostly forgotten about months before. They had a role at a smaller, much more aggressive tech firm that was actually doing interesting things. I went in for the interview, and instead of showing them my shiny certificate, I just opened my laptop and showed them the log of all the stupid mistakes and cheap, quick fixes I’d done for the last two months. I told them exactly what I broke when I was learning and exactly how I fixed it and the crappy tools I used to do it.
I got the job. Not at the huge salary I dreamed of, but 25% more than I had at DataCorp and doing the real, gritty work I actually wanted to do. That was the boost. It wasn’t my horoscope. It was the moment I realized the comfy chair was actually a deadly trap, and then I just forced myself to jump off the cliff and start building the wings on the way down. Forget the stars or what month you were born. You gotta throw yourself into the fire, period. That’s the only real tip there is.
