Look, for the past six months, I was totally stuck. Not just a little stuck, but the kind of paralyzed where you just stare at the same four walls and wish they’d tell you what to do. The whole issue was this stupid side project I kept pushing off. I knew it needed to happen. It needed to be built. But every time I opened my laptop, I just felt this huge weight, like trying to push a car up a hill with a spoon.
I’m usually pretty decisive, you know? I can make a call. But this one thing, this one single move, had me spinning my wheels. I’d write an action plan, scratch it out, write another one, delete it. I was doing everything except the actual work. My sleep was a mess, my diet was garbage, and I was just generally snappy. Anyone who knew me could tell I was running on fumes but going nowhere.
The Old Man’s Box Came Out
It sounds stupid, but I hit a wall. I’d read all the self-help books. I’d watched all the productivity gurus on YouTube. Nothing landed. Nothing clicked. I needed some kind of sign, maybe just something completely outside my usual logical framework to jar me loose. That’s when I remembered the old box my grandfather gave me years ago.
He was a weird dude, but cool. Always had this little wooden box with three old Chinese coins in it. Told me, “When the world doesn’t make sense, ask the book.” I always thought it was a load of crap, but desperate times, right?
I found the box under a pile of old guitar cables in the back of my closet. It was dusty, the wood felt heavy. I took it into the kitchen and sat down, feeling ridiculous. I’d never actually done it before, so I had to pull up a messy tutorial on my phone, ignoring the voice in my head telling me I was wasting my time.
The Clumsy Casting Process
I cleaned the coins—three identical old pennies, actually. Held them in my hands, closed my eyes, and just tried to focus on the one thing I needed to know: What do I actually do right now to start this thing?
- I tossed the coins the first time. Two tails, one head. I scribbled down a broken line.
- Second toss, three heads. That was a solid line, but it was moving. I drew a circle next to it.
- Third toss, two heads, one tail. Solid line.
- Fourth toss, two tails, one head. Broken line.
- Fifth toss, again, two tails, one head. Another broken line.
- The final toss, three tails. That was a broken line that moves. Another circle.
My first diagram looked like a total mess. I sat there tracing the lines up—broken, moving solid, solid, broken, broken, moving broken. I followed the messy instructions to figure out the primary hexagram and the secondary hexagram.
Hexagram 19 Hit Me Square in the Face
When I traced the pattern, the primary one was Hexagram Nineteen. Lin. The text I looked up called it “Approach” or “Nearing.” My first reaction was pure confusion. Nearing? Nearing what? That didn’t help me build a damned thing.
But then I read the actual lines, and the whole energy of the thing started to sink in. It wasn’t about the destination; it was about the action of moving toward it. It talked about showing up early. About being the first one there. About foresightedness and taking the initiative now, not later.
The whole message I got, the big takeaway from that old piece of philosophy, was brutally simple: The time is now. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop planning the impossible. Just start moving. If you wait, the opportunity or the moment of ‘approach’ goes sour. You have to be ready right at the start.
The Shift from Thinking to Doing
I slammed the laptop shut. I put the coins back in the box. I didn’t spend another second analyzing the changing lines or the secondary hexagram. The core message was enough. My problem wasn’t a lack of plan; it was a lack of movement.
I walked straight to the hardware store. I bought the clunky, cheap server parts I had decided were “not good enough” months ago. I scrapped my detailed, forty-page technical spec and just started building the most bare-bones, ugly version of the service I had been dreaming up.
I worked like a maniac for a solid week. No planning meetings. No fancy documents. Just wiring, coding, and brute-forcing the problems. The thing I launched was ugly. It was slow. It broke. But the damn thing was running. It was tangible. I had approached the project, I had arrived early, just like the reading seemed to push me to do.
The Aftermath and the New Reality
Since that day, the project has evolved three times. It’s still ugly sometimes, but it’s making noise. It’s doing what I needed it to do. It was only after Hexagram 19 told me to stop being an idiot and just show up that I broke the paralysis.
If I hadn’t dug out those silly coins, I would still be staring at a blank document, planning a perfect future that never arrives. Sometimes you just need an ancient instruction book to remind you that action beats planning every single time.
