Man, 2022. I gotta tell you, when I first saw the headline about the Pisces Career Horoscope, I literally snorted my coffee. Seriously. It read like some total hocus pocus: “Pisces, This is Your Best Career Year Yet! Prepare for the Big Leagues!” I mean, come on. Me? Big leagues? I was sitting in a cubicle that smelled like old microwave popcorn, trying to figure out how to stretch a manager salary that hadn’t seen a raise in three years, and my biggest career move was figuring out how to stop taking calls on my vacation days.
I was so fed up. It felt like I was watching my career slowly die on the vine. The day-to-day grind was nothing but juggling spreadsheets and sitting through meetings that could have been an email. Every day, I walked in, slumped down, and signed off on projects I didn’t care about. It was soul-crushing. My wife kept asking why I looked like I hadn’t slept in a week, and all I could grumble was, “The TPS reports, babe. The TPS reports.”
The Catalyst: When Life Slapped Me Awake
I’m gonna jump right into the practice part, which wasn’t some organized experiment—it was pure chaos, just like the example I always follow. I had an incident that year, early on. A major project I had been pushing for, one I had poured maybe six months of my life into, got completely shut down. Not for a good reason, mind you. No, it was dumped because the CEO’s nephew had a “cooler idea.” You hear that? Six months, gone, because of a nepotism hire with a shiny toy idea.
I sat there that night, staring at my wall. I wasn’t just mad; I was done. It reminded me of the time I had a similar situation, where I was just completely dismissed and shut out, and honestly, the sheer disrespect was the only push I needed. That feeling—of being completely disposable—it’s what makes you realize you have zero control. I knew I had to pull the trigger.
The Practice: Leaning Into the Crazy Prediction
I went back and found that stupid horoscope again. “Best year yet.” Okay, fine. I decided to treat it like a challenge. If it was my best year, I wasn’t going to let the old company ruin it. I didn’t just quit the next day—that would be stupid. But I did two things immediately:
- I completely stopped giving a damn about the old job’s rules. I did the minimum and spent my lunch hour networking with people I admired, not people who could hire me, but people who were doing the cool stuff.
- I started applying only for roles that sounded absolutely terrifying and completely out of my league. No more safe bets. I tracked every single application, every connection, and every interview like it was my own personal data science project. I called the file “The Year of the Fish.”
The process was rough. I got rejection emails that were so cold they could lower the room temperature. I had an interview where I completely bombed the technical questions because I’d never touched that software. I was toast. I remember my partner looking at my messy desk, the printouts everywhere, and just sighing, asking if I was okay betting our future on, you know, stars.
But the practice—the tracking, the pushing—it forced me to be honest about where I was weak and where I was strong. I realized I was a great fixer of problems, but a horrible maintainer of mediocrity. It was all the things I hated about the corporate machine that were holding me back.
The Realization: It Wasn’t the Stars, It Was the Push
Then, the unexpected happened. Around late summer, a connection I’d made at one of those terrifying interviews (the one I almost bombed) called me. They said, “Hey, you might not be the right fit for that senior engineering role, but your passion for problem-solving is insane. We’re spinning up a new crisis-management team, and we need someone who can jump into the fire and just figure things out.”
I didn’t even negotiate much. I just said, “When can I start?”
I jumped ship. I took a massive pay bump, got a title that meant something, and walked into an office where people actually liked their work. No more TPS reports. No more microwave popcorn smell. My new job is basically being an emergency response planner, which is crazy, but it’s where I shine.
Looking back at the end of 2022, was it the best career year I ever had? Absolutely. But here’s the kicker, the final record: It wasn’t because the stars made it happen. It was because the horoscope—and that humiliating project failure—gave me the excuse to finally say, “Screw it,” and risk everything. The prediction forced the action. The action forced the result. My old company? They spent the rest of the year trying to replace me, and I hear they hired three people just to handle the workload I used to do.
So, yeah. That silly headline? It ended up being the truth. Sometimes you need a bit of wild optimism, or maybe just a bit of ancient astrological guidance, to slap you hard enough to get out of a miserable situation. The practice was simply believing I deserved better and acting like the prediction was already fact. Try that sometime. It changes everything.
