Man, what a train wreck I was before May hit. You know how it is, being a Pisces—we don’t live on this planet, we live in our heads. I had about a dozen “great ideas” floating around, each one a guaranteed path to my own private island, except I hadn’t actually done a single thing to move them forward.
I was drowning in a soup of half-started projects. My digital life was a total mess, kind of like how those big companies run their tech stacks—a bit of everything bolted together with spit and pure hope. I had one folder for “Novel Drafts,” another for “App Ideas V3,” and seventeen different versions of a budget spreadsheet that was somehow already wrong before I even finished typing the first line. My desk? Forget it. Paperwork from three years ago sitting right next to a notebook with three pages of genius scribbles and then nothing. It was all a giant, interconnected failure. Total paralysis by analysis, right?
The Bottom Fell Out
The cosmic calendar for May screamed, “Act!” And like a true fool, I was nodding along, thinking I’d start next Tuesday. Then life decided to shove me off the deep end, and let me tell you, it wasn’t graceful. I didn’t choose to act; I was forced.
My old workhorse laptop—the one that held all those precious, undone ideas—
suddenly, spectacularly, just died. Not a soft fade. I’m talking blue screen, then black, then a smell that reminded me of a burnt electrical outlet back in college. Gone. Finished. All my little fantasy projects, everything I’d convinced myself I was “working on” just went up in smoke. It was the purest definition of “gone without a trace.”
Panic doesn’t even cover it. I grabbed the machine, shook it like it owed me money. I called up every tech guy I knew, every friend who’d ever fixed a router. They were like those former coworkers who suddenly don’t recognize your number—either ignored my calls or gave me that awful, fake-polite, “Sorry, man, that sounds terminal” speech. I was alone in a digital desert, exactly like that time I got burned by my old employer and suddenly everyone forgot who I was. Complete isolation.
I Was Forced To Act!
That failure, that utter silence from the people I thought would help, was the kick in the pants. It was the universe screaming at me, “Stop dreaming about buying a house; buy a hammer and fix the wall that just fell over!”
I didn’t try to save the dead thing. That was the first “Act” and it felt great. I literally
threw the ancient machine into a closet and decided that whatever was lost was garbage anyway because it was never completed. I stripped everything down to zero.
My practical process—the actual “Act” part—was ugly, trust me. No fancy agile sprint, no consulting a guru. It was brute force survival:
- I drove straight to the store and bought the cheapest, most basic desktop machine they had. No bells, no whistles, just something that could run a browser and a word processor.
- I designated ONE external drive, a simple 1TB chunk of plastic, as the ONLY place for new projects. I taped a giant label on it that just said, “WORK ONLY.”
- I cleared the desk. Every single piece of paper, every artifact of my old “dreamer” life got filed away in a box or just trashed. I didn’t sort it; I
dumped and forgot about it. The desktop space was now 100% sterile.
- I picked ONE project—the easiest one, something I could knock out in a week. It wasn’t the “private island” idea; it was the simple, boring task of setting up a functional budget tracker that actually worked.
- I set the clock. I didn’t let myself look up tutorials, or new software, or “better ways” to do it. I just installed the basic spreadsheet software and started
typing in the numbers. It looked crude. It was full of messy formulas. But it was done by the end of the week.
I stopped talking about doing things and just did the ugly first version. I didn’t know the jargon for it—I just knew that if I waited for the perfect tool or the perfect moment, I’d just stare at a black screen forever.
The Payoff: Simplicity Over Perfection
The result of that forced, frantic ‘Act’ moment is not a masterpiece. My new setup is Spartan. It’s bare-bones. It can’t do half the fancy things my old machine could, but guess what? It’s
functional. The few projects I’m working on are finally moving. They’re simple, they’re maybe a little rough around the edges, but they are real. My whole life isn’t a complex, broken ecosystem anymore. I only use the few tools I need, and the rest of the clutter—digital and physical—is gone.
Just like how I landed this current gig after I got burned, I didn’t plan to become efficient. I was just trying to survive the catastrophic failure of my previous state. May told me to Act, and it took a total system crash to make me actually
move my feet and build something crude but effective. It’s not the dream, but it’s a foundation, and that’s the only thing that matters right now.
