Man, 2016 rolled around, and I swear, I was feeling it. That nagging feeling, you know? Like you’re just spinning your wheels, doing the same old grind day in and day out. I always heard about that ‘Virgo work ethic,’ how we’re supposed to be all meticulous and dedicated. Yeah, I had that part down, but it wasn’t pushing me forward anymore. It was just keeping me stuck in place, doing the same damn thing, and honestly, a bit miserable about it.
I knew something had to shift in my job life. I couldn’t keep going like that. So, I started by just looking at my day-to-day. What was I actually spending my time on? I felt like a detective in my own cubicle, observing myself. I wrote down everything, even the tiny stuff, like making coffee. It was messy, not organized at all, but I just needed to see it all laid out.
Then, I talked to my buddy, Jim, who was always hustling, always had some side gig going on. He just had this energy. I told him I felt stuck. He just looked at me and said, “Dude, just pick one thing you hate doing, and figure out how to make it better. Or automate it. Or just stop doing it.” That hit me. Simple, right? But I never thought about it like that before.
So, I picked that clunky report generation task. Every damn week, it was hours of copy-pasting, checking numbers, making sure everything aligned. It was tedious as hell. That was my first target. I went online, I watched a bunch of terrible YouTube tutorials, you know, the ones with bad audio and even worse explanations. I struggled. Really struggled. But I kept digging.
Eventually, I found this one forum, some obscure place for spreadsheet geeks. I was embarrassed, but I asked stupid questions. Like really basic stuff. To my surprise, people helped me. They gave me pointers, explained what a macro was in simple terms, told me to stop using “select all” for everything. I spent evenings after work just messing around with Excel, writing these tiny lines of code, breaking things, then fixing them. I even bought a cheap online course, probably only 30 bucks, just to understand some basic coding logic. It wasn’t about being a programmer, it was about making my life easier.
Next thing, I applied what I learned. I built a simple macro. It wasn’t fancy, didn’t have a cool interface, but it worked. My weekly reports? They got done in like 30 minutes instead of three hours. It was a game changer. And guess what? My boss noticed. Not because I told him, but because he saw the reports landing in his inbox earlier, without me looking like I’d been through a war.
That gave me a real kick, a boost of confidence I hadn’t felt in ages. So, I looked for the next thing. What else was a pain? What else could I improve? I started seeing my job differently. Not just a list of tasks, but a series of problems waiting to be solved. And I realized, I could be the guy who solved them.
I volunteered for a project nobody else wanted. It was this cross-department mess, a tangled web of outdated processes. Everyone avoided it like the plague. I jumped in. I had to organize stuff, talk to different teams, figure out their problems, translate between departments that practically spoke different languages. It was brutal. I stayed late a lot. I made mistakes, plenty of them. I got yelled at once or twice. But I pushed through.
During that time, I also started showing up at these internal tech meetups. Not to talk, just to listen. I’d grab a slice of pizza, stand at the back, and just absorb what people were saying. Gradually, I started asking questions. Then, little by little, I even shared what little I knew about my Excel tricks or how I untangled that project. I got to know people from other departments, people I’d never even said hello to before. It was pretty cool, expanded my world a bit within the company walls.
By the end of 2016, man, it was a totally different game. I wasn’t just doing my job; I was shaping it. I wasn’t waiting for tasks; I was finding opportunities to improve things. I got a decent raise, yeah, and some recognition, but more than that, I felt like I was actually growing. That ‘Virgo’ perfectionism I had, the one that made me nitpick everything? It turned into a drive to master things, to really understand them, not just do them right. It was a busy year, a tough year, definitely had its moments where I wanted to just quit, but I made it happen. I learned that if you just keep trying, keep pushing, even when it sucks, you get somewhere.
