The Day I Dumped Data for Destiny (And Wrote It Down)
You wouldn’t believe the absolute mess July 2022 was. I’m talking full-on dumpster fire. For years, I preached about metrics, validated learning, and never letting emotions drive the product roadmap. Then that summer hit, and suddenly, my entire playbook was useless. Everything I touched was turning into dust, specifically my pet project, the one where I had sunk half my life savings and about 18 months of pure grind.
I was in the middle of a massive pivot—or what I thought was a pivot, but really it was just me panicking and throwing code at the wall. My lead developer had just ghosted me, taking three months of crucial documentation with him. The investors I was counting on decided that “market instability” meant they weren’t sending that final tranche of funding. I felt completely paralyzed. I couldn’t move forward, but I couldn’t afford to stop either.
I spent an entire Saturday just staring at the ceiling. I needed a sign. Not a data point, because the data was screaming “FAIL,” but something external, something utterly ridiculous, just to jar my brain loose. That’s when the sheer absurdity kicked in. Me, the guy who mocks anyone who reads crystals, typed that exact headline into my browser: “Read the full virgo career horoscope july 2022 predictions here.” I clicked on the first result and actually started reading that nonsense.
Logging the Irrational Impulse
This is where the practice part started. Even though I was doing something stupid, I documented it. My log entry for that morning was titled: ‘Operational Decision Based on Cosmic Input (Desperation Phase).’
The horoscope article was long, filled with flowery language about Jupiter alignments and the second house of finance. I skimmed, trying to find the actionable item. And then I hit the section for Virgos, right around the middle of the month. It spoke about career moves. It said something specific about how “the greatest success will come not through acquisition, but through elimination” and that I needed to “ruthlessly prune unnecessary commitments to restore energetic flow.”
Now, I’m not saying I believed the stars were talking to me, but the phrasing—’ruthlessly prune’ and ‘elimination’—stuck hard. It perfectly described the logical step I had been refusing to take for weeks because of ego. I was trying to hold onto three major features in that failing SaaS product, convinced that if I just kept building them, the market would magically appear.
So, I grabbed my notepad and started cross-referencing this cosmic suggestion with my actual project budget and timeline. I treated the horoscope like a cryptic memo from an eccentric CEO.
- Prediction Item 1 (Elimination): Stop investing time in Feature X (which had zero user engagement but was my personal favorite).
- Prediction Item 2 (Pruning Commitments): Cancel the contract with the expensive, underperforming outsourced content team.
- Prediction Item 3 (Restoring Flow): Focus 100% of my remaining runway on simplifying the onboarding process—the one thing users had actually requested.
I know, it sounds like I just used the horoscope as an excuse to do the sensible thing, but trust me, the psychological leap was huge. I needed permission to fail small so I could succeed later, and I let a piece of internet junk food give me that permission.
Executing the “Cosmic” Strategy
That Monday, I went straight to the code repository and started ripping things out. I archived the entire Feature X branch. I didn’t save it; I deleted it. I emailed the content team and terminated the agreement, absorbing the penalty hit because I knew that money was better spent on keeping the lights on. I then forced myself to sit down and dedicate three full days to nothing but shaving down the onboarding friction, making it stupid simple for new users.
I documented every single action, logging the specific changes made, the money saved, and the corresponding “horoscope trigger.” I treated it as a scientific experiment: Can an entirely irrelevant external stimulus force a logically sound, but emotionally difficult, business decision?
By the end of July 2022, the results were stunningly clear. The product was leaner, easier to explain, and cheaper to maintain. Our cash burn rate dropped by 40%. More importantly, simplifying the onboarding immediately led to a small, but steady, increase in sign-ups. They weren’t the huge numbers I dreamed of, but they were real, paying customers.
The Takeaway I Carry Now
The horoscope didn’t predict my future; it demanded immediate action on obvious problems I was too scared to face. The whole weird experience taught me that sometimes, when you are deep in the weeds, you need a radical distraction to reset your perspective. I keep that log entry—the “Operational Decision Based on Cosmic Input”—pinned right above my desk. It’s a reminder that good practice isn’t just about collecting data, but sometimes about finding the trigger that forces you to act on the data you already have. I never looked at another horoscope again, but I damn sure wrote down every stupid reason why I decided to pivot that summer.
