Alright folks, gather ’round. So, you know how everyone and their grandma talks about horoscopes, especially career ones? “Oh, Virgo, today’s your day for a promotion!” or “Scorpio, watch out for office politics!” Honestly, never really paid much mind to all that. My life’s been more about just kinda stumbling forward and picking up skills along the way, rather than checking cosmic forecasts.
But 2023, man, that year was a bit different. I hit a point where it felt like I was just… treading water. Not going backwards, which is good, but definitely not pushing forward much either. My buddy, who’s big into all that self-improvement guru stuff, kept chirping in my ear, “You gotta set intentions! You gotta visualize your path!” And I’m just sitting there, thinking, “Intentions? Visualization? Buddy, I’m just trying to get my coffee to stay hot past 10 AM.”
Still, his words kinda stuck. And I figured, if I wasn’t gonna read some daily career horoscope telling me what the stars had planned, maybe I could just… plan it myself? Or at least try to get a better handle on what I wanted to happen. So, I decided, screw the mystic stuff, I’m gonna try my own weird, unscientific method to figure out “what’s coming” for my career in 2023.
My Messy Method for Career Clarity
First thing I did, which was probably around late December 2022, was just a complete brain dump. I grabbed one of those cheap school notebooks – you know, the ones with the weird marbled covers – and just started writing. No filter. No fancy bullet points. Just raw thoughts. I wrote down:
- What I actually liked doing at my job.
- What made me wanna pull my hair out.
- Skills I felt I had but wasn’t using.
- Stuff I wanted to learn, even if it seemed crazy.
- People I admired in my field and why.
- And, honestly, how much money I wished I was making. Let’s be real, that’s always a factor.
It was a proper mess, like a toddler’s art project. Scribbles, cross-outs, arrows going every which way. But seeing it all laid out, even if it was chicken scratch, felt kinda liberating. It wasn’t about finding a perfect path, it was about acknowledging all the different bits and pieces rattling around in my head.
Next up, I started playing a mental game I called “The Grass Isn’t Always Greener, But What Color Is It?” Basically, instead of just daydreaming about a perfect job I didn’t have, I tried to pick apart what was actually making me feel stuck where I was. Was it the tasks? The team? My own damn attitude? I started noticing patterns. Like, I’d always get a jolt of energy when I was solving a tricky problem, but dreaded the routine admin stuff. It sounds obvious, right? But until I wrote it down and actually looked at it, it was just background noise.
Then came the “Paying Attention to the Whispers” phase. This was my version of reading signs, I guess. Instead of celestial bodies, I started really listening to conversations. What were colleagues talking about? What skills were coming up in industry news? What kind of roles were constantly popping up on job boards, even if I wasn’t actively looking? I’d keep that marbled notebook handy and jot down anything that sparked an idea, even if it was just a keyword or a company name. I remember one time, overhearing a conversation about a new software tool, and I just scribbled it down. Didn’t think much of it then, but it came up later.
After a few weeks of this half-baked introspection, I kinda had a rough sketch. Not a detailed blueprint, mind you, more like a crayon drawing of a house. I saw a few areas where my skills and my interests overlapped, and where there seemed to be a bit of a market. It was less about predicting the future and more about pointing myself in a direction that felt right. I decided on a couple of specific skills I was gonna try and pick up, even if it was just through online tutorials, and I made a mental note to reach out to a couple of folks in my network who were doing interesting things in those areas.
What Actually Happened?
Did it all pan out exactly like my messy scribbles predicted? Hell no! Life, as always, threw some curveballs. One of the skills I thought was gonna be a game-changer turned out to be less exciting in practice. And one of the people I planned to connect with ended up changing jobs themselves, so that conversation went sideways in a good way, leading to totally new insights.
But here’s the kicker: the process of doing all that, even my crude, amateurish version of career planning, was the real win. Because I’d spent that time dissecting my own thoughts and paying attention, I was way more alert to opportunities. When that new software tool I’d overheard about popped up in a project, I jumped on it because I’d mentally tagged it as “interesting.” When a friend of a friend mentioned an opening for a role that needed exactly one of the skills I’d decided to brush up on, I actually felt ready to talk about it.
By the end of 2023, I hadn’t switched careers or become a millionaire. But I had taken on more interesting work, learned a couple of genuinely useful new things, and felt a heck of a lot less like I was treading water. It wasn’t a promotion or some grand career leap the stars foretold, but it was a solid, forward shuffle. And for a guy who usually just rides the waves, that felt like a damn good win. So, maybe it’s not about seeing what’s coming, but about getting ready for whatever does.
