It all started right after I got completely screwed over on a deal back in the summer of ’22. Man, that whole thing was a total headache. We’d spent six months building this platform, all nighters, pizza and coffee, the whole nine yards. I was sure this was the one that was finally gonna stick, finally get us some actual cash flow. But then the main investor just ghosted us. Just vanished. Left the whole team high and dry, owing rent, owing freelancers, owing everybody. I felt like the universe had personally lined up to just kick my teeth in. I was flat broke and suddenly had nothing but time to think about how cursed my life seemed to be.
I realized I needed some kind of structure, anything to stop me from staring at the ceiling and hating everything. My brain, being the very orderly, annoying Virgo it is, needed a system. Not just a to-do list, but something that felt like it had bigger power behind it. I’d always liked the look of Ganesha, the guy who removes obstacles, you know? But I couldn’t just start praying out of the blue. I needed a framework. So, I built my own ridiculous one.
The Alignment Protocol Setup
I started by pulling out this cheap, college-ruled notebook I had shoved in a drawer. I decided that luck wasn’t something you waited for, it was something you had to clear the path for, like shoveling snow. And the obstacles (the snow) were always internal crap.
I established a few weird rules, and I stuck to them hard:
- The Time Lock: I had to be sitting at my small, messy kitchen table exactly at 5:45 AM. Not 5:44, not 5:46. Five, forty-five. Why? Because I decided 5 + 4 + 5 equals 14, and that feels like a good, solid, rectangular number that my Virgo brain could handle.
- The Ganesha Day Rule: Wednesday was the main power day. Tuesday night I had to write my “Clearance List.” Every other day was just maintenance, but Wednesday was the big one.
- The 12-Item Limit: My focus was always on 12 things that were blocking my physical space or mental path. Not a wish list, but obstacles. Things like “That massive stack of bills on the desk,” or “The fear of calling back that potential client.”
I spent the next two months on this. Every single morning, I dragged myself out of bed before the sun, feeling completely ridiculous. I would stare at the coffee maker, listen to the traffic outside, and just write down 12 problems. I wasn’t solving them. I was just listing them and drawing a little, messy version of Ganesha next to each one, like I was delegating the problem to him. It was completely insane, but it got me out of bed.
The Messy Reveal
The practice itself was a total mess, I won’t lie. I probably hit that 5:45 AM mark maybe 60% of the time. The other 40%, I just scribbled the 12 items down at 9:00 AM while drinking burnt coffee. Sometimes I only had 5 things to write down, so I’d make up seven more, like “The dust on the ceiling fan” or “My socks don’t match.” I was just trying to fill the page to follow the system.
I kept waiting for the big sign, the moment Ganesha would whisper the lottery numbers to me or something. Nothing happened. The first big break I got wasn’t some cosmic reward for my discipline. It was pure dumb luck that came from a completely different direction. I ran into an old neighbor at the grocery store—the kind of person I usually dodge because they talk too much. But this time, I was so mentally structured from the 5:45 AM routine that I actually stopped, talked to him, and he mentioned his company was desperately looking for someone to clean up their old codebase.
It was a terrible job, low pay, fixing ancient code that should have been put out to pasture years ago. But I took it. It was money. It was stability. That job wasn’t revealed in the notebook. It wasn’t on the Clearance List. The connection was purely accidental, made while I was out buying cheap beans because I was broke.
But here’s the thing I realized later: I only went to that particular grocery store because I had successfully cleared the “massive stack of bills” from my desk the day before, which meant I had finally found an old gift card, which meant I had enough to drive to the fancier, but further, cheap-produce spot. If I hadn’t followed the stupid, arbitrary rules of the Alignment Protocol, that stack of bills would still be there, and I would have gone to the closer, worse store, and I wouldn’t have run into the neighbor.
The system didn’t give me the luck. It just forced me to clean up enough of my own mental and physical garbage that when the little piece of luck finally wobbled by, I wasn’t too messy to grab it. I still keep that notebook. I haven’t written in it in months, but it’s still right there, waiting. Because you never know when the universe is going to kick the can down the road, and you gotta be ready to catch it.
