Man, June 2020. What a garbage year that was. Everyone was locked down, stressed out, and my own income stream—which was basically chasing tiny ad clicks for some third-rate digital agency—was drying up faster than the Amazon in a drought. I was living paycheck to paycheck, and those checks were getting smaller by the minute.
Then I saw the stupid thing. The title of this piece. The “virgo monthly horoscope june 2020.” I’m not even a big believer in that stuff, but when you’re desperate, you read everything. The line that stuck out? “Get ready for a big Financial boost!”
I laughed, right? But it was like a little, stupid dare. A voice saying: “What if you actually did something big and stupid right now? What do you have to lose?” I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was tired of the grind. I was tired of thinking short-term.
The Great Digital Escape: My Practice Begins
My “practice” wasn’t some calculated investment. It was pure, dumb desperation fueled by a two-sentence horoscope. I looked at the $3,000 I had managed to scrape together—my emergency fund, basically—and I decided to ditch the digital world entirely. No more algorithms, no more SEO, no more social media campaigns. My idea? Get into something tangible, something real. I decided to flip used industrial equipment.
I know, sounds crazy. But I figured if the financial boost was coming, it wouldn’t be from the same garbage I’d been doing for five years.
I spent the $3k on an ancient, massive piece of CNC machinery from an auction two states away. I rented a U-Haul and drove there myself. That thing was a nightmare to move. I wrestled it into my garage, which instantly looked like a hazardous waste site. I had no business owning this thing. It weighed two tons. It reeked of old oil and neglect.
The practice process was hell:
- I bought basic manuals off eBay and tried to understand the ancient control panel.
- I spent a week draining the sludge and replacing broken hydraulic lines. I cut myself like ten times.
- I tried to get it to power on. I tripped the main breaker in the house three times.
- I took grainy photos and listed it online, asking for $6,000. I figured, double my money, easy.
I waited. And waited. Nothing. Zero replies. Just a bunch of spam emails and one guy who wanted to know if I’d sell him the scrap metal.
The Pivot and The Real Boost
I was ready to throw in the towel. My wife was giving me “the look,” you know, the one that says, “I told you so, you idiot.”
Then, after about three weeks of this misery, I got a random message. Not about the machine itself, but about a very specific part of the controller. I had detailed the component wiring in my listing, just to show how much work I’d done on it. This guy—a local contractor who specialized in factory automation—said he saw that I’d mapped out the motor control relays and understood the input signals. He didn’t want the big machine; he wanted me.
He was short-staffed and needed someone who could basically read an old, complex wiring diagram and help him migrate a client’s obsolete system to modern Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). He told me, “You obviously have the patience to unravel this rat’s nest.”
I said yes immediately. My skills from the digital world were useless. My time spent failing to fix that hunk of junk machine—that was the real qualification.
I spent the next two months learning ladder logic and PLC programming on the job. It was dry, boring, and intensely structured. It was the complete opposite of the volatile, chaotic online hustle I had been doing.
This was the financial boost. It wasn’t a sudden cash injection; it was stability. It was an hourly rate that was four times what my old agency boss was paying. It was a 9-to-5 job with actual paid holidays, not “maybe we’ll make revenue this quarter.” I sold the giant CNC machine for $1,500 just to get it out of my garage, taking a loss, but I was already making real money from the new gig.
The Long-Term Realization
I still see my old coworkers online, talking about the next big “growth hacking” trend. They’re still running around like headless chickens, worrying about their quarterly bonuses tied to some volatile ad platform. They’re still dealing with the technological “big soup” of a thousand different systems that only half-work, just like that old Chinese example I heard about—a maintenance nightmare.
They email me sometimes, asking if I want to help them with a small digital project for “good money.” I read the emails, I shake my head, and I delete them.
I picked up a new life because a stupid horoscope made me panic and buy a piece of junk machinery. The “big Financial boost” wasn’t a windfall; it was the push I needed to quit the hustle and find a stable trade. That old industry is still desperately looking for people, just like that other story, probably paying peanuts, while I’m here, steady, stable, and completely checked out of that game. I moved out of volatility and into certainty. Best practice record I’ll ever have.
