I still remember March 2020. Everyone remembers the global mess, but for me, it was personal financial catastrophe time. I was riding high on a big contract that made up damn near all my income—the anchor for my mortgage, the kids’ school fees, everything. Then, boom. The client’s funding dried up faster than spilled paint on hot asphalt. They just vanished. No severance, no warning, just an automated email saying, “project paused indefinitely.”
I went from feeling secure to cold-sweat panic overnight. My emergency fund? Gone in three months just covering the essentials while I fruitlessly chased job leads that weren’t going anywhere. I was calling in favors, polishing up resumes, trying every single conventional path, and getting absolutely nowhere. The whole system was frozen.
That’s when I hit the point of true desperation. I was scrolling through old emails, trying to find any scrap of relevance, when I stumbled on a cheesy newsletter my sister-in-law had signed me up for years ago. It was a career horoscope site. I usually trash that stuff without looking, but I clicked it. And there it was: the specific reading for March 2020, frozen in time, right when my financial life was about to implode.
The Garbage Advice That Saved My Ass
The headline was exactly what I’m sharing with you today. I read the whole thing, rolling my eyes at the talk of Mercury retrograde and Saturn’s influence. But buried under all the celestial fluff was a surprisingly brutal core message, the one single piece of advice: “You are dramatically undervaluing your unique position. Do not accept anything less than double your current rate, and be prepared to walk away.”
Double my rate? In the middle of a global shutdown? That sounded insane. My immediate thought was, “That’s how you starve.” But then I looked at my bank account, which was already showing zero, and realized I had nothing left to lose. I had been terrified of unemployment for years, and that fear had led me to accept insulting rates just to keep working. I was practicing career cowardice. This dusty, ridiculous horoscope was basically telling me to grow a spine and treat my skills like a scarce resource. So, I decided I would reverse-engineer the “celestial wisdom” into five brutal, actionable steps.
Executing the Five Maxims to Maximize Income
I stopped treating my work like a hobby and started treating it like a high-value manufacturing plant. Here is the process, the ugly, hard steps I executed to turn zero income into maximum profit within a few months.
- Step 1: I Brutally Audited My Dead Skills.
The reading spoke of leveraging latent value. I stopped marketing my general skillset and dug deep into the niche stuff I hadn’t touched in five years—specific enterprise software configuration and technical documentation for legacy systems. I executed a total skills inventory, finding three things nobody else wanted to bother with anymore. I built a specific, focused offering just for those pain points. I immediately started charging 3x what I charged for my general work because I knew I was solving niche problems for desperate clients.
- Step 2: I Executed a Total Contact Cleanse.
The horoscope mentioned focusing on high-return relationships. I deleted 90% of my weak professional ties—the ones who always wanted free advice or asked me to “collaborate” for “exposure.” I created a list of only fifteen former clients who had a history of paying on time and respecting boundaries. I dedicated my first two hours every morning to crafting hyper-personalized, high-value pitches for only those fifteen contacts. I executed targeted outreach only. No more mass mailers. This focus instantly filtered out the time-wasters and led to three major contracts landing in the first forty days.
- Step 3: I Instituted Non-Negotiable Office Hours.
Discipline was cited as the key to Virgos’ prosperity. I used to let freelance work bleed all over my day. Not anymore. I treated my home office like a jail cell. I clocked in at 8 AM, clocked out at 5 PM. If I didn’t have client work, I spent every minute building lead magnets, optimizing my portfolio, or calculating my true hourly cost. This rigid execution structure eliminated procrastination and increased my task output by at least 40%. Suddenly, I was completing projects in days instead of weeks.
- Step 4: I Forced the Walk-Away Stance.
This was the hardest test of execution. A huge prospect came back with a counter-offer that was barely 40% of my quote. I remembered the horoscope, took a breath, and politely but firmly said, “I appreciate the offer, but my rate is fixed due to the complexity required. I understand if that doesn’t align with your budget.” I didn’t negotiate downward. I just executed the walk-away. Two days later, they called back and accepted my original quote. They respected the firmness. That single moment executed the permanent shift: I now charge based on value, not fear.
- Step 5: I Partnered for Execution Scale.
The advice mentioned unexpected alliances. I was great at strategy and sales, but slow on the complex technical build-out. I found a partner who was technically brilliant but hated client communication. I executed a 70/30 split partnership (my favor, because I handled the pricing and client management, which is where the real money is). We immediately executed on two projects I wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to handle alone. I doubled my potential income stream without having to learn a single new line of code myself.
It’s bizarre that I owe my current income level—which is higher than any corporate salary I ever pulled—to a silly career horoscope. But that piece of advice, appearing exactly when I was most vulnerable, forced me to stop begging for scraps and start demanding my true value. I didn’t just read the advice; I immediately executed the necessary, painful steps to implement those changes. Now, I don’t wait for the stars to align. I just execute my pricing strategy, and you should too. Stop being afraid. Go raise your rates right now.
