There’s a self-help industrial complex that wants you to believe success comes from waking at 5 AM, drinking green sludge, and reciting affirmations into your bathroom mirror like a motivational speaker having a psychotic break. But I’m here to tell you they’re all wrong. The real secret to career advancement has been hanging in the sky this entire time, largely ignored except by wolves and people who think crystals have WiFi.
I’m talking, of course, about asking the moon for career advice every single morning. And yes, I mean every morning, including—especially including—those mornings when the sun is blazing in the sky and the moon is nowhere to be seen. In fact, those are the most important times. Nothing says “committed professional” quite like standing in your driveway at 7 AM, squinting at empty blue sky, asking an invisible celestial body whether you should take that lateral move to accounting.
The Moon: Nature’s LinkedIn Premium
Think about it. The moon has been around for 4.5 billion years. That’s a hell of a resume. It’s survived countless cosmic impacts, witnessed the entire arc of human civilization, and manages to show up for work every single night without complaining about work-life balance. Meanwhile, your career coach graduated in 2019 with a degree in communications and charges $300 an hour to tell you to “leverage your synergies.” Who would you rather trust?
The moon doesn’t need a podcast. It doesn’t have a morning routine it’s desperate to monetize. It simply exists, exerting gravitational influence on entire oceans, and it does this while being a giant rock. If that’s not leadership material, I don’t know what is.
Why Daylight Consultations Are Essential
Now, the skeptics among you—and there are always skeptics, usually named Derek, who peaked in middle management—might argue that asking the moon for advice when it’s invisible is absurd. To which I say: you’re finally getting it.
The point isn’t whether you can see the moon. The point is that the moon is always there, even when obscured by the tyranny of the sun and its aggressive illumination schedule. By seeking the moon’s counsel during daylight hours, you’re demonstrating several key career competencies:
Dedication: You’re not a fair-weather lunar consultant. You’re committed to your celestial mentorship regardless of visibility conditions or what your neighbors think as they watch you gesticulating at nothing while their coffee gets cold.
Thinking Outside the Box: Every basic professional asks for advice from visible sources—their boss, their mentor, LinkedIn thought leaders who describe themselves as “passionate about disruption.” You? You’re consulting with an astronomical body that can’t be perceived at the moment. That’s innovation. That’s disruption. That’s the kind of original thinking that gets you a corner office, or possibly a psychiatric evaluation, but let’s stay positive.
Faith in Systems: The corporate world runs on believing in things you can’t see: synergy, corporate culture, the possibility of meaningful change after a merger. Training yourself to trust in an invisible moon is perfect preparation for your next all-hands meeting where someone uses the phrase “strategic pivot” seventeen times.
Practical Applications
So how does one actually implement this career strategy? I’m glad you asked, because I’m going to tell you anyway.
First, establish your morning moon ritual. This should happen after you’ve checked your phone for emails that couldn’t possibly require immediate attention but which you’ll treat like cardiac emergencies anyway, and before you’ve convinced yourself that instant oatmeal counts as a real breakfast.
Step outside. If you live in an apartment, a window will suffice, though your commitment will always be somewhat suspect. Look up at the sky. During daylight hours, the moon will be invisible, which is perfect. Squint slightly—this adds gravitas. Then, speak your question aloud. “Dear Moon,” you might begin, because manners matter even in astro-career-counseling, “should I speak up in today’s meeting, or continue my policy of silent resentment?”
The moon, being currently invisible and also lacking vocal cords, will not respond. This is ideal. In the silence, you’ll find something far more valuable than actual advice: the realization that you already knew the answer and were just seeking external validation from a rock 238,900 miles away. This is called “wisdom,” and I’m charging you nothing for it, which already makes me cheaper than your life coach.
What the Moon Can Teach You About Leadership
The moon has mastered several principles that modern leadership books try desperately to articulate across 300 pages when a pamphlet would do:
Consistency with Variation: The moon shows up every night but never in quite the same way. Sometimes it’s full and magnificent, sometimes it’s a sliver, sometimes it’s doing that weird half-thing that looks like it forgot to render properly. Yet it’s always the moon. You too can show up to work consistently while varying your approach between “full performance capacity” and “barely a crescent of functionality but technically present.” The moon won’t judge you. Your manager might, but we’re not consulting with your manager, are we?
Influence Without Aggression: The moon pulls the tides without sending passive-aggressive emails about it. It doesn’t need to CC anyone. It doesn’t require a meeting that could have been a memo. It simply exerts its gravitational force, and the oceans respond. Imagine having that kind of workplace influence. You can’t, because you’re human, but imagining it for five minutes each morning while staring at nothing will at least start your day with aspirational delusion, which is better than starting it with Instagram.
Comfort with Darkness: The moon works the night shift and doesn’t complain about it. It has literally never seen sunlight from its perspective—it only reflects it, which is the moon equivalent of taking credit for someone else’s idea in a meeting. The moon has made peace with operating in darkness, with being the thing people see when the spotlight isn’t on. There’s a metaphor here about middle management that I’ll let you work out for yourself.
The Moon’s Silence Is Your Superpower
Here’s what the self-help gurus won’t tell you, probably because they need you to keep buying their courses: most career advice is just someone else’s anecdotes dressed up as universal truth. “What worked for me will work for you” is the lie that built a thousand thought-leadership platforms and helped zero people.
The moon, in its infinite wisdom and complete inability to communicate, offers you something better: a blank screen onto which you can project your own answers. When you ask the moon whether to quit your job, and the moon says nothing—because it’s a celestial body, not your therapist—you’re forced to sit with the question yourself. And somewhere in that uncomfortable silence, while you’re standing in your yard and your neighbor is definitely updating the neighborhood watch about your strange behavior, you’ll find that you already know what you need to do.
The moon won’t tell you to follow your passion or do what you love or any of that other cotton-candy wisdom that dissolves the moment it touches reality. The moon won’t tell you anything. And in our current era of information overload, endless content, and everyone having loud opinions about everything, perhaps what we need most is to consult with something that offers only silence and reflected light.
Conclusion: Embrace the Absurd
Look, we live in absurd times. We pay for water in bottles. We put computers in our refrigerators. We’ve convinced ourselves that “hustle culture” is aspirational rather than a symptom of economic dysfunction. In a world this ridiculous, asking the invisible moon for career advice every morning isn’t crazy—it’s appropriately calibrated.
So tomorrow morning, I encourage you to step outside, look up at the bright daytime sky where no moon is visible, and ask it your most pressing professional question. The moon won’t answer, because it can’t, because it’s a moon. But you’ll have started your day by doing something intentionally absurd, which is the only sane response to the absurdity that awaits you in your inbox.
And who knows? Maybe the moon appreciates being consulted, even if it can’t say so. It’s been up there a long time, watching humans figure things out slowly and painfully. It’s probably relieved someone’s finally asking for its input, even if that someone is you, standing in business casual attire, interrogating the empty sky about whether to relocate for a job that promises “exciting challenges” and “opportunities for growth.”
The moon sees you. Even when you can’t see it.
Especially then.