Man, I gotta tell you, the reason I even dug up some dusty old career advice from 2018 is pure desperation mixed with a hefty dose of embarrassment. See, late last year, things weren’t just slow, they were dead. I was staring at my screen, freelance income dried up, feeling like a total failure. My wife, bless her heart, was trying to cheer me up, scrolling through some nonsense on her phone.
“Look at this,” she says, laughing, “Your career advice from five years ago. Maybe you should just follow that.” She meant it as a joke, pointing specifically at some highly detailed August 2018 Virgo career prediction that promised a ‘major financial realignment’ if specific actions were taken on specific dates.
I snapped. Not at her, but at the situation. I figured, what the hell? If I’m failing anyway, might as well fail spectacularly by following five-year-old space guidance. It gave me a framework, something to actually execute instead of just staring at the ceiling.
The Digging Phase: Finding the Specifics
The first thing I had to do was locate the exact piece. This wasn’t easy. I spent three solid hours diving into the archives of some obscure astrology site, battling dead links and terrible formatting. I was practically a digital archaeologist. What I was hunting for wasn’t some fluffy “you will be lucky” phrase, but the actionable, date-specific stuff.
I finally pinned it down. The advice was aggressive. It wasn’t about waiting; it was about initiating major structural change. I literally screenshot the advice and printed it out, feeling like a lunatic planning my comeback based on cosmic instructions from when my kids were toddlers.
The core message for August 2018 was split into three key action windows:
- The 6th–8th: Eliminate dead weight and painful partnerships.
- The 19th–21st: Make a major, visible pitch to authority figures.
- The 25th–27th: Complete necessary administrative tasks and negotiate hard on pricing.
I wasn’t in August 2018, I was in January 2024. So I had to translate and map those key dates onto my current calendar structure, treating the first week of January as the “6th-8th” window, and so on. This was my self-imposed deadline structure.
The Execution: Committing to the Cosmic Plan
I approached this project like a total grunt. I didn’t care if it was stupid; I just needed to move my feet. I opened up my ugly, old Excel sheet and started logging every action against these transposed dates.
First Window (The Purge): This meant following through on the ‘eliminate dead weight’ advice. I had three small, low-paying clients who were a headache—constant scope creep, late payments, absolute energy vampires. I’d been putting off firing them for months because I was terrified of losing any income. This old horoscope pushed me over the edge. I crafted very firm, polite-but-final emails and sent them all in one morning. I lost about 15% of my monthly recurring revenue, but I gained back about 50% of my sanity.
Second Window (The Pitch): This was the hard one: ‘Major visible pitch to authority figures.’ I had been sitting on a proposal for a massive corporate project—something way out of my league, something I thought I had no chance of getting. But the clock was ticking, and the stupid 2018 advice demanded a ‘major visible pitch.’ So I polished that proposal until my eyes bled, forced myself into uncomfortable cold-call mode, and scheduled a Zoom meeting with the decision-maker I thought would never talk to me. I used every single connection I had to get that meeting. It felt utterly fake, but I did it.
Third Window (The Administration & Negotiation): This was pure paperwork hell. I had deferred all my Q4 taxes and outstanding invoices. Following the ‘complete administrative tasks’ instruction, I spent three days locked in my office just reconciling the books and chasing old money. Crucially, the advice also mentioned ‘negotiate hard on pricing.’ On the few new leads I had, I didn’t drop my rate a single dime. When one potential client tried to haggle, I stood firm, which is something I rarely do when I’m desperate. I actually lost that small client, but the act of saying no felt powerful.
The Results: Structure Trumps Stardust
So, did the stars magically align because I followed 2018 advice? No. That’s goofy talk.
But here is what happened:
The advice acted as a totally external, unarguable project manager. It forced me to do three crucial things I had been terrified of:
- I removed toxic income streams.
- I submitted the big pitch I had been procrastinating on for half a year.
- I cleaned up my financial mess and established boundaries on my rates.
The biggest twist? Two weeks after that intense pitching window, the corporate authority figure I pitched to didn’t give me the massive contract, but they referred me to a smaller, equally well-paying subsidiary project that was a perfect fit for my team. It wasn’t the exact win I expected, but it was the lifeline I desperately needed. That referral came solely because I had forced myself to make the ‘major visible pitch.’
I learned the hard way that sometimes, the specific instructions don’t matter as much as the structure they impose. If I hadn’t committed to those goofy key dates, I would still be bogged down by those garbage clients, too scared to reach for the bigger fish. It turns out even five-year-old career horoscope advice is useful if you just execute the hell out of it.
