The Day Everything Blew Up and I Went Looking for Stars
You gotta understand the context here. I was a total mess around late 2018. We’re talking about a time when every single career move I made felt like stepping on a landmine. I was grinding, I was networking, I was trying to pivot into something “high-growth,” whatever the hell that meant, but all I managed to do was burn through my savings and my confidence. I was sure everyone else had the manual, and I was just standing there with a blank stare.
I had just walked away—or maybe I was shoved—from a big project I’d poured 18 months of my life into. I thought I was irreplaceable. Turns out, I was perfectly replaceable, and worse, the documentation I relied on was non-existent. When I left, the whole damn thing crumbled, but nobody blamed me; they just moved on. That sting, man, that feeling of having zero lasting impact despite working 80 hours a week, that’s what drove me nuts.
I stopped trusting traditional advice. All the career gurus and the LinkedIn posts were just noise. I needed an angle. I needed something truly dumb and off-the-wall to break the pattern. I remember sitting there, staring at my screen, thinking: What did I miss? What was the moment I derailed?
The Weird Dive Into Astrological Archaeology
I am a Virgo. I typically ignore all that zodiac crap, but desperation does funny things to your brain. My thought process was simple: I know exactly when I decided to shift my focus away from the boring, foundational stuff and chase the shiny, high-level management titles—it was spring of 2018. I figured, okay, if I missed a cosmic warning, maybe I missed a real warning hidden inside the cosmic BS.
So I started digging. It wasn’t easy finding that specific, random snippet. I had to hunt through archived astrology blogs and dusty forums. It took me a whole afternoon just to zero in on the exact “Virgo Career Horoscope May 2018.” I used terrible search terms like “Virgo job fail 2018 advice.” Finally, I snagged a screenshot of the key paragraphs from some forgotten site.
The text was pure fluff, you know the drill. Stuff about “re-evaluating your core partnerships” and “Mercury demanding structure.” But one sentence snagged me, and I blew it up on my monitor. It said: “The greatest opportunity lies not in expansion, but in rigorously reinforcing the structures you already possess, especially those tied to basic communication and daily accountability.”
Operationalizing the Occult: My Three-Step Action Plan
I treated that one sentence like a military directive. It forced me to acknowledge that the problem wasn’t the external market; it was my internal sloppiness that started right when that horoscope came out, which was exactly when I got too cocky.
Here’s what I immediately stopped doing, and what I started doing instead. I called it my “Astro-Accountability Protocol.”
- Step 1: Abandoned the Shiny New Thing. I completely stopped applying for roles that were five levels above where my skills actually were. The horoscope said reinforcement, not expansion. I forced myself to look at my core, boring competencies—the stuff I used to hate doing, like detailed financial modeling and systematic documentation. I decided to get world-class at the stuff I already knew, instead of failing miserably at the stuff I didn’t.
- Step 2: Hyper-Documentation of Everything. This was brutal. I went back to every single failure point from the last two years and created a “post-mortem” document for each. Not blaming anyone, just logging the process. The horoscope’s talk about “basic communication” made me realize I never logged the “why” behind my decisions. Now, before I start any task, I write down the expected outcome and the success metrics. Takes five minutes, saves five days of headache later.
- Step 3: The Daily Accountability Log. I implemented a simple spreadsheet—not some fancy SaaS tool—where I physically logged every productive hour, not just time spent sitting at my desk. I started measuring impact, not effort. If I spent three hours on a task, but the output was zero, I logged zero. This was the biggest gut punch. I realized I was maybe only genuinely productive for about four hours a day, maximum.
The Lesson Was Never in the Stars, It Was in the Timing
The stupid, essential truth I missed was that the moment I started to feel successful—around May 2018—was the moment I stopped doing the meticulous, boring groundwork that made me successful in the first place. I had outsourced my memory and my discipline to the universe, waiting for the next big break instead of securing the foundation.
The horoscope itself was meaningless junk. It was the fact that I needed something totally nonsensical to make me stop, look back at a specific point in time, and force accountability on myself. That piece of cosmic garbage was just a mirror reflecting my own timeline of neglect.
By forcing myself to act on that generic advice—interpreting “reinforcing structures” as going back to basics and documentation—I fixed the massive holes in my workflow that had previously led to sudden, catastrophic project failures. I got boringly consistent. I got reliable. And guess what? Reliability is the real secret sauce in any career.
I ended up taking on smaller, critical projects that required intense detail and structure. People noticed that I actually delivered what I promised, on time, with full documentation. I wasn’t the flashy guy anymore, but I was the guy who got paid, and who didn’t get fired.
I still have that screenshot of the May 2018 Virgo horoscope saved. Not because I believe in astrology, but because it’s a constant, embarrassing reminder that sometimes, the biggest lessons are hidden in the places you least expect, simply because you stop paying attention to the fundamentals the moment you think you’re too good for them.
