Man, lemme tell you, chasing those “big wins” the internet talks about? It’s a total mess. You spend all this time scrolling through LinkedIn, submitting resumes into the void, going to networking events where everyone is just fake smiling, and you get absolutely nowhere. I was tired of it. Absolutely spent.
The Mess That Started It All
I distinctly remember December 2017 ending, and I was staring at a bank balance that was practically gasping for air. I’d been laid off in September—a brutal, out-of-the-blue kind of thing. My boss, this snake of a guy, slapped the severance papers down right as I was about to head out for a holiday party. Three months of desperate job hunting later, and all I had to show for it was a stack of rejection emails and a phone bill I couldn’t pay.
I was done. I hit a wall. My wife was whispering about maybe taking a part-time retail gig just to cover the groceries, and that crushed me. I felt like a total failure. I needed a sign, a direction, literally anything that told me I wasn’t just wasting my time spinning my wheels.
That’s when I stumbled across this ridiculous video: “Virgo Career January 2018: Big Wins Are Coming!”
The Practice: From Skeptic to Spreadsheet Nerd
I’m a Virgo, right? Total skeptic, but I was also totally desperate. I said to myself, “Fine. I’m going to treat this like a weird-ass research project.” I decided to test the whole cosmic theory. If the stars could really predict a “big win,” I wanted to know when and how, and I was going to track the evidence like a lunatic detective.
The first thing I did was grab every free January 2018 Virgo career prediction I could find. It was a chaotic haul.
- I scrolled through three different YouTube tarot readers, all talking vague nonsense about “financial transformation.”
- I wrestled with two major astrology websites whose predictions contradicted each other completely. One screamed “A new client delivers a windfall on the 10th.” The other mumbled “Avoid risky investments mid-month.” Thanks for the clarity, guys.
- I slapped a simple spreadsheet together. Columns were: Date, Prediction Source, The Vague Prediction, Actual Event, Match (Yes/No).
I committed to checking and logging my real-life career events against these predictions every single night. I tracked everything: tiny freelance applications, follow-up emails, phone calls, even when I managed to resist buying a $5 coffee. I was looking for the “big win” the video promised.
Wrestling with the Daily Data
The process itself was a total grind. Initially, I was looking for that moment—the prediction day where the clouds parted and a six-figure job offer landed in my lap. It never happened.
I agonized over the definitions. When a prediction said “a chance encounter brings opportunity,” and I bumped into an old colleague at the grocery store, I spent twenty minutes debating if that counted as a “Match.” It was ridiculous. I logged the encounter anyway, under “Actual Event.” It turned out he was just buying milk and had no job leads. No match.
Mid-January, I thought I had a win. The “financial windfall” prediction was set for the 18th. On the 17th, I got an email saying an old client had finally paid me for a small, two-hour project I’d done months ago—$150. I wrestled with that entry. Was $150 a “windfall”? To my bank account at the time, maybe, but not the big win I was hoping for. I marked it “Partial Match” and felt completely deflated.
The Real Big Win (Spoiler: It Wasn’t the Stars)
I kept the tracking up until the end of the month, religiously filling in the cells. The final tally? About 85% of the predictions were either too vague to prove or were simply wrong. My spreadsheet was a joke.
So, what was the big win that January? It wasn’t the stars, and it wasn’t the predictions. It was the spreadsheet itself. The act of tracking forced me to be intentional. I realized that on the days I had nothing to log under “Actual Event,” I felt terrible. So, I started forcing myself to do things just so I’d have data to log.
I started sending five cold emails a day. I began reaching out to two old managers every week. I moved from passive desperation to active effort, simply because I didn’t want the “Actual Event” column to be empty.
The “win” wasn’t cosmic; it was behavioral. By forcing myself to capture my daily career activity, even the tiny ones, I created a momentum that wasn’t there before. A few weeks later, in early February, one of those random cold emails I sent back in January finally paid off with an interview. The job offer came soon after.
I still have that original spreadsheet file. I open it up sometimes and laugh, but I kept the habit. Now, I track my goals and my output, not my horoscope. That ridiculous project kicked me in the butt and made me realize that the only person delivering the “big wins” is the person putting in the work, regardless of what Mercury is doing.
