THE SINKING SHIP AND THE SPREADSHEET EXPERIMENT
Early 2019 was a complete wreck, honestly. I’m a Virgo, yeah, but usually, I just roll my eyes at the whole astrology thing. You know how it is. But late February 2019, I was desperate. My main gig was circling the drain. The project I was managing? It was a total mess, over budget, and the client was breathing down our necks. I felt like I was spending twelve hours a day just trying to hold the hull together. Morale? Non-existent. I knew I needed to jump ship, but the fear of the unknown kept me plastered to my chair.
The real kicker, though, was the side hustle. I had sunk a good chunk of my savings—we’re talking almost twenty grand—into inventory for a small e-commerce venture. The plan was to launch it on March 1st. That money was supposed to be the safety net, the buffer for future bigger moves, maybe even letting my spouse finally quit that job they hated. But the payment gateway integration kept failing. Every time my developer fixed one bug, three new ones popped up. I was hemorrhaging money and time, and the inventory was literally sitting in my spare room gathering dust. I needed a sign, a goddamn lighthouse.
WHY I BECAME AN ACCIDENTAL ASTRO-TRACKER
I was in full-blown panic mode on February 27th. I remember doomscrolling in a haze at 2 AM, trying to find anything positive. That’s when I stumbled across it—that huge, loud blog post. It screamed: “Virgo! HUGE financial shift coming mid-March! Get ready for a promotion or a windfall! The planets are aligning for your career!”
Normally, I’d laugh and close the tab. But I didn’t. I stared at the screen and muttered, “Fine. You want a big shift? Let’s track it.” I decided to treat this internet nonsense like a science project. I was going to document every single financial and career-related action I took, and every single thing that happened, starting on March 1st. No more gut feelings; only cold, hard data in a spreadsheet.
THE GRIND: LOGGING THE MONTH OF MADNESS
I opened up an old Google Sheet and dedicated three whole tabs to this crazy experiment. I was serious about tracking the “shift.”
- Tab 1: The Job Hunt Log. I tracked every single application I sent out. Column A was the date. B was the Company Name. C was the Role. D was the Source (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.). E was the expected salary range. F was the Response Status (Received, Interview 1, Rejection). I committed to sending out at least three quality applications every day.
- Tab 2: The E-Commerce Nightmare. This was the raw nerve. I logged every single communication with the payment gateway company. Date, time, who I talked to, ticket number, the exact issue they promised to fix, and the deadline they gave me. I wanted proof of their failures.
- Tab 3: Mood and Spending. A simple log. Date, how much I spent that day (categories like food, fuel, necessary bills). And a simple 1-5 mood rating. The goal was to see if the cosmic shift actually translated into a happier mood or looser spending habits halfway through the month, as predicted.
The first two weeks were brutal. March 1st through the 14th was a graveyard. The Job Hunt Log was filled with ‘Rejection’ and ‘No Response.’ The E-Commerce log was a giant column of broken promises and escalating ticket numbers. My mood rating hovered between 2 and 3, and I was spending only on the absolute necessities. I started to feel like a total fool for even believing the prediction for a second. The “huge shift” was looking like a huge slump.
THE REALIZATION: IT WASN’T MAGIC, IT WAS MOMENTUM
The blog post had circled March 15th as the peak of the cosmic alignment. March 15th rolled around. Nothing. I was actually pulled into a meeting where my boss essentially told me I was being quietly phased out of the main team. I had hit rock bottom. I thought, “Well, so much for the stars.”
But the practice of tracking had created momentum. Even though I felt hopeless, I still went home, opened the sheet, and logged my daily three applications. I made my call to the payment gateway. I had done it every day for two weeks straight, and I wasn’t going to stop now.
Then, suddenly, the shift came. Not on the 15th, but on the 18th.
- First, the E-Commerce Log: I got an email. Not a standard ticket response, but a personal call from a manager at the payment company. They finally found the core issue—a server-side authentication error on their end—and promised a fix by the end of the day. And they delivered. That night, my store was finally live.
- Second, The Job Hunt Log: A company I had applied to way back in January, who had ghosted me for two months, suddenly called. They said, “The role you applied for filled up, but we loved your resume, and we have a new, much higher-level position opening up immediately. Can you interview tomorrow?”
The shift wasn’t a windfall dropping money from the sky. It was the result of the sheer volume of action I had logged in the depressing columns of that spreadsheet. The energy, the “luck,” only landed because I had spent weeks preparing the runway. I took that new, higher-level role. The salary boost was enormous—exactly the kind of “financial change” the blog promised. But it wasn’t the stars; it was the two dozen job applications and the daily, irritating phone calls I’d logged. My practice proved that you can force the universe’s hand if you just keep showing up and logging the effort.
