Man, sometimes you stumble across things in your digital archives and they just smack you in the face. I’ve been trying to clean up my old cloud storage—you know, that endless mess of PDFs from 2012 and screenshots you took for reasons you can’t remember—and I found this folder simply labeled “Random Crap.”
I clicked into it, expecting maybe a few old receipts. Instead, I pulled out a screenshot I must have taken back in November 2017. It was a clipping from some astrology site. Yeah, I used to read those things sometimes, mostly for a laugh. The title was specific: “Virgo Career Horoscope: December 2017 Forecast.”
The prediction was pretty standard, flowery stuff. Something about how “long-term efforts finally coalesce,” and that “professional recognition is due, likely resulting in an elevation of status or title.” I remembered reading it, shrugging it off, and thinking, “Sure, whatever, maybe I’ll get a better coffee mug.”
But when I read that specific line again this week, five years later, a massive memory just slammed into me. Because that December, everything was absolutely chaotic.
The Mess That Was Late 2017
Back then, I was totally immersed in the launch of Project Titan. This was the big one. It was supposed to streamline our entire reporting infrastructure. If it failed, we were going to lose a massive enterprise client. If it succeeded, it would be the new benchmark for the company globally.
My team and I were drowning in architectural issues. We had identified a severe bottleneck in the data ingestion pipeline, and fixing it meant rewriting code we’d already promised was stable. Management was breathing down our necks. We were pulling consecutive 18-hour days, fueled by stale pizza and lukewarm energy drinks.
I drove myself crazy trying to solve the core integration puzzle. I slept maybe four hours a night for two weeks straight. I took ownership of the entire rewrite process, sitting side-by-side with the engineers, diving deep into the documentation, figuring out why the legacy system and the new API just would not talk to each other cleanly.
December 2017 wasn’t about horoscopes; it was about sheer, painful, professional survival. I did the work because it needed doing. I ignored everything else—my social life, my sanity—to make sure that system shipped clean before the year-end deadline.
Here’s what I logged about my effort during that critical time:
- Verified over 4,000 lines of new integration code personally.
- Coordinated three simultaneous hotfixes across two continents.
- Presented the final architectural solution to the executive board on December 20th, 2017.
- Received an email from my manager at 11:30 PM on Christmas Eve telling me the client signed off on the initial test phase.
The Timing That Blew My Mind
The system went live successfully on January 1st, 2018. We all breathed a massive sigh of relief. We were zombies, but we were successful zombies.
Then came the Q4 review cycle. Because of the critical success of Titan, my manager nominated me for an accelerated performance review. I walked into that review meeting in late January, still expecting just the standard “good job” handshake and maybe a small bonus.
Instead, the Regional VP sat me down and spent 15 minutes talking about the “leadership and ownership” I demonstrated during the Titan crisis. He stated clearly that my performance had fundamentally changed the department’s outlook for the next year. He then told me I was officially being promoted from Senior Analyst to Manager, effective immediately, with a hefty 20% bump and a dedicated team reporting to me.
I accepted the new role, of course. It was earned. It was the direct result of that horrible, sleepless December grind. But for years, I just categorized it as “hard work pays off,” end of story.
Connecting the Dots Five Years Later
When I re-read that silly screenshot from the horoscope this week—the one talking about the “elevation of status or title” linked to “long-term efforts” coalescing in December 2017—I just sat there staring at the screen.
Did I get a promotion? Hell yes, I did. And the window of the prediction—December 2017 for the efforts, January 2018 for the formal recognition—was shockingly tight.
Did the horoscope cause the promotion? Absolutely not. My tired hands typing code at 3 AM caused the promotion.
But here’s the interesting thing I realized about these sorts of predictions. When I took that screenshot back in November 2017, I was already in the middle of that grinding effort. That prediction, no matter how vague, might have planted a tiny seed. It might have subtly affirmed that the ridiculous effort I was putting in wasn’t wasted time. It might have encouraged me to push through that final, brutal wall of December.
My new methodology now is this: Treat every vague positive prediction as a hidden assignment. If someone tells you you’re going to succeed, act like you deserve it and put in the work to make the prediction true. The universe might give you the timing, but you still have to deliver the effort.
So, yeah. My look back at the 2017 Virgo career horoscope was eerie. It didn’t predict my future, but it perfectly described the hard-fought reward that followed the most intense effort I’d put into a project up to that point. It taught me that sometimes, you just have to document the insane efforts you are making, even if it’s just a silly screenshot, because five years later, it helps you understand exactly how far you’ve come.
