Honestly, when I first came up with this headline, I wasn’t even thinking about what the stars said in November 2019. I wasn’t reading horoscopes back then. I was too busy making the very mistakes that thing warned about. This whole session, this whole practice log, wasn’t about following advice; it was about back-checking the wreckage to see if the cosmic navigation system was right and I was just a blind pilot.
My first move? I had to dig up the darn thing. I mean, a four-year-old specific career reading? That took some serious searching. I just punched in a bunch of simple variations like “Virgo career Nov 2019 worst warnings” until I finally pulled up a few archived blog posts and forum discussions that were spitting out the same key phrases. It was like piecing together a crime scene using old newspaper clippings.
The Initial Scrutiny: What I Should Have Avoided
I scrutinized the common warnings that kept popping up. They basically boiled down to three main points, which I jotted down quickly:
- Warning 1: Avoid relying on unstable income streams or side ventures; stability is key.
- Warning 2: Do not engage in major financial risks related to your primary career network (avoid lending/borrowing money with colleagues).
- Warning 3: Do not ignore the obvious red flags from a toxic or unstable leadership team; start looking now.
Reading these now, four years later, just made me slump back in my chair. Because that exact time, November 2019 and rolling into early 2020, was when I walked straight into all three of those traps. Not accidentally. I sprinted toward them, full speed ahead.
The Real-Life Screw-Up: My Practice Timeline
What actually happened? Well, my life had taken a sharp turn just before that. My wife had just landed a big, new demanding job, and we were scrambling to cover the unexpected, huge costs of specialized childcare. Suddenly, my steady paycheck, which had always been enough, felt like it was choking under the pressure. I felt this need to make quick money to ease the strain, which launched me right into the very thing the horoscope warned me about: unstable income.
I hooked up with a couple of guys from my old company—a “network” I trusted. They were pushing hard on this supposed “can’t lose” side-project, saying the payout would be massive within six months. It sounded too good, but I was stressed out and needed the cash injection. I dumped a sizable chunk of our savings into it, borrowing a little extra to make the investment “worthwhile.” That checked off Warning 1 and Warning 2 right there.
And what about Warning 3? My boss at the time was a hot mess. Everyone knew it. He’d yell at people one day and pretend to be your best friend the next. My colleagues were quietly slipping out for interviews, but I stayed put. Why? Because I was so focused on that side hustle and recovering the money I’d sunk into it that I shut my eyes to the toxicity of the main job. I convinced myself it was temporary; I could manage the boss until the ‘big payoff’ arrived.
The Inevitable Crash and the Aftermath
The “big payoff” never came. The side hustle? It collapsed in March 2020, right when the world was really getting weird. The guys I invested with? They vanished, literally. I lost every dime I put in, plus the added debt. I had to sit down and stare at the balance sheet and face the fact that I’d bet our stability on a pipe dream.
Then, the main job imploded. Because of the economic shift and my boss’s terrible management, the company downsized massively, and guess who was the first to be shown the door because they were already mentally checked out and constantly dealing with the side hustle stress? Yep, me.
It was a rough couple of months. I felt like a total idiot. I spent days just walking around the neighborhood, trying to figure out how I’d been so incredibly stupid. I had zero income, debt, and a high-stress family life. I had to scramble to take any freelance gig I could find, just to keep the lights on and stop digging the hole deeper.
My Hard-Won Realization: The Blogger is Born
This whole experience hammered home one thing: I was making major life decisions based on panic and hope, not on cold, hard facts. The horoscope, this silly thing I never believed in, had spelled out the danger perfectly, and I ignored every single line. I vowed then and there to start documenting every single practical, real-world decision I made from then on—good or bad—to force myself to be accountable. I started this blog not as an expert, but as a guy logging his own recovery from a massive failure.
So, the “practice” today? It confirmed that the universe, or random algorithms, or whatever, often gives you the warning. The practice is learning to listen to the quiet voice, even if it sounds like a silly career horoscope from 2019. If I had just taken ten minutes to read that thing back then, I would have paused, and that pause would have saved me a year of financial stress and my old job.
My advice? Pull up your old timelines. Find the warnings you ignored. And log the hell out of your failures. That’s where the real lessons are hidden, not in the victories.
