The Best Month That Wasn’t: Tracking the Career Horoscope Mess
Man, 2020 was just a total dumpster fire, wasn’t it? I swear, I was floating, just doing busy work, trying to pretend the world hadn’t stopped. I was stuck in this job that paid the bills but gave zero actual satisfaction. Zero direction. I was getting sloppy. My motivation was running on fumes.
So, I did something really stupid, something the ‘old me’ would have laughed at: I checked my sign. I dug up this “Virgo Career Horoscope 2020 Monthly” thing—I remember seeing the title: “The Best Month… Check Your Path!” I wasn’t usually into that stuff, but hey, when you’re desperate and the world is chaos, you grab any ridiculous lifeline you can find. The ‘best month’ was supposed to be September, based on their dating. I decided to treat the last two weeks of August as preparation, and then commit fully.
I decided to turn this abstract cosmic advice into a concrete, mandatory tracking project. The horoscope was vague, full of junk about “aligning your core values” and “reaching out to new moons.” I translated that mush into four hard, trackable tasks. This was my path, and I was going to check it every day.
Turning Vague Hope into Mandatory Tracking
The system was simple: a big Google Sheet with daily columns. Green if I hit the goal, red if I whiffed it. My commitment was to track these four things for 30 days straight, starting late August, hoping for that ‘best month’ payoff in September:
- Ditching the Dead Weight: This was the big one. Stop wasting time on side projects that hadn’t generated $1 in six months. That meant killing the antique eBay store idea that was sucking up my evenings. I had to formally document that I sent the final “closing shop” email.
- Aggressive Networking: Mandate two new professional coffee meetings per week (even if they were awkward, terrible Zoom calls). I had to log the person’s name, role, and one specific takeaway, even if the takeaway was “This person hates their life.”
- Skill Consolidation: Dedicate 10 hours a week only to mastering the core skill my actual paycheck depended on. For me, that was advanced database management and querying, something I kept putting off because it was boring. I had to log specific modules completed.
- Boundary Enforcement: Say ‘no’ to at least one low-priority request from the boss per week, just to regain some control over my schedule. This had to be tracked by showing the initial request and my response saying, “I can’t prioritize that right now.”
I started the process full tilt. I was obsessed with filling those squares green. I killed the eBay shop in three hours—surprisingly easy, once I forced the issue. The database modules were painful, but I was checking the clock and forcing myself through the material. I was feeling great about my dedication, despite the total worldwide weirdness.
The Execution Disaster and the Accidental Lifeboat
But the ‘Aggressive Networking’ goal? That was a joke. Absolute misery. People were remote, stressed, and totally uninterested in taking a cold Zoom call with some dude trying to follow a career horoscope. The calls were silent, awkward, and usually ended with me muttering something about “synergistic alignment.” I felt like a pest. But I kept forcing it. I checked the boxes anyway, even if the result was garbage.
I was so focused on hitting those metrics—especially the database training—that I nearly missed the whole thing crumbling around me. The real kick in the teeth happened during the second week of September, the supposed “best month.”
I was trying to set up one of those miserable ‘networking’ calls with a former colleague who had jumped ship six months prior. I sent her a quick message asking if she had time. She replied quickly, but she accidentally forwarded me an old internal email chain she thought she had deleted from her drafts folder.
I opened it, and my stomach dropped. The email chain, dated from early August (right when I started my silly horoscope project), showed my boss and HR planning to completely restructure my team and outsource the exact advanced database management role I was spending 10 hours a week studying for! They were labeling it “legacy infrastructure” and budgeting to offload it to a cheaper vendor overseas.
I felt sick. I was diligently following this “path” laid out by the stars, only to find the literal ground was about to be bulldozed underneath me by the people cutting my paychecks. I realized that all my effort focusing on ‘mastering the path’ had made me blind to the environment.
The Pivot and the Power of the Record
The horoscope didn’t tell me to look over my shoulder, but the process of tracking did something essential. Because I had diligently tracked who I talked to, what I studied, and what I said ‘no’ to, I had a documented record of my real priorities and capabilities.
I stopped studying advanced database management that very hour. I switched instantly to learning Python automation, which was mentioned once in that leaked internal email as a critical new skill they couldn’t outsource yet. I used the ‘Aggressive Networking’ list I’d built—those miserable connections—to ask two people who worked in Python automation exactly what resources they used.
I managed to completely switch my internal focus in three weeks, even while pretending to my boss I was still struggling through the final database manuals. I was tracking the new Python hours under the old “Skill Consolidation” heading, quietly substituting the subject matter.
When the official restructure announcement finally came down in late October, my name wasn’t on the list for elimination. Why? Because I had the receipts. I had my tracking sheet, which I quickly modified to reflect the “real” path I had taken since the email leak. I walked into the HR meeting, not with a plea, but with a document showing my rapid, self-directed deployment into a new, critical tech stack that aligned with their future needs, not their outsourced past.
Did the “Virgo Career Horoscope 2020” give me the best month? Hell no. It was a catalyst for intense, documented self-assessment that exposed the absolute mess I was in. The power wasn’t in the prediction; it was in the commitment to checking the path every single day, which forced me to see the reality lurking outside my spreadsheet. If I hadn’t meticulously logged that pathetic attempt to network with my former colleague, I wouldn’t have had the contact who forwarded the email. That whole ridiculous, horoscope-driven mess saved my entire career.
