Man, sometimes life just throws you back to a weird place. I spent all of last weekend doing one of those dreadful deep-dives into the storage closet, the kind where you pull out boxes you haven’t touched since the last election cycle. I was mainly looking for my old camping gear, but instead, I hauled out a filthy cardboard box marked “2015-2018 Junk Files.”
I cracked that thing open, and right there on top was this tattered notebook. Not a fancy leather one, just one of those cheap spirals with a coffee stain shaped like a small continent. I almost tossed it. Then I flicked through the pages. I stumbled upon a printout—yes, an actual paper printout—of a 2017 Pisces career and money horoscope. That’s what triggered this whole retrospective mess.
The 2017 Prediction I Nearly Trashed
I distinctly remember printing this thing off in early January 2017. Why on paper? Who even knows. Maybe my phone battery was dead. The headline on the printout was something ridiculous, all caps: “MID-YEAR ECLIPSE SPARKS MASSIVE PISCEAN PAYDAY.” I scoffed back then, I really did, but I’m a sucker for a challenge. Below the printout, in my own messy scrawl, I penciled down three financial benchmarks I needed to hit that year, just to see if the stars actually had a clue.
These weren’t official business goals; these were pure ego-driven targets. The horoscope promised a massive payout from a “new partnership venture” around August. So, I took my real, sensible goals and superimposed them onto the horoscope timeline. I basically decided to structure my side hustle around this celestial nonsense.
- Target 1 (Q1, Jan-Mar): Secure three small retainer clients. (Reality Check: Did I even try before the horoscope said so?)
- Target 2 (Q2/Q3, Apr-Aug): Secure the “big partnership” that leads to 50% of the annual goal. (The ‘Eclipse Payday’ Window.)
- Target 3 (Q4, Sep-Dec): Use the cash injection to stabilize operations and finish the year strong.
It sounds stupid, I know. But the practice here wasn’t believing the horoscope; the practice was using it as a weird, arbitrary project deadline structure. I always needed an external push, and this time, the universe provided a completely bogus one.
Chasing the ‘Eclipse Payday’
I spent the first half of 2017 absolutely grinding. I wasn’t just waiting around. I hustled to land those retainer clients. I sent out dozens of cold emails. I took every meeting. Q1 hit Target 1. Solid. Not cosmic intervention, just pure elbow grease.
The real fun started in Q2, the run-up to the mythical August payday. I was working on a massive project with a couple of guys I knew from a forum—a proper, large-scale collaboration, precisely what the horoscope called a “partnership venture.” I was totally focused on this project, believing (or maybe just hoping) this would be the promised big money spike. I remember logging every single expense and every bit of anticipated revenue in a dedicated, color-coded spreadsheet. I was meticulous. I poured months of my life into that project, constantly checking the calendar, waiting for the August ‘eclipse’ to hit.
Then August came. And went. What happened to the big partnership venture? It imploded. Not in a dramatic, movie-style failure, but in a messy, slow-motion fizzle. The other guys had different priorities, the scope ballooned, and the whole thing just crashed and burned, leaving me with nothing but a giant pile of non-billable hours. The big, promised payout was exactly zero dollars. I remember throwing the notebook across the room in frustration.
The True Practice: Digging Through the Records
This is where the real work of this retrospective started last weekend. I yanked open my 2017 expense tracker—a dusty, old Excel file. I dug into the bank statements I’d saved in a folder marked ‘Tax Hell.’ I cross-referenced the goals I’d written in the notebook with the actual numbers in the spreadsheet. It was brutal, raw data.
What I discovered wasn’t a failure, but a complete misattribution of effort and reward. The horoscope failed miserably, but I didn’t.
Q2 and Q3, the very quarters where the big partnership went sideways, were actually my best quarters. Why? Because while I was busy worrying about the Big Partnership, the three small retainer clients I’d secured in Q1 were quietly churning out reliable, consistent revenue. They weren’t flashy, they weren’t ‘eclipse-driven,’ but they paid the bills and then some. My income graph for that year didn’t have a massive August mountain; it had a steady, upward-sloping hill. I tracked back the final numbers against my original, sensible annual goal (not the horoscope-driven one), and I found out I actually exceeded it by 15%.
The Verdict: Was It a Big Money Year?
Yes, 2017 was a big money year. But it had absolutely nothing to do with the stars, and everything to do with the boring, foundational work I hated doing.
That notebook, that silly printout, and those arbitrary deadlines pushed me to secure the retainers in Q1. That, it turns out, was the real ‘massive payday.’ It just came from compounding effort, not from an astrological event.
The practice I documented and reviewed here is simple: Always track your work, no matter how stupid the initial motivation is. If I hadn’t kept that ridiculous notebook, and if I hadn’t logged every single dollar in that spreadsheet, I’d just remember 2017 as the year the big partnership failed. Instead, I see it as the year boring consistency finally paid off big. Digging up these records was a reminder that you don’t need a cosmic spark; you just need to keep showing up and tracking your progress. The universe is just noise; your spreadsheet is the truth.
That’s the entire journey, start to finish. I tossed the printout back in the box, but I kept the spiral notebook. It’s a good reminder.
