January 3

Who you are

You are ambitious and you have stopped apologising for it. Plenty of people want exactly what you want and dress the wanting up as service or passion. You just say it. That honesty unsettles the ones who prefer their ambition disguised, but it saves you enormous amounts of time and it makes you unexpectedly easy to work with, because nobody has to guess your motive.

What separates you is patience. You will take the job that pays less because of what it teaches, sit through the years nobody writes about, and keep going past the point where most people conclude it is not happening. You are not chasing a good year. You are building a position, and you can wait a very long time for it without losing interest.

Your gifts

• Honest wanting. You know what you are after, which means you rarely waste a decade on the wrong thing.
• Tolerance for the boring part. You do the unglamorous middle years that most ambition never survives.
• Self correction. You can hear that you were wrong and change course without needing a week to recover.

Your shadow

Ambition running unsupervised turns everything into a rung. You start measuring friendships by usefulness, weekends by output, and your own life by whether it is ahead of schedule. Arriving somewhere gives you about four days of satisfaction before the next target appears. The danger is not that you fail. It is that you succeed and feel almost nothing.

Your soul work

Your work is deciding what the climbing is for, and answering honestly. Choose a few people and a few things that stay valuable even in a bad year. Achievement is a fine engine and a poor destination, and you have enough clarity to tell the difference if you look.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The tenth sign is the mountain goat with a fish tail: ambition with depth beneath it. Capricorn carries mastery, and the lesson of what summits are for.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

Check a friend's day, or your partner's, and send it to them.