Man, I never thought I’d be the type of guy talking about pulling cards to figure out where my next paycheck was coming from. Seriously. I was always the spreadsheet-and-logic guy. If it couldn’t be calculated, it wasn’t real. That’s how I rolled for two decades.
Things went sideways for me a few years back. Not like a fire-sale sideways, but a slow, grinding mess. I was at this company, right? I had put in the hours, the late nights, the whole deal. I was running the team practically single-handedly, and the big boss promised me that promotion, the big desk, the proper title. I banked on it.
Then, bam. They bring in some kid fresh out of somewhere fancy, gave him my title, and told me, “Hey, we’ve got a new ‘mentoring’ opportunity for you.” Mentoring, my butt. It was a slap in the face. I was furious. I started drinking too much coffee and sleeping too little. My head was just soup. I tried the job boards, revised the resume twenty times, but nothing felt right. Everything looked like the same rat race, just in a different building.
I was sitting on my couch one Saturday, scrolling through absolute garbage, feeling sorry for myself, when I tripped over a weird little ad. Something about a “Career Path Discovery.” I almost scrolled right past it. But I was so desperate for some kind of sign, I clicked it. I figured, what’s the harm? It’s not like I was going to sacrifice a goat or anything, right?
My First Accidental Reading
The site was kinda tacky, honestly. But it walked me through this process of asking a question about my immediate future. My question was simple: “Should I stay or should I go?” I had to pick three cards on the screen. I was laughing under my breath while I clicked. I mean, this was ridiculous. But when the cards flipped over, I stopped laughing.
Now, I don’t remember the exact cards, but I remember the ‘reading.’ It wasn’t some crystal ball telling me the name of the company I should join. It was more like a hard talk with myself. It said I was holding onto something that was already dead, and that my real problem wasn’t the job market, but my own stubborn refusal to learn a new skill I kept putting off. It hit me like a ton of bricks because that was absolutely true. I had been meaning to learn that new database system for like six months, but always found an excuse.
That little online reading, free as it was, kicked me in the pants way harder than any résumé workshop ever did. It wasn’t magic; it was just a different way of getting my own head straight. It was like I needed some weird external validation to listen to the little voice I’d been ignoring.
I decided I wasn’t just going to wait around. I went out and bought the cheapest deck I could find, just a basic rider-waite thing. I figured, if I can do this simple reading for myself, maybe I can figure out how it actually works. It became a weird kind of evening ritual. I didn’t want the “fortune-teller” stuff; I wanted the “self-reflection tool.”
The Practice Run: The Three-Card Career Spread
I started practicing a super simple three-card career spread on myself and then, once I was less embarrassed, on my buddy who was also stuck in a rut. I’m telling you, it’s not about predicting the future. It’s about focusing the question so sharply that when you look at those symbols, your own brain spits out the answer you already know deep down.
Here’s the basic setup that became my go-to for job questions:
- Card 1: The Foundation. What is the current root problem, the thing keeping you stuck in the past job or mindset?
- Card 2: The Block. What is the immediate challenge or self-sabotaging behavior you are doing right now?
- Card 3: The Action. What is the next logical step you need to take to move the needle? Not the final answer, just the next move.
It’s all action verbs, no flowery language. When I got a card that looked dark, like the Tower or something, I didn’t freak out. I just read it as: “Okay, you need to break something to rebuild. What needs to go right now—the toxic manager, the dead-end skill, or the whole company?” It forces a choice.
I kept a physical log, just a cheap notebook, writing down the question, the cards, and the interpretation I landed on that night. Sometimes I looked back a month later and realized I was totally wrong about the card’s meaning, but the action it made me take was exactly right. It’s the action that matters, not the prediction.
It helped me pull the trigger on leaving that company and diving headfirst into learning the stuff I’d put off. Now I actually feel like I’m building something, not just collecting a paycheck. And every time a buddy calls, totally fried from their job, I tell them, “Sit down, let’s pull three cards. You’ll figure it out.” It works because it forces them to talk about the block. That’s the real secret. You unlock the future by getting real about the present.
