YouandTheTarot

  Are the ambitious a menace in organizations?  Too often they are one-dimensionally focused on achieving their professional goals, not moving the dial on those of the organization. Functioning as a stand-alone closed system they can gum up the works. Along the way they usually derail their own careers. For instance, the joke in elite law firms is that grinders finish last.  On Substack I discuss the plight of the ambitious. What can turn around the situation is being roughed up. That can happen at the onset of a career or in middle age as with the late Lee Iacocca. The former iconic GE professional training institution Crontonville is said only to have admitted employers who already had been knocked around. In interviewing at professional schools law firms such as Skadden, Simpson and Paul and management consulting ones such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting and Deloitte should ask: How ambitious are you? Should the answer be very, the applicants should be rejected out-rig...

  "I don't want my children to go through what I have in trying to keep my tech career propped up." Essentially that's what parents have been telling psychics like myself. In addition to empathy for what they've been endured professionally, they want us to project where the work will be in the future.  Well, not even those of us who channel into current energy force fields can guarantee those will be sustainable. There are too many intersecting variables. I for one do agree with The Wall Street Journal that there has been a shift away from the overall tech sector and toward more creative and people-oriented lines of work. Some major names in tech are actually steering their offspring from replicating their career paths. But no one, at least not anyone who doesn't want to sound foolish, is forecasting where demand will be once those children are ready to start to earn a living.  The reality is that pendulums are always swinging. When I get concrete in career g...

  "I was reeling. I had just been laid off. Yes, early that morning. Never saw it coming. And, that evening, a few in my 12-step group congratulated me. Said that now I could now begin a new journey." A client shared that trauma during an emergency tarot-reading session.  This horror is not atypical. Not in 2025.  More and more organizations which are billed as anything from vibration-raising to support pile on various forms of toxic positivity. Essentially the message is: View things optimistically or else. The group doesn't tolerate any shade of inner darkness. And it gets off the hook on having to provide authentic empathy. Toxic positivity is the worst kind of emotional bullying because it's imposed on people going through flashpoints in their life.  I have a hunch: This harsh push onto the sunny side of the street might be becoming an epidemic because human beings are unable to get their heads around the new order of things. That extreme shift extends from knowl...

In the tarot the predator card is represented by the miscreant making off with swords. Swords symbolize the ability of the human intellect. And so much of mankind's inhumanity to each other takes the form of cognitive manipulation and downright oppression.  In too many of tarot sessions clients recount to me the cruel mental arrogance of superiors, co-workers, the smug, the wealthy, dean/professors in higher education and more. Until recently the best guidance I could offer was how clients could insulate themselves from those kinds of mind games.  Now, with the old order coming down - represented in the tarot by the Death card - those platforms for arrogance could collapse.  Unemployment, with no way back to that career path, will do it. Did you ever observe a former professional who's been out of work for two years? Beyond humbled. More like broken. Reduction of power and influence has the same sort of impact. When a corporation is acquired the brass at the conquered vis...

  "I couldn't even get one of those home-care assignments, helping the elderly with daily tasks." That's what a client with advanced degrees blurted out during a tarot reading session. What was obvious to me is they had put the value on their expensively trained cognitive ability, not fundamental human traits such as intuitive listening, empathy, patience and lifting moods.  Right now, as AI takes over more and more complex knowledge work, there's a shrinking market for individual brilliance. In a seminal essay in Bloomberg this weekend, Azeem Azhar poses this question for both professionals and organizations:  "What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?" AI is plenty smart and getting smarter all the time. Azhar points out that work as we have known it had been organized and rewarded based on the assumption that the number of authentically brilliant minds is limited. Pre-AI employers competed aggressively to h...