The Grind and the Stupid Wall I Kept Hitting
You know that feeling when you’ve been slugging away at something for ages, pouring time and cash into it, and you just feel totally stuck? Like you’re watching the paint dry? That was me for the last eighteen months with this side business I was trying to get off the ground.
I was still holding onto my regular day job—good salary, good stability, a comfy setup—but every single evening, every single weekend, I was shoveling hours into this new Project. I invested my own savings, I dragged a couple of friends in with me, and we just kept running in place. It wasn’t failing, which would have been easier, but it wasn’t succeeding either. It was just stuck in a kind of purgatory. I remember staring at the spreadsheets and getting this knot in my stomach: I couldn’t decide if I needed to dump another ten grand into marketing or just close the whole damn thing down and cut my losses. It was a crappy decision to be facing, especially after sacrificing so much.
I’ve always kept a record of my thinking when I’m faced with these big forks in the road. It’s a habit I picked up after watching my brother tank his business because he relied purely on “gut feeling” and never wrote anything down. He just kept digging himself into a deeper hole based on vague hope. I vowed I wouldn’t do that. So, I started using my old deck, not for fortune-telling BS, but for a structured way to look at the immediate action I needed to take. That’s where the 7 of Pentacles came in, but not the way you think.
The Dumb Way I Used to Wait and What Forced My Hand
Before this specific practice, whenever I’d pull the 7 of Pentacles, I’d just read it as a sign to “Be Patient” or “Wait for the Harvest.” I’d then tell myself to just keep doing what I was doing and wait another six months. I wasted so much time with that approach. It’s lazy thinking. It’s not an action; it’s an excuse to stay paralyzed.
The real shift happened last fall. The person I’d partnered with on this Project—a guy who was great at talking but terrible at actual work—insisted we needed to take out a small loan and buy a bunch of expensive equipment for a part of the Project that hadn’t even generated a dollar yet. He was absolutely convinced this equipment was the magic key. I sat there in the meeting, listening to him ramble on, and I looked at my notes which showed he hadn’t completed a single one of his promised tasks for the last three months. I suddenly saw the card in my mind, but this time it wasn’t saying “wait.” It was saying: “Evaluate the worth of the wait itself.”
That day I walked out of the office, straight to my deck, and I pulled the card for the immediate action required to deal with this situation, not the outcome. The 7 of Pentacles was staring up at me, depicting that farmer standing there, leaning on his tool, looking at the crop. I realized he wasn’t waiting for the crop to grow on its own; he was actively judging if the previous effort was worth any more of his time and sweat. That was the breakthrough.
My “7 of Pentacles Action” Protocol for Decisions
I wrote down three specific verbs based on that image. These became the actions I committed to before I made any decision about the loan, the partner, or the Project’s future. I called it my “Field Assessment Protocol.”
Step 1: Halt the Tending.
- My immediate action was to impose a 14-day freeze on all new Project spending and work, except for maintenance. I literally stopped tending the field. This gave me space to see things clearly without the momentum bias of “being busy.”
- I pulled all the books. I didn’t look at potential revenue; I only looked at sunk costs: dollars, hours, and opportunity cost.
Step 2: Scrutinize the Investment (The Soil).
- The image is one man and seven pentacles. I had to identify my seven biggest investments (time blocks, financial deposits, key relationships).
- I created a simple chart. Left column: Investment. Right column: Actual Return (Measured, not Projected).
- I realized one of my “investments” was my old partner himself. His column was basically zero return, but massive time drain. Another was a complicated piece of software that cost a fortune but we barely used.
Step 3: Prune, Don’t Plant.
- The action of the card, when you use it for decision-making, is a Pruning action, not a planting one. The farmer has to decide if he needs to remove the dead wood or if he needs to rip up the whole plant.
- I didn’t quit my stable job, but I did quit the things that were sucking energy out of the Project. I immediately told my partner I was ending our collaboration. It was messy, but it was honest. I cut out the expensive software and replaced it with a cheap, clunky alternative.
The Realization: Focusing the Remaining Energy
The result of this practice wasn’t a huge financial windfall, not yet anyway. The achievement was the sudden, massive reduction in stress and confusion. I didn’t make the big, glamorous decision to “quit and go for broke.” I made the hard, realistic decision to eliminate the 80% of activity that was wasting the other 20% of good effort.
Using the 7 of Pentacles as an action verb—as a command to stop, assess, and strategically prune—forced me to apply a brutal, honest assessment of where my resources were actually going. It stopped me from throwing more money into a situation just because I was scared to admit the previous investment was flawed. The decision was no longer about predicting the future harvest; it was about honoring the present investment by protecting it from bad spending. Now, I’m running a smaller, cleaner Project, and for the first time in two years, I actually feel like I’m building something solid, instead of just staring anxiously at the dirt.
