Look, when you first try reading three cards, it’s an absolute mess. It’s supposed to be simple, but it always turns into this confusing, knotted-up disaster. You pull The Hierophant, then you get the 5 of Swords, and maybe the Ace of Wands. What is that? A traditional education ends up feeling like a betrayal, and the answer is just starting a new project? You grab the book, flip through the pages, trying to connect fifteen keywords from Card 1 to twenty keywords from Card 2, and the whole thing gums up. It’s a waste.
Every single beginner I see messes this up. They treat the cards like a math problem that has to be solved with the right formula. They want a rule for when a suit is a verb and a Major Arcana card is a subject. Stop that nonsense. You turn a story, a conversation, into this boring, lifeless data dump. It becomes this insane inventory system you have to track. It’s like trying to build an entire company on a single, incomplete software tool. You end up with a huge database of facts that never actually tells you a story or shows you a direction. It just creates noise.
I dealt with this noise for months, maybe a year. I was always chasing the “right” combination meaning, but I never felt like I actually read anything. I just felt like I was memorizing a dictionary. So, I walked away from all the fancy rules. I threw out the books that talked about patterns and numerology in combinations. I decided to start from zero and train my brain to link, not to define.
My Crude Practice Log: Force the Story
I made a rule: no more than three cards, ever. And I forced myself to use only two super-simple, almost stupid layouts. I had to practice every morning before the sun was fully up. The goal wasn’t a profound reading; the goal was speed and absolute clarity. I needed my eyes to see a movie, not a stack of flashcards.
My first layout was all about action. I grabbed a pen, I grabbed my deck, and I wrote these three headings down:
- Card 1: Where are you at right now? (The simple, immediate situation, no deeper meaning)
- Card 2: What is the main friction? (The one thing actively blocking Card 1)
- Card 3: What’s the next single step? (Not the solution, just the immediate action item)
Then I tried the second layout, which was even dumber, but forced a linear story:
- Card 1: Past Action (The seed you planted)
- Card 2: Current Reality (What the plant looks like now)
- Card 3: Inevitable Outcome (The fruit the plant will bear if you keep going)
The core practice was this: I pulled the three cards, slapped them down, and looked at them. Then, and this is the important part, I forced myself to write exactly one single sentence for the full three-card combination. Just one. No commas. No “buts” or “maybes.” Just one complete, rough sentence summarizing the entire spread. That was the whole log. Forcing that raw, short sentence cut out all the noise and made the combination move in my head. It forced the cards to become verb-verb-verb, or noun-verb-noun, instantly.
Why I Needed to Get This Basic
Why all this aggressive simplification? Why the focus on just one sentence? Because I couldn’t afford the time or the mental space for complicated nonsense. I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around quietly, sipping tea, trying to find the deeper cosmic links between the Major Arcana. That was a fantasy for me at the time.
I was working a soul-crushing job at the time. I was in a terrible, high-pressure managerial position where the boss was an absolute micro-managing nightmare. I was putting in 70+ hours a week, and I came home every night feeling like a zombie. I knew I needed to get out, to change my career, but I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even mentally process an email, let alone a complicated five-card spread.
I tried to do the big, comprehensive readings—The Celtic Cross, The Horseshoe, all the famous ones. But when I finished pulling the ten cards, or the seven cards, my brain would just shut down. It was information overload. It made me feel more paralyzed and more stuck than when I started. The reading itself was making my problem worse, it was another failure I was stacking on top of everything else.
So, one Sunday morning, sitting at my kitchen table with my deck and a cold cup of coffee, I pushed all the complex stuff away. I slammed down three cards and just looked at them like an instruction manual. I said out loud, “Just tell me what the hell is directly in front of me and what the only thing I need to do next is.”
The Realization That Turned Everything Around
That reading, the simplest, fastest one I’d ever done, was brutally honest. It was like a shot of cold water. It wasn’t about the boss or the career path—it showed me that the friction (Card 2) was my own inability to disconnect from the job after midnight. My “next step” (Card 3) was literally to commit to stopping work at 7 PM, no matter what. It wasn’t a magical solution, it was just the simplest physical action I could take to fix my focus. It was staring me right in the face.
I followed that stupidly simple advice. I forced myself to leave the work phone and computer off after 7 PM. That simple action freed up the minimal mental capacity I needed. Within a week, I was looking at job postings again with actual interest. Two weeks later, I was interviewing. I got out of that miserable job soon after. That entire chapter of my life ended because I stopped trying to read the three-card combination like an academic expert and started reading it like a desperate human being trying to find the nearest emergency exit.
That’s the trick, man. Force the story. Give the three cards a raw, simple structure. Don’t look up what the Judgment card means when it follows the King of Pentacles. Just look at the full line of three and tell the roughest, most honest, most useful story you can see.
