I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for GenXers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Yesterday I drew three Tarot cards, looking for guidance and inspiration. I didn’t like the first three cards I drew so I discarded them and chose again. This time I got what I wanted: The Star as my course of action. I had seen it while shuffling and I thought: that’s it! It was just fortune that it showed up in my second draw.
I don’t follow any strict rules about the Tarot, so I can redraw if I want. I just use the cards to tap into what I’m really thinking and hoping for, underneath my brain’s incessant chatter.
Lately I’ve been using ChatGPT to do my Tarot readings, which is fun. I tell it extensive details of a current situation, I report the cards I drew, and it gives me a very smart and validating reading.
For The Star as my course of action, ChatGPT said:
The Star is about healing, renewal, and aligning with your highest aspirations. It’s the card of hope after disruption, and an invitation to return to your true self—not just what you do, but who you are at your most luminous.
In terms of action, The Star says: nourish yourself emotionally and spiritually. Focus on what inspires you. Write the newsletter when you have something to say, not to meet a schedule. Paint what feels alive. Let the personal finance venture emerge from your unique voice, not industry templates.
It also asks you to trust in your long-term vision—even when it feels far away. The work you’re doing now is planting seeds. Keep showing up for your why.
Key Message: Reconnect with your inspiration and trust your authentic path. Prioritize alignment over productivity.
The idea of prioritizing alignment over productivity appeals to me. Last week I was gung ho ready to start recording my podcast but life intervened. My mom moved out of my house last week, and that disrupted my home situation. I started dating someone new, and things got intense quickly. My sisters came in town late in the week, to help my mom settle in and to help my dad with decluttering. This weekend has been filled with sisterly hangouts and family restaurant visits.
I keep trying to get myself to make progress based on goal setting, based on a sense of urgency, based on principles of productivity, based on defining a niche and sticking to it. Instead, I may need to go back to working through the inspiration that comes from getting in alignment with my deepest creative urges. Instead, maybe I need to trust my authentic path.
In Beyond Anxiety, Martha Beck refers to this kind of work as commingling with creation:
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s an odd phrase, partly because in our culture, very few people talk about anything like it. We favor discussions about how to compete, produce, get ahead, and otherwise please our left hemispheres. But once you’ve followed your creative interests far enough to master a skill or project, there will be periods when even the hard work of mastery becomes utterly blissful. There’s a sense of homecoming to this peaceful but intensely active state, a fierce delight in the process, a deep contentment that says you have found part of your life’s essential purpose.
Instead of using analytical planning, goal setting, and outside-in imposition of restrictions and tasks on myself, maybe I need to instead work inside-out, from my deepest creative urges, from my life’s essential purpose.
What would that look like next week? Instead of trying to write a newsletter that fits into some structured idea about what business I want to build to serve which target audience, maybe I write the newsletter article that seems to want to be channeled through me. I’ve been thinking about the concept of the block universe, and how the future is embedded in the present, and how we can feel reverberations of the future in the present. This potentially sits far outside the personal-finance-for-Gen-X content space I’ve been thinking I should target. But it is much more authentic to who I am.