What does Seven of Cups mean for career and work?

Too many directions, none committed to. Daydreaming about work instead of doing any.

It is the card of the person with four business ideas, none started, each of which is more appealing than the one they began last month. The tradition is unsentimental: the appeal is inversely proportional to how much is known about it.

Reversed, a decision finally made. The practical reading upright is to pick the one with the least glamour and the most information, and to accept that the others were partly a way of not starting.

Choice overload, wishful thinking, illusion. Options that look better than they are, with one that is genuinely good hidden among them.

The hidden good option matters. This is not a card that says everything on offer is worthless; it says the presentation is unreliable and the sorting has not been done.

In an advice position it asks for something specific and dull: investigate one of them properly rather than imagining all seven. The card is quite clear that the imagining is the pleasurable part and the reason nothing progresses.

Clarity arriving. Cutting through to the real option and committing to it, usually with some relief.

Or, less happily, retreating into fantasy entirely, where the options have stopped being candidates and become a place to live.

The useful test the tradition offers is time. A choice that has been open for a long time is not being considered, and the card reversed is often the point at which somebody notices how long it has been.

Upright: choices, illusion, fantasy, overwhelm, wishful thinking

Reversed: clarity, commitment, disillusion, escapism

• Which of these options would I still want if nobody knew I had chosen it?
• What am I imagining rather than investigating?