The 8 of Pentacles in the tarot is traditionally associated with craftsmanship, diligence, and focused effort. We see a solitary figure at his bench, hammering away with precision and care. It’s often read as a call to roll up your sleeves, master your craft, and devote yourself to the grind.
This image resonates with one of our most deeply rooted cultural beliefs: that success comes from hard, often relentless work. Thomas Edison famously declared, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” For generations, this formula has been the gold standard — a kind of sacred math of success.
This is basically what gets drummed into us from the time that we’re small children. We have to work very hard in elementary school, so that we’ll be ready to work very hard in high school, so that we’ll be ready to work very hard in college, so that we’ll be fully prepared to work very hard when we finally graduate.
Very, very hard work is the key to success in life. We all know that.
But what if that equation is upside down?
Enter the Field of Synchronicity
In her book Super Synchronicity, Susanne Koss offers a radically different perspective. She proposes that when we shift into the realm of synchronicity — that mysterious field where events line up with uncanny precision — the rules of time, effort, and productivity get rewritten.
Instead of spending 90% of our time grinding and 10% dreaming, Koss suggests we reverse the ratio:
“Spend 90% of your time visualizing what you want to accomplish, and only 10% in actual physical labor.”
It’s not about being lazy. It’s about learning to work with the flow rather than against it. When we align with this deeper field of meaning and connection, effort begins to take on a different quality. Things that once seemed far off can suddenly show up in our lives with surprising speed.
As she writes:
“Your old inner identity operates along a time line that aligns with the general assumption of how long things, ‘usually,’ take… But if you want to achieve your goals faster, you need to let go of your old concept of time.”
Visualize It, Don’t Build It
All of this actually makes a great deal of sense when we think about the basic process of visualizing and manifestation. As Mike Dooley likes to describe that process, “Thoughts become things.” Not, “Things become thoughts.”
When we manifest something through visualization, we’re taking our thoughts and investing them with huge amounts of our personal energy. As we continue to imagine all of the delicious details of our visualizations, we’re adding more and more energy until they finally achieve critical mass and manifest in the physical world.
With that basic formula, it obviously makes sense to spend more time visualizing and less time working. Actually, if working is taking away from our time visualizing, we’re going at it ass-backwards.
The Invention of Free Time
Another myth that we have about work is that the result is measured by the time that we put into it. If we only put a little bit of time into a project, then we can’t expect to get much out of it. And if it’s a really BIG project, like writing a book or starting our own business, then we HAVE to invest massive amounts of time in order to make it happen.
But something strange and wonderful happens when we enter into the field of synchronicity. Suddenly we’re showered with serendipity. Everything lines up just perfectly and totally unexpected opportunities pop up out of nowhere. What might have taken six months is suddenly accomplished in six weeks. What we expected to spend a year on comes to fruition in half that time.
Koss even jokes that she’s “the inventor of free time.” Behind the humor is a profound truth: we’ve been conditioned to equate time with toil, as if doing less invalidates our worth. But Koss has flipped that script. She shares that she often goes weeks or months doing “absolutely nothing” — simply enjoying life — until inspiration strikes and the next project emerges fully formed.
This isn’t procrastination. It’s alignment. It’s honoring the cycle of rest, gestation, and flow.
Reinterpreting the 8 of Pentacles
What if the 8 of Pentacles doesn’t just represent effort — but focused alignment? What if that solitary figure is absorbed not in laborious repetition, but in a meditative state of creation — following an inner spark rather than an external demand?
Maybe the card isn’t telling us to work harder. Maybe it’s inviting us to devote ourselves to what feels right, and to let go of the cultural pressure to earn our worth through exhaustion.
A New Work Ethic
In the magical, new work ethic of synchronicity, we’d be taught to spend a lot more time dreaming and a lot less time doing. We’d be taught that banging our heads against a brick wall when a project isn’t working out is stupid and that we should drop it and come back to it later. We’d be taught that working ourselves into a state of exhaustion is nothing more than a sign that we’re completely out of alignment with the Flow.
The myth of workaholism is exactly that — a myth. And like many myths, it contains a seed of truth but has grown into something unbalanced. The emerging paradigm — one that blends visualization, intention, and synchronicity — offers a kinder, faster, and more creative path forward.
It’s time to short-circuit the grind and reclaim our power as conscious co-creators with the Universe. Not by doing more — but by aligning more deeply with what truly moves us.
My new ebook, The Alchemy of the Mind, is available on Amazon at a very reasonable price.
Just the Tarot 