Teaching is a Losing Game

Yesterday was my birthday! It was also the day I wrote a blog post about how to learn to read tarot and released a free workbook called TIY (Trust in Yourself!) Tarot! I've always found joy in giving and helping and teaching others.

A friend of mine wished me a happy birthday and best of luck with my new business, but raised a question that I hadn't actually thought much about. I've thought about it so much now that I felt compelled to write a blog post about it! So with this friend's permission, I want to lay my thoughts bare and also give gratitude to them for posing the question in the first place.

With no malice or ill intent, the question was,

"If you teach others to read tarot, why would anyone want to pay you to read for them, when they can just do it themselves?"

To be honest, I had never thought that deeply about this before. Why wouldn't I want to teach others? Why wouldn't they still want me to read for them? I pondered over these thoughts and it finally clicked that from my friend's perspective, teaching is a losing game.

When you think about it, in many Western nations, teachers and professors are some of the lowest-paying professional workers in the market, especially when we compare them to other more lucrative careers like those in medicine, law, and tech these days. But where would any of those doctors, lawyers, and software engineers be without the teachers and professors who raised them up? Surely, the teachers and professors themselves have the knowledge, experience, and skill set to perform those jobs, so then why do they choose to teach instead? Aren't they playing a losing game?

Here's my thought, summed up in one sentence.

There is no game.

That's right, there is no game. This "game" we've made up in our minds is wholly a product of capitalist society, which encourages us to compete and designate winners and losers. If there is a game, I'm not playing.

I don't want to look at teaching as a losing game, I don't want to look at it as a game at all. There is no competition because we can ALL win. When we teach others, we broaden the field of knowledge, introducing into it the possibility for even greater things. Each person can bring in unique and valuable assets to the field, whether in medicine, law, technology, or, yes, tarot!

Additionally, think of this. If you were a doctor, would you never see a doctor simply because you could diagnose and treat yourself? While there is no federal law expressly stating one cannot, the American Medical Association Code of Medical Ethics does state that "in general, physicians should not treat themselves or members of their own families." One of the primary reasons this is cautioned against is due to bias.

I think of tarot reading as just the same. Sure, we can do our own readings, but we may fall into traps of WebMD-ing ourselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy (and YES, self-fulfilling prophecies are REAL and POWERFUL!!). Sometimes it is so important for us to get a completely outside perspective or a second or third opinion. There's nothing wrong with that. All the best tarot readers I know have their go-to tarot readers as well!!

If you are serious about learning tarot, I encourage you to see other tarot readers in action!! And you can do this by getting readings from them! Listening to other tarot readers can only enhance your own style of reading as you hear and experience what works and what doesn't for you.

So teaching others tarot isn't a losing game for me, it's only all of us winning, because more individual and unique tarot reading styles only add to the beauty of what tarot can be and do for all of us.