The Six and Seven of Disks: Why Success and Failure Must Walk Together

The Six and Seven of Disks: Why Success and Failure Must Walk Together

John Maxwell once reframed a mistake that most people never question. Success and failure are not enemies standing on opposite sides of a battlefield. They are siblings growing up in the same house. They appear on the same days, in the same seasons, sometimes in the same hour. To demand success without failure is to demand harvest without soil, profit without labor, or maturity without friction.

The Tarot already understood this.

The Six and Seven of Disks do not represent different lives or different people. They represent the same practitioner at different moments of the same process.

The Six of Disks is balance, stewardship, measured success. Resources are flowing. Effort has produced results. Systems are working well enough to distribute value without collapse. This is the card of sustainable provision, not excess. In modern terms, it is positive cash flow, a functioning team, a process that pays its bills and rewards discipline.

Dave Ramsey would call this margin. Not wealth, not fantasy, but enough order that chaos no longer dictates your choices. Bills are paid. Debt is shrinking. Decisions are intentional instead of reactive. The Six of Disks is what happens when yesterday’s discipline finally shows up as today’s relief.

But relief is not the end of the story.

The Seven of Disks always follows.

The Seven of Disks is pause, assessment, frustration, recalibration. The work has been done, but the outcome is not yet satisfying. Growth is slower than hoped. Results lag behind effort. Something worked, but not enough. Something failed, but not fatally. This card is not collapse. It is evaluation under pressure.

Patrick Lencioni teaches that healthy teams and healthy individuals must be willing to name what is not working without panic or blame. The Seven of Disks is exactly that moment. The harvest is partial. The numbers are mixed. Some initiatives succeeded. Others stalled. The temptation here is to label the day as a failure and quit. That temptation is the real danger.

Maxwell’s insight cuts directly through this moment. If you treat success and failure as opposites, the Seven of Disks becomes discouragement. If you treat them as siblings, it becomes intelligence.

This is why success and failure must be allowed to coexist within the same day.

You can make progress in one area and regress in another. You can execute well and still misjudge timing. You can act with integrity and still lose money. None of this negates the Six of Disks. None of this invalidates the work. It simply means the system is still teaching you.

Ramsey often says that winning with money is about behavior more than math. The Tarot would agree. The Six of Disks is behavior aligned long enough to stabilize life. The Seven of Disks is behavior refined long enough to improve it. One distributes what has been earned. The other asks whether what is being built is worth continuing as is.

Taken together, these cards form a complete cycle of adult competence.

You manage what works.
You examine what doesn’t.
You do both without drama.

This is what mature success looks like.

People who expect only Six of Disks days become fragile. They panic at the Seven. People who only live in the Seven never allow themselves to recognize progress. They starve in the presence of provision. Wisdom lives in holding both cards at once.

Some days you pay down debt and overspend elsewhere.
Some days your team delivers excellence and misses a deadline.
Some days your system works and still needs improvement.

That is not hypocrisy. That is reality.

The practitioner who understands this stops asking, “Did I win or lose today?” and starts asking, “What worked, what didn’t, and what will I do differently tomorrow?”

That question is the bridge between the Six and the Seven.
That bridge is where mastery is built.

Success and failure are not destinations. They are instruments. Used together, they tune the system. Separated, they distort it.

The Tarot did not place these cards side by side by accident. They are meant to be read together, lived together, and respected together.

Some wins.
Some losses.
Some excellence.
Some screwups.

And if you are honest, learning, and still standing, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.