Upright the Two of Wands is read as personal power exercised through planning, a moment of surveying real options before choosing a direction; reversed, as fear of change, a failure to plan, or ambition kept deliberately small.
Pre-Golden-Dawn cartomancy read a bare two of wands as an early, still-forming assertion of will, without the specifically strategic, surveying quality Smith's globe-holding figure adds; the globe itself is her invention, and it is this detail, not the older number-based tradition or the matching Dominion title from either the Golden Dawn or Crowley, that gives the card its now-standard association with global or long-range vision rather than with more local ambition.
Waite's own printed meaning, riches, fortune, magnificence, but also physical suffering and mortification if the card falls badly among its neighbors, is considerably more mixed than the confident planning most contemporary readers now describe, and the harder, more cautionary half of his text is one many current guidebooks quietly drop.
Because one staff is fixed and one is held, the card is frequently used to distinguish a foundation already secured from a further ambition not yet committed to, and readers commonly treat the reversed card's hesitation as fear specifically of the second, uncommitted staff rather than as any threat to what the figure already holds fixed to the wall behind him.