TAIU · The alternative is unthinkable

What are you trying to work out?

You do not need to know what you are looking for. Write it as you would say it to someone you trust.

Leave these alone and we will work it out from what you write.

Start from something familiar

Most people arrive with a sentence rather than a category.

If none of those are yours, write your own above. If nothing fits, TAIU will say so rather than send you somewhere that half works.

How TAIU works

Think. Discover. Save. Understand. Decide. Act. Keep developing.

Sessions

Every session is free, takes about half an hour, and gives you something to keep.

Browse the sessions →

Or enter by area of life

Who this is for

You do not need a crisis to be worth taking seriously.

  • Working out what you are actually good at

    and what the evidence really says.

  • Carrying a decision you keep postponing

    because the alternative is uncomfortable.

  • Building something

    and unsure whether anybody else cares yet.

  • Doing fine on paper

    and quietly wondering whether this is it.

Resources

The books, talks and thinking behind the sessions.

Books, talks and writing, each attached to the session it actually helps with rather than a reading list nobody finishes.

All resources →
Book

The Element / Finding Your Element

Sir Ken Robinson

The clearest account of what happens when natural aptitude meets the right environment — and why so many capable people are judged in the wrong one.

Book

Working Identity

Herminia Ibarra

Most relevant if the evidence points somewhere your current career doesn't go. People act their way into a new direction rather than thinking their way into one.

Course

Stanford Life Design / Odyssey Planning

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford Life Design Lab

Useful if your abilities look portable but you cannot picture a life other than the one you already have.

Article

CliftonStrengths

Gallup

Worth treating as an additional data point, not a definitive answer. Compare it with the evidence you gathered rather than letting it replace it.

Book

The Second Mountain

David Brooks

Useful where achievement versus contribution, or a changing definition of success, has emerged.

Talk

Why Some of Us Don't Have One True Calling

Emilie Wapnick, TED

Useful where you have several strong interests and feel pressure to choose one identity.

Book

Reinventing You

Dorie Clark

Useful when professional repositioning is the point — how reputation actually changes, and how long it takes.

Talk

The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TED

Useful where one aspect of your identity has become the dominant story through which you, or everybody else, understands you.

Coming to My TAIU

One exercise is useful. Several, kept together, start to tell you something.

My TAIU will be the place your work accumulates: what you discovered, what you decided, and what actually happened when you tried it. It does not exist yet.

Tell me when it's ready

Product concept · My TAIU is in development

My TAIU

Today

Completed

4 exercises

Open decisions

2

Goals in progress

3

Recent discoveries

  • I work best when I have purpose and autonomy.
  • I'm drawn to building things that help people grow.
  • I want more freedom to create and travel.

Next up

  • Revisit your goals
  • Build your network

Where TAIU came from

Mark Eve mid-conversation, listening
Mark Eve

I have spent most of my life meeting people.

For more than twenty years, work and curiosity took me around the world. Different countries, different cultures and religions, different businesses, different ways of living. Along the way I built things that worked and things that did not, raised a family, made good decisions and bad ones, lost things I thought mattered and found things that mattered a great deal more.

What stayed with me was the people. Enough of them, different enough from each other, to convince me there is no single correct way to live a life. TAIU came out of that. Not because I have the answers. I am still working through plenty of my own. But a good question, asked at the right moment, changes how a situation looks, and sometimes that changes what you do next.