TAIU · The alternative is unthinkable

Work out where you are.
Decide where you want to go.
Do something about it.

A man in his early thirties walking alone through a city street at dusk, seen from behind

A development platform for the questions that actually matter — starting with free exercises, and building from there.

Start with a tool

12 tools available now · No account · Nothing stored

How TAIU works

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

Try a tool

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

All free tools →

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.

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

Explore

The books, talks and thinking behind the exercises.

11 books, 2 talks and 9 pieces of writing — each attached to the exercise it actually helps with, rather than a reading list nobody finishes.

Explore everything →
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.

Why TAIU exists

Mark Eve mid-conversation in a working meeting, listening
Mark Eve · Origin of TAIU

Most people are given advice long before anybody has asked them a decent question.

TAIU came out of thirty years of Mark Eve's work with founders, boards and institutions — and one repeated observation: the answer is usually already in the room, badly framed. The tools here are the questions, made available to everybody, free.

Mark is the origin of TAIU. He is not the product. Where a decision genuinely warrants a person rather than an exercise, that route still exists — quietly, and last.