TAIU

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 →
01

Find your superpower

What are you unusually good at, and what is the evidence for it?

Me
A young woman truing a bicycle wheel in a cluttered garage, absorbed in the work
20–30 min
02

Find your purpose

Energy versus competence, and what you would keep doing anyway.

Purpose & values
A woman alone at a café table, notebook open, looking away and thinking
20–30 min
03

Build your story

The red thread through apparently unrelated chapters — and the bios that come out of it.

Me
Hands sorting through old photographs, letters and notebooks on a wooden table
25–35 min
04

What do you want to be known for?

The box people put you in, and what the evidence gives you permission to claim.

Work & career
Three people at a home dinner, one introducing two others who are shaking hands
20–30 min
05

What do you actually want?

What you say you want versus how you actually live your Tuesdays.

Future
Early morning at a kitchen table, a young woman with a mug and an open notebook
20–30 min
06

What should I actually do?

A difficult decision, framed properly — including the alternative you haven't considered.

Major life decisions
A person alone at a café table by a window in the early evening, notebook untouched, thinking
15–20 min
07

How am I showing up?

Where your time, attention and energy actually go, and who gets what's left.

Relationships
A woman sitting slightly back from a busy family dinner table, holding a glass, her attention elsewhere
15 to 20 min
08

What does money mean to me?

What you are really buying, what you inherited without examining, and what enough looks like.

Money
A couple in their early thirties in an empty rented flat, one holding a hand against the bare wall while the other looks out of the window
Live
09

Your principles

What you steer by when it costs you something.

Purpose & values
A woman in her forties standing in a dark corridor just outside a lit private dining room, coat over her arm and phone in her hand
Live
10

What am I responsible for?

Who reasonably depends on you, and what you have promised.

Me
A man in his forties in a family hallway in the evening, bag in one hand and coat half off, the kitchen visible through an open doorway behind him
Live
11

What stage am I in?

Your life may have changed before you changed your mind about who you are.

Future
A young man in a partly unpacked rented bedroom on a weekday morning, half dressed for work, stopped still between two open boxes
Live
12

What does not need fixing?

What if this part of your life is already good?

Me
Three generations of a family walking a muddy rural footpath on a grey afternoon, an older woman laughing mid-conversation and a wet terrier alongside them
Live

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.

Choose your path

Three places to start, depending on what you are carrying.

Three friends walking together along a coastal path, mid-conversation

12 tools available

Develop yourself

“What am I unusually good at, and what should I do with it?”

Work on the person before the plan. Strengths with evidence behind them, motivation you can name, and a next move you can test rather than agonise over.

Two people checking finished stock beside packing crates in a small manufacturing workshop

In development

Develop your business

“Is this idea real, and where is the value actually going to come from?”

Pressure-test the thing you are building. Proposition, economics, constraint, partners and customers.

A woman standing over a table covered in maps, plans and notes, working something out

In development

Develop your mission

“What do I care about enough to keep going when it gets hard?”

For people building something that is not primarily about them. Purpose, coalition, and whether anybody other than you actually cares.

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.

Why TAIU existsAbout Mark Eve →