Somewhere to start
What may still grow
New growth, above ground.
What you may still want to explore, protect or make room for. It could be a possibility, a direction or simply something you want more of. Nothing here has to become a goal.
New growth is curiosity rather than ambition. Something you keep circling, a subject you read about with no purpose in mind, work you have not attempted, a place you would like to know properly.
Nothing here has to become a goal. The suggestion that a person should always be growing is one of the more tiring ideas in circulation, and the book does not make it.
Sometimes the honest conclusion after looking is that this is good as it stands. That counts, and it is worth arriving at deliberately rather than by default.
What this can help you notice
- What you keep returning to when nobody is asking you to.
- Something you have wanted room for and never given room to.
- Which possibilities you stopped examining, and why you stopped.
- What a small honest experiment would look like, if you wanted one.
- That concluding nothing needs to change is a real answer.
The book treats new growth as possibility rather than a plan, and never as a requirement to be improving.
Where people usually start
Session, about 30 minutes
What Do You Actually Want?
A guided AI interview that goes underneath your ambitions, finds the contradictions between what you say and how you live, and leaves you with experiments rather than a life plan.
Why it is relevant here: Separates what you want from what you have been told is worth wanting.
Session, about 30 minutes
What do I want this next part of my life to be about?
A guided AI conversation designed to explore what might deserve a bigger part in the next chapter of your life.
Why it is relevant here: For the part of life this question is really about, rather than all of it at once.
Workshop, around twenty minutes
What the decision really is
Separate the decision you are making from the ones tangled up with it.
Why it is relevant here: Establishes what the choice actually is before anybody starts weighing it.
If you want to go further
Four things made by other people, chosen because they are useful rather than because they agree with us. None of them is homework, and none of them is a view TAIU is asking you to hold.
READ · Oliver Burkeman
Four Thousand Weeks
Why this may be useful: Oliver Burkeman on finite time, and why the plan to do everything eventually is the thing worth abandoning.
oliverburkeman.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)WATCH · Ruth Chang
How to Make Hard Choices
Why this may be useful: On choices between genuinely different lives, where waiting for the better option to become obvious does not work.
ted.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec
The experience of regret: what, when and why
Why this may be useful: Research on what people regret over a long life, which is mostly not what they did.
doi.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Albert Bandura
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Why this may be useful: The work behind belief in your own capacity, and why it tends to follow evidence rather than encouragement.
doi.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)
Reading it, and keeping it
Everything listed on this page can be read and worked through without an account. Nothing you write in a public session is sent anywhere or stored by us.
Signing in adds one thing: your own words stay, in My Tree, so that when you come back in six months you can see what you thought at the time rather than reconstructing it.
Take this in any order, or take one and stop there. Deciding that nothing needs changing is a real answer, and it is worth knowing why.