Somewhere to start
Work
One of the five branches: the life being lived now.
The place work has in your life: what it gives, what it costs and whether it still fits.
Work takes more waking hours than almost anything else in a life, so it tends to be described either as a problem or as a success. Both descriptions skip the ordinary question underneath, which is whether the work suits the person doing it now.
People change faster than jobs do. A role can be well paid, well regarded and still belong to somebody you were eight years ago. It can equally be unremarkable from the outside and fit you perfectly well.
Looking at work properly means looking at what it gives you as well as what it takes. Money, structure, company, competence and the pleasure of being good at something are all real, and they are easy to forget when the conversation only ever starts with what is wrong.
What this can help you notice
- What work actually provides, including the parts you would miss.
- Which of your abilities the job uses and which it has no use for.
- Where the cost is being paid: energy, attention, health or the people at home.
- Whether the discomfort is about this job or about work having the place it has.
- Whether, having looked, nothing needs to change.
The book treats work as one branch of a life rather than the trunk. It matters, and it is not the person.
Where people usually start
Session, about 30 minutes
What am I actually good at?
A guided AI conversation designed to discover where your natural ability, energy, value and environment come together.
Why it is relevant here: Starts with evidence rather than ambition, which is the honest way into what work should be asking of you.
Workshop, around twenty minutes
Where the evidence actually is
Test what you think you are good at against things you have actually done.
Why it is relevant here: Takes a strength you think you have and tests it against things you have actually done.
Reading, a few minutes
Should I leave my job?
You have thought about it more than once, and more than once you have talked yourself out of it.
Why it is relevant here: For the version of the question that keeps coming back without resolving.
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 · Herminia Ibarra
Working Identity
Why this may be useful: Herminia Ibarra's research follows people who changed direction at work, and finds most of them acted their way into a new identity rather than thinking their way into one.
herminiaibarra.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)WATCH · Ruth Chang
How to Make Hard Choices
Why this may be useful: A short talk on choices where no option is obviously better, which is the shape most work decisions actually take.
ted.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton
Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work
Why this may be useful: A study of people who reshaped the job they already had, useful if leaving is not the question you are asking.
jstor.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
The Feedback Fallacy
Why this may be useful: An argument about why other people's feedback describes them as much as it describes you.
hbr.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.