Tool 81 · Develop yourself
Every account is doing a job. The question is what.
A guided 15 to 19 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Rounding up is not lying, and it still costs.
What would somebody who knows you say?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I don't think people lie to themselves as often as they round up.
Nearly finished. Working on it. It's under control. Small adjustments that keep a story intact.
And the story is usually protecting something real. A marriage, a job, somebody's idea of you.
So the useful question isn't whether you're being honest. It's what the account is doing for you.
What you'll get
01
The account
02
The evidence
03
The gap
04
The job it does
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
The account you give.
02 · Test it
Tell one person the accurate version.
What I would do
Write the account down as you normally tell it.
Put the month beside it, in facts.
Mark the places where the two do not meet.
Ask what the story is doing for you.
Say one thing accurately, out loud, to somebody.
Test it
What does the last month actually show?
What would somebody who knows you say?
What is the account protecting?
The alternative
The usual reading is that somebody is avoiding an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes the account is accurate and the discomfort comes from somebody else insisting it is not. The reverse also happens. The story has been told so often that it has replaced the record, and everybody around the person can see it except them.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If the account is holding something in place
Further thinking
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues
The Seven Sins of Memory
Daniel Schacter
Article
Leon Festinger
The finding that matters here is not that people feel uncomfortable when belief and behaviour diverge. It is what they do about it. Adjusting the belief is far cheaper than adjusting the conduct, and it happens without anybody noticing. If you have quietly stopped believing something you used to act on, this explains the mechanism.
Article
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues
Batson's experiments put people in situations where acting fairly cost them something and nobody would know. Most preferred to appear moral to themselves rather than to be moral, and were remarkably good at not noticing. It is a useful piece of evidence to hold when you are describing the distance between what you say you value and what you did last month.
Book
Daniel Schacter
Schacter catalogues the specific ways memory fails, including bias, the tendency to rewrite the past so that it agrees with how you feel today. That is exactly the failure mode of an annual review conducted from the armchair. Knowing the mechanisms makes it much easier to notice when you are remembering the year through the mood of the week you are in.
Article
Don Moore and Paul Healy
Moore and Healy separate three things people muddle together: overestimating your ability, overplacing yourself relative to others, and being too certain you are right. The useful part is their finding that people tend to be overconfident on hard tasks and underconfident on easy ones, which predicts exactly the pattern where somebody is falsely modest about what they do daily and dangerously certain about what they have never done.
Book
Erving Goffman
Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.