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Tool 71 · Develop yourself
What happens when the structure you've known ends and nobody gives you the timetable for what comes next?
Work out what you actually know, what you don't, and what is worth trying first.
A guided 15 to 20 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.
Who told you that you should already know what you're going to do with the rest of your life?
Not knowing yet is a starting position, not a failure.
A temporary choice does not have to become an identity.
What you'll explore
- 01What you are leaving
- 02What you know
- 03The pressure
- 04What is reversible
A note from Mark
I think we put enormous pressure on young people to make decisions very early and then behave as though those decisions define them.
They don't.
A first job can teach you what you dislike. A wrong turn can give you useful experience. A temporary choice does not have to become an identity.
I want to help you make the next sensible move, not pretend we need to design the next forty years today.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
What you know
02
What to test
03
What is reversible
04
The next move
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you are leaving
- 02What you already know about yourself
- 03What you have only imagined
- 04The pressure you are under
- 05What would teach you something
- 06What is reversible
- 07What needs deciding now
- 08What can remain undecided
- 09The rival reading
- 10What deserves protecting
- 11Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
What you already know about yourself.
02 · Test it
Take the reversible option and treat the first six months as evidence.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Separate what you know from experience from what you have only pictured.
- 02
Name the pressure and whose it actually is.
- 03
Choose an experience that will teach you something, rather than a plan.
- 04
Prefer reversible options while the evidence is thin.
- 05
Decide only what genuinely needs deciding now.
Test it
- 01
What do you know you enjoy from something you have actually done?
- 02
Whose expectation is inside the pressure you feel?
- 03
What genuinely has to be decided this month?
The alternative
The usual reading is that you need a career answer. Often you need exposure, work experience, training, income or simply more information, and the answer arrives through doing rather than deciding. The reverse also happens. Somebody keeps experimenting long after the evidence is clear, and further exploring becomes a way of avoiding a decision they have already made.
Think about this
- What you are leaving, and what happens immediately afterwards.
- What you already know you enjoy or are good at from real experience.
- What you have only imagined you might enjoy.
- Whose expectations are inside the pressure you feel.
- Which options are reversible.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
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Recommended by the TAIU community
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Next tool
What kind of work fits me now?
If the question becomes the work itself
Further thinking
Career Construction Theory and Practice
Mark Savickas
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
Explore the thinking ↓
Article
Career Construction Theory and Practice
Mark Savickas
Savickas treats a working life as a story a person is building rather than a set of traits to be matched to job titles. It changes what question you ask first.
Book
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.
Article
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
The paper that broke confidence into pieces. Bandura's argument is that belief in your capability is built for a specific domain, mostly out of things you have already done, and that it transfers far less than people assume. That is why a person can chair a board and dread a party without either being a contradiction. It also names the strongest source of confidence, which is not encouragement but mastery experience.
Article
Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work
Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues
The study that found people in identical roles describe their work as a job, a career or a calling in roughly equal thirds. None of the three is the correct answer.