Tool 19 · Develop yourself
Not personal branding. An accuracy check, with the freedom to conclude that nothing needs doing.
A guided 15 to 25 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.
There is a version of you in circulation that you did not write.
Absence is not a deficiency. Accuracy matters far more than presence, and nothing needs doing is a common result here.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
There is a version of most people online that has not been updated since a job they left years ago, and it keeps introducing them to strangers.
I am not interested in whether somebody has a following. I am interested in whether the thing out there is true, and whether the people who actually look can find out what they came to find out.
Usually it is a small job. A bio, a title, a photograph, one dead account. An afternoon of work that people put off for years because they think it means becoming a content creator.
And quite often the answer is that nothing needs doing. Nobody is looking, nothing is wrong, and the discomfort is about something else entirely.
The one thing I would push on is absence where absence costs money. If you sell something and there is no way for a serious buyer to check who you are, that is a business problem, not a matter of taste.
What you'll get
01
What actually exists
02
Who is looking
03
Where it diverges
04
What to correct, if anything
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
A plain inventory of what exists, from what you described.
02 · Test it
Search your own name in a private window and read the first page as though it belonged to somebody else.
What I would do
Build the inventory before making any judgement. Most opinions about this are formed without the facts.
Establish who is actually looking. Exposure without an audience is not a problem.
Compare the public version with what is true now, and name the specific gap.
Treat absence as neutral. Nobody needs a presence for its own sake.
Fix accuracy first. An out of date profile does more damage than a missing one.
Test it
Ask somebody who does not know your work to look you up and tell you what they think you do.
Check whether the thing you spend most of your week on appears anywhere at all.
Count the actual occasions this has cost you something. Often the answer is none.
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that you should be more visible. It is usually wrong. The far more common finding is that the material out there is accurate but old, and that a single afternoon of correction closes the entire gap. The second most common is that nobody is looking, which makes the whole question smaller than it felt. And occasionally the discomfort turns out not to be about the online version at all: somebody is uneasy about how they appear because they are uneasy about the work, and no amount of profile editing touches that.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If the gap was about impression rather than accuracy
Further thinking
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
Nancy Baym
The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski
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.
Book
Nancy Baym
Baym has studied mediated relationships since long before it was fashionable, and she dismantles the assumption that anything conducted through a screen is a lesser version of the real thing. Her account of how people build genuine intimacy and community through text is the best correction available to the idea that digital life is inherently thin. It also refuses the opposite exaggeration.
Article
Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski
They ran the same large datasets through thousands of defensible analytical choices and showed the effect of screen use on wellbeing is tiny, comparable to eating potatoes, and that most headline findings depend on which analysis somebody happened to run. It is the single most useful paper for resisting the idea that hours online tell you anything on their own. What the hours contain is a different question.
Article
Leon Festinger
The original paper, and still the clearest. Festinger's claim is that in the absence of an objective measure we evaluate ourselves against whoever is nearby, and we choose people close enough to us for the comparison to sting. It explains a great deal about why private ambition and public ambition often turn out to be different things, without reducing everything you want to envy.