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Tool 75 · Develop yourself

What future are you quietly organising your life around?

A guided 18 to 22 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Everybody is preparing for something. Most people have not said what.

GUIDES

You have named it. Now spend some time on it.

Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.

The assumption

The future you are quietly assuming

Say out loud which future you have been organising your life around.

Where this often ends up: The future you are preparing for, written down plainly.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around twenty minutes

If it does not happen

Testing it against change

Take two of those assumptions and look at what happens if they do not hold.

Where this often ends up: Two assumptions with their weak points named.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around thirty minutes

What to do with it

What you would change now

Decide what, if anything, is worth changing now rather than later.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around twenty minutes

This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.

You can see what it covers before you begin.

Start this Guide
A man in his early thirties at a kitchen table at night with papers out and a closed laptop

What future are your decisions already assuming?

Say the assumption out loud and it becomes testable.

Preparing hard is not the same as being ready.

What you'll look at

  1. 01The assumption
  2. 02The evidence
  3. 03What would make it wrong
  4. 04Control

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

Whether we say it out loud or not, most of us are preparing for something.

A career shape. A financial position. A family structure. A version of the world.

Some of those assumptions are worth keeping. Some were inherited and never checked.

The useful move is to say what you're assuming, then look at what you're already doing about it.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

  1. 01

    The assumption

  2. 02

    What it costs

  3. 03

    What you control

  4. 04

    One adjustment

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓
  • 01The future you are assuming
  • 02What you are organising around it
  • 03Where that assumption came from
  • 04What would make it wrong
  • 05What you are not preparing for
  • 06What is actually in your control
  • 07Where preparation has become avoidance of the present
  • 08The rival reading
  • 09What deserves protecting
  • 10What deserves adjusting
  • 11Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

  • Session
  • Date
  • The part of life this belongs to
  • What we found
  • The alternative we tested
  • What deserves protecting
  • What should change, if anything
  • Next actions
  • What to notice or find out
  • What remains unresolved
Open My Tree

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    The future you are assuming.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Say the assumed future out loud to somebody who knows you well.

See more ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Write the assumed future down in one plain sentence.

  2. 02

    List what you are already organising around it.

  3. 03

    Name one thing that would make it wrong.

  4. 04

    Separate what you control from what you do not.

  5. 05

    Make one adjustment rather than a new plan.

Test it

  1. 01

    What future are you assuming?

  2. 02

    What would make it wrong?

  3. 03

    What are you not preparing for?

The alternative

The usual reading is that preparing more is always sensible. Sometimes the preparation is precise and the life around it has quietly narrowed to fund a version of the future nobody has checked. The reverse also happens. Somebody dismisses planning as anxiety, and the evidence shows they are exposed in a way that a small adjustment would fix.

Think about this

  • What future your decisions assume.
  • What you are organising your life around now.
  • Where the assumption came from.
  • What would have to happen for it to be wrong.
  • What you are not preparing for.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 10 MIN

Future Evidence Audit

TAIU

The future your current behaviour is preparing for.

Try it →
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Recommended by the TAIU community

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?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A man in his early forties in a back doorway with a mug, looking at a childs bike on the grass

Next tool

What changes when time is finite?

If the horizon is the real question

Continue →What do you actually want? →

Further thinking

  • Superforecasting

    Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Daniel Kahneman

  • Four Thousand Weeks

    Oliver Burkeman

See the thinking ↓

Book

Superforecasting

Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

How to think in probabilities instead of pretending certainty exists.

Book

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Why confidence and accuracy aren't the same thing.

Book

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.

Article

The experience of regret: what, when and why

Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec

Their finding is that regret over things we did fades, while regret over things we did not do tends to grow and to become more abstract as it does. Read it carefully though. The same abstraction is why inaction regret is easy to romanticise: the road not taken never has to survive contact with reality. Both halves of that are useful when deciding whether a want is worth acting on.

Article

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

Laura Carstensen

Why the relationships and goals we prioritise change as our sense of time changes. The finding worth having is that this tracks how much time a person believes is left rather than how old they are, which is why a shortened horizon at thirty produces the same narrowing as one at seventy.