Tool 21 · Develop yourself
A guided 20 to 30 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This is not a test of your worldview. It looks at what you believe based on how you behave, not what you would say in an argument.
That is a different list from the one you would give in conversation.
Inherited is not the same as untrue. Nothing needs changing is a legitimate result here.
What you'll look at
A note from Mark
I am wary of anybody who can recite what they believe without hesitating. It usually means they are reciting somebody else.
What I have found is that belief shows up in conduct long before it shows up in language. You can watch somebody for a month and learn more about what they hold true than you would learn from an hour of them talking.
This exercise has no opinion about your conclusions. Mine are mine and they are not the point. What is worth knowing is which of your beliefs you would keep if holding them became expensive. Those are the ones that will steer you when a decision is genuinely difficult.
And I would not rush to tidy a worldview. Some of the most reliable people I know hold two things that do not entirely fit together and have made peace with it.
What you'll get
01
What you actually hold true
02
Which beliefs are load bearing
03
Where they came from
04
What has changed, and what has not
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Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
When you finish
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.
What now?
01 · Save it
A description of what you hold true, in your own language rather than anybody else's.
02 · Test it
Say one belief out loud to somebody who will disagree with it. Notice whether you can give a reason that is yours, not inherited.
Before you decide anything needs rebuilding
A worldview does not have to be systematic to be sound. Most people carry a handful of firm convictions and a great deal of open ground, and that is a workable way to live.
If the exercise found tension between two beliefs, resist resolving it quickly. The tension is often doing useful work.
What I would do
Start with something you did, not with something you think. Doctrine produces a rehearsed answer and last Tuesday does not.
Separate what you would argue about from what you act on. They are rarely the same list.
Do not assume the inherited beliefs are the weak ones. Some of them have been tested by three generations.
Notice which beliefs you have never once said out loud. Those tend to be the ones doing the work.
Leave a contradiction standing if it is not costing anything. Coherence is not the objective.
Test it
Name something you would not do for a hundred thousand pounds. Then work out what has to be true for that to be your answer.
Write the belief you would defend in a room where it made you unpopular. If nothing comes, that is worth sitting with rather than fixing.
Take the belief you state most often and find the last occasion it cost you something. If there is none, it may be a preference.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you have drifted from what you were raised with and should work out where you now stand. Sometimes that survives. Often it does not. It is just as likely that you have not drifted at all and simply stopped using the vocabulary. Or that the belief you think is central is decorative, and the one running your life is a plain conviction about fairness you would never have called a belief. Or that the two positions you thought contradicted each other apply in different places and always have.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →READ · BOOK
Ray Dalio
Worth reading against yourself. The systematising instinct that makes it useful is the same one that can turn a life into an algorithm, and the exercise you have just done deliberately stops short of that.
READ · BOOK
Charles Taylor
Best for seeing how belief became a choice rather than a background.
READ · BOOK
Jonathan Haidt
Best for understanding why people who disagree with you are not stupid.
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.
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Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If it found beliefs you state but do not act on
Further thinking
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
A Secular Age
Charles Taylor
Principles
Ray Dalio
Book
Jonathan Haidt
Haidt argues that moral judgement arrives first and the reasoning follows, assembled afterwards to defend a position already taken. That is uncomfortable reading if you believe you arrived at your worldview by thinking it through. It is also the single most useful corrective when you sit down to describe what you actually believe, because it makes you look for the origin of a conviction rather than only for the argument supporting it.
Book
Charles Taylor
Taylor's account of how the West moved from a world where belief was assumed to one where it is one option among many is long and demanding, and worth it. It explains why questions about what you hold true now feel like personal decisions rather than inherited facts, and why so many people find they cannot answer them without borrowing somebody else's vocabulary.
Book
Ray Dalio
Dalio's case is that most people rediscover their own rules under pressure, badly, every time. Writing them down turns a repeated agonising decision into a considered one made once. The book is at its best where he shows a principle failing and being rewritten.
Ask Alto