Tool 12 · Develop yourself
The one exercise here that is not looking for a problem. It produces a protect list rather than an improvement plan.
A guided 20 to 30 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.
Everything that works in your life is paid for by something. If you cannot say what, you will not notice when you stop paying it.
Fine is a legitimate finding. It is just an unpopular one.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have spent most of my working life being paid to find what is wrong. It is a useful habit in a business and a fairly destructive one to take home.
The pattern I see most often is somebody with a life that is broadly in good order, running a permanent low level audit on it. Every conversation is about the next improvement. Nothing is ever allowed to be finished.
What they usually cannot tell you is what any of the good parts cost. They talk about them as though they arrived by accident. They did not. Somebody declined a job, held a line, kept turning up on a Thursday, or decided years ago not to chase something everybody else was chasing.
The other thing worth saying is that improvement is not free. It comes out of time, attention and energy that are currently doing something else. Ask anybody who took the bigger role what stopped happening at home.
So this one is deliberately unusual. It is allowed to conclude that you are fine. If it does, I would take that seriously rather than going looking for another exercise that agrees with your instinct that you should be doing more.
What you'll get
01
What is actually working
02
What it rests on
03
What to leave alone
04
The one thing, if anything, that needs attention
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
Two to five things that are genuinely working, each with the evidence underneath it.
02 · Test it
Tell the person who holds one of these things up that you know they do. Say the specific thing, not thank you for everything.
Before you improve anything
A protect list is only worth having if it changes a decision. The useful test is whether anything you were planning next week now looks different.
If the exercise found one thing that genuinely needs attention, that is a result rather than a failure of the premise. Deal with that one thing and leave the rest.
What I would do
Start with what has lasted. Duration is the cheapest evidence available and most people ignore it entirely.
Work out the price. If you cannot see what something cost you, you will not notice when you stop paying it.
Find the single point it depends on. Good arrangements often rest on one person, one hour or one limit, and that is a reason to defend it rather than to worry.
Check the standard you are measuring against, and whose it is.
Then decide what you are protecting, and be specific about how. Protection that is not scheduled is not protection.
Test it
Remove one small good thing for a fortnight and see whether you miss it. It is a faster read on what matters than any amount of reflection.
Write down what you assume you should have achieved by now, then next to it the name of the person or place that assumption came from.
Describe one working part of your life to somebody who has known you ten years, and listen to which bit they say has always been true.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that things are fine. Sometimes that is exactly right and it deserves to be said clearly. Other times the evidence points somewhere less comfortable. This is not contentment, nothing has been chosen. This is not stability, it is resting entirely on one person who has never been asked. This is not a good arrangement, it is a good arrangement for you and somebody else is paying for it. You are not protecting it, you have simply stopped noticing it. And occasionally the reverse: the thing you keep apologising for is the best part of your life.
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.
Further thinking
The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz
It's a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events
Minkyung Koo, Sara Algoe, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert
The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky
Book
Barry Schwartz
Schwartz separates maximisers, who need to be sure they have the best available option, from satisficers, who stop once something is good enough. The uncomfortable finding is that maximisers tend to end up with objectively better outcomes and feel worse about them, because every choice carries the shadow of the one they did not take.
Article
Minkyung Koo, Sara Algoe, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert
A neat piece of research with a practical finding: imagining how something good might never have happened does more for how you see it than describing why you appreciate it. Listing what is good confirms what you already think. Removing it tells you something you did not know.
Article
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky
Why the best parts of a life stop registering. Adaptation is efficient and it is also why people trade away arrangements that were working, having quietly stopped noticing them. The prevention research is more useful than the treadmill headline: variety and continued attention slow it, and pure acquisition does not.
Book
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed lives across decades. One of its clearest lessons is that the quality of our relationships matters enormously to how our lives unfold.
Book
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.