Tool 91 · Develop yourself
A guided 14 to 18 minute conversation, here in TAIU. The measure is worth naming before it is trusted.
Ask what each item is meant to prove.
Where did this measure come from?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
People say the word success as though it names one thing. It doesn't. It names a list, and most people have never written the list down.
I ask what somebody would point to right now as proof they're doing well, and then I ask what each item is actually meant to prove. Money proving security is a different claim from money proving you were right to leave.
A lot of these measures came from somewhere specific: a parent, a school, an industry that has since moved on. Naming the source isn't an accusation. It's just tracing the thing back.
Sometimes the list still holds and saying so is the whole result. Sometimes it doesn't, and the person already knew before I asked.
What you'll get
01
The evidence
02
The source
03
The proof
04
The fit
+
Your TAIU handover, a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
When you finish
This session works on you rather than one part of your life, so nothing is rated. At the end you are asked, once, which part of your life it touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this 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
The evidence you currently use.
02 · Test it
Write down the actual list of what you currently count as proof.
What I would do
Write the actual list, not the word.
Ask what each item is meant to prove, not just whether you have it.
Trace at least one item back to where the measure came from.
Say plainly whether the measure still fits.
Leave the list alone if it still holds.
Test it
What would you point to right now as proof you are doing well?
What is each thing meant to prove?
Does the measure still fit the life you have?
The alternative
The usual reading is that somebody chasing the wrong measure needs a new one. Often the evidence shows a measure that was never examined rather than one that is wrong, and once it is stated plainly the person recognises it as their own and keeps it. The reverse also happens. Somebody has already outgrown a measure they are still reporting to, and the exercise mostly gives them permission to say so.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →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 the measure holds and something still feels flat
Further thinking
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
A theory of social comparison processes
Leon Festinger
Book
Morgan Housel
Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.
Article
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.
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.
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
Greg McKeown
Useful when too many commitments are competing for limited attention.