Tool 63 · Develop yourself
Look for the real moments, then find what they have in common.
A guided 14 to 18 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.
Not every source of energy is a business waiting to be found.
Two different examples beat five similar ones.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I know some of the things that give me energy.
Interesting people. A good conversation. Seeing a connection between things that looked unrelated. Getting something moving. Walking into a room where I don't know exactly what will happen.
That's useful for me to know.
But I don't think everything that gives us energy needs monetising, scaling or turning into a mission.
Sometimes the useful discovery is simply knowing what deserves more room in your life.
What you'll get
01
Real moments
02
The shared conditions
03
Where it already exists
04
What to protect
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
Two real moments, described specifically.
02 · Test it
Put one more occasion of it in the next month.
What I would do
Start from a real occasion rather than from what you enjoy in principle.
Find a second example that is genuinely different.
Look for the condition underneath, not the activity.
Notice where that condition already exists in your week.
Give it more room, or leave it exactly as it is.
Test it
What did the two moments have in common?
Was it the activity, the people or the challenge?
What would be lost if this had to be useful?
The alternative
The obvious reading is that the activity is the answer. Test it. The pattern may be novelty rather than lasting interest, in which case a new version will be needed soon. It may be the people rather than the thing. It may be the level of challenge rather than the subject. It may also be escape from something else, which is worth knowing before you build anything around it.
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 pull is towards knowing rather than doing
Further thinking
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Book
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The original work behind absorbed attention: the conditions are a clear task, immediate feedback and difficulty roughly matched to skill. Useful here as a discriminator. Attention that absorbs you and attention that merely holds you feel similar in the moment and leave you in completely different states afterwards.
Book
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
The readable account of self-determination theory, written by the man who spent forty years testing it. The finding that matters here is that rewards and approval reliably change why people do things, and that behaviour which survives without either is telling you something the rest is not. It gives you a usable test rather than a feeling.
Article
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Sampling thousands of people at random moments, the study found that minds wander around forty seven per cent of the time, and that people were less happy when their attention was elsewhere than on what they were doing, almost regardless of what that was. Where the mind goes when nothing demands it turns out to be worth looking at.
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.