Tool 25 · Develop your mission
Not a charity audit. Most contribution is unpaid, unrecorded and close to home, and the usual finding is that people count it wrongly in both directions.
A guided 20 to 25 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
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Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
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Paste
Open ChatGPT.
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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.
Name the people. Not the categories.
Contributing more is not always the answer. Already at capacity is a legitimate result here.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
The people I know who contribute most rarely describe it as contribution. They describe it as Tuesday.
Meanwhile the language around this subject has become inflated to the point of uselessness. Impact, giving back, making a difference. None of it names a person. If you cannot say who is better off and in what way, you are describing an intention.
I would also say something unfashionable. Doing your actual work properly is a contribution. Running a business that pays people on time is a contribution. Training somebody so they are more capable than you were at their age is one of the largest available, and it almost never gets counted because it does not look like charity.
And where the honest answer is that you are already carrying more than you can hold, then the result of this exercise is to carry less, not to add a good deed to it.
What you'll get
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Who actually benefits
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At what cost to you
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What you understate
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One act, or none
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
A named list of who actually benefits, and how.
02 · Test it
Ask one person what they would say you do for them. The gap between their answer and yours is the whole finding.
Before you take anything else on
If the exercise found you are already at capacity, adding a commitment is not a virtue. Protecting what you already carry is the harder and more useful job.
One concrete act with a date attached is worth more than a resolution about the kind of contribution you intend to make.
What I would do
Name people, not categories. The community is not an answer, and neither is society.
Count the work as well as the extras. A job done properly that somebody else would do badly is a contribution.
Look at what it costs you before deciding whether to do more. Half the people asking this question are already at capacity.
Watch for the accidental contribution, the one that happens through your work rather than around it. It is usually the largest.
If the honest answer is that you are giving too much, that is the finding, and doing more is not the remedy.
Test it
Write the names. If you cannot fill three lines, the account you gave may have been about intention rather than contribution.
Take the person you describe as a burden and ask whether you would actually hand them over. That answer is information.
Add up the hours honestly for one week. Both the inflaters and the deflaters find that uncomfortable.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you should contribute more, and the internet will always agree with it. Frequently it is wrong. Your contribution may already be substantial and invisible because it is domestic. It may be happening through your work rather than around it, which counts. It may be that the deliberate scheme you keep planning has never happened while four people have depended on you throughout. And occasionally the finding runs the other way: you are giving at a rate that is quietly costing you your health, and the useful conclusion is to give less rather than better.
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 it found contribution close to home and nothing beyond it
Further thinking
Give and Take
Adam Grant
Spending money on others promotes happiness
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton
The Generative Society
Dan McAdams and Ed de St Aubin
Book
Adam Grant
Grant's finding that givers occupy both the top and the bottom of most performance distributions is the practical heart of this. What separates them is not generosity but whether the giving is bounded. If you have ever concluded that you should do more while quietly running out of road, read this before you add anything.
Article
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton
The effect depends far less on the amount than on whether the giving was chosen and whether you can see what it did. That is a useful design constraint. A small, specific, visible commitment does more for the person giving than a larger anonymous one, which is worth knowing before you set up something you will never think about again.
Book
Dan McAdams and Ed de St Aubin
McAdams has spent a career on generativity, the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation. His work shows it is not confined to parents and not confined to later life, and that people who have it tend to tell a particular kind of story about themselves. Useful for locating contribution you already make and have never counted.