A Brief Assessment to Clarify Your Next Area of Focus
To identify where clarity is most needed next
David Tian, Ph.D., is Private Advisor to Founders, High Achievers, and Senior Leaders, Brown University Certified Leadership & Performance Coach, Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (L3), ICF Certified Coach, devoted husband, proud father, and former university professor — helping build lives of connection, meaning, and fulfillment through Asian philosophy, psychological insight, and relational depth.
LATEST FROM OUR BLOG
The Lie About Money That’s Costing You Your Life | (#089) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
A toxic and false belief has been dominating business culture for decades: Money is the byproduct of value creation. It sounds like common sense, but it is one of the most damaging things a thinking person can believe.
This episode takes the belief apart and shows the moral claim hiding inside the causal one. The cost of getting this wrong is steep: you spend thirty years hounded by a number you can never reach, unable to rest, unable to truly enjoy what you have built — and then arrive at sixty to discover the prize the belief promised was never there.
How to Know If Your Partner Is the Right Person For You: What Your Dating History Is Actually Telling You
Most people, trying to decide whether to get serious with someone, ask whether their partner is the right person. The question feels like the important one. It is also the wrong one, or at least the secondary one. The primary one is about the person doing the asking. The qualities in your partner that first drew you in are usually the same qualities you eventually try to suppress in them, because they’re the same qualities you suppressed in yourself a long time ago. The variable in your dating life has never been the partner. This essay is about what it has been.
What to Look For in a Partner: Why the Checklist Doesn’t Work
When successful people sit down to write what they want in a partner, they usually produce something closer to a job description than a portrait of someone to live with. The list reads like a spec because that is what it is, and the spec is doing a job for the writer rather than describing an actual person. The job is settling an old question about whether you are enough. No partner can settle that question. This essay is about what to do instead.