A Brief Assessment to Clarify Your Next Area of Focus
To identify where clarity is most needed next
David Tian, Ph.D., is a private adviser to founders and senior leaders on the bigger questions behind what they’re building.
Ph.D., University of Michigan, specializing in moral psychology and Asian philosophy. Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (Level 3). Brown University Certified Leadership Coach. Former university professor of philosophy. Helping founders and high achievers work through the bigger questions behind what they’re building, through Asian philosophy, psychological insight, and relational depth.
LATEST FROM OUR BLOG
What If Success Brings You the Wrong Life? | (#103) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
A life can look respectable, successful, even enviable, and still be badly chosen.
The frightening part is that this usually doesn’t happen because of one reckless decision.
It happens through years of reasonable choices.
Another demanding stage at the company. Another opportunity worth taking. Another reason to wait before making room for a serious relationship, children, old friends, or aging parents.
Each decision makes sense on its own.
Then one day, those decisions have added up to a life.
In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a capable and respected man discovers too late that the very success that kept rewarding him also helped him avoid asking what his life was actually becoming.
What Success Can’t Tell You About Life | (#102) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
Success can reward a bad trade for years before the costs become obvious.
The decisions usually look reasonable at the time. One more demanding year. One more important opportunity. One more stretch of travel. Marriage can wait. The children will understand. Friends will still be there.
And professionally, it may keep paying off.
But that’s what makes the mistake so hard to catch.
The Brutal Cost of Keeping Your Options Open | (#101) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
You’ve spent years getting better at managing your time. But what if time management has been helping you avoid the harder problem?
Productivity works beautifully when the goal is getting more done. But some of the most important things in life can’t be accelerated.
This episode explores themes from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and a possibility most productivity systems never ask you to consider: maybe you don’t have a time-management problem. Maybe you have a decision problem.
And if that’s true, getting more efficient won’t solve it.
You have to decide what truly deserves the years before those years are gone.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING
Explore Topics
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is David Tian?
David Tian, Ph.D., is a private adviser to founders and high achievers on the bigger questions behind what they're building. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, specializing in Asian philosophy and moral psychology, and was a tenure-track professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore. He is a Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (Level 3) and a Brown University Certified Coach.
What is a private adviser to founders and high achievers?
A private adviser works one to one, and in select groups, with a small number of clients on the deeper questions behind their success: what they're building, what it's ultimately for, and what they want a life to add up to. The work is not strategy or performance consulting, though it might include elements of these. Its focus instead is confidential counsel on the person behind the achievement, drawing on philosophy and psychology rather than tactics.
How is private advisory different from coaching, consulting, or psychotherapy?
Coaching optimizes toward a goal. Consulting advises on the business. Psychotherapy heals what is broken. Private advisory is not contained by any of these. Instead, it is a thinking partnership for people who are already successful and are asking what the success was actually for. The subject is always the person, not only the company: their values, motives, relationships, and vision of a life.
Who does David Tian work with?
David works with a small number of founders, entrepreneurs, and senior operators, who have built real success and cleared the goals their younger selves set. They are intellectually rigorous and private about their inner lives. They come not because something is broken, but because the questions underlying the achievements have gotten harder to put off.
What does David Tian help with?
He helps with the bigger questions success raises but doesn't answer: what to build next and whether it's still worth it, how to choose among the options wealth opens up, what role work should play in the rest of a life, and what a person wants it all to have amounted to. His authority also covers identity beyond achievement, major life transitions, meaning, and mortality. Because these questions eventually reach the whole of a person's life, the work also covers love, trust, relationships, and family.
What makes David Tian different from other advisers to the successful?
Most advisers to the successful work on the company: strategy, operations, the next raise, the board. David works on the person behind it all. He is not a corporate strategist or an operating adviser, and the work is not coaching or therapy. His training is in philosophy and psychology, and he has spent nearly two decades helping high achievers with identity, meaning, and their relationships. He understands ambition without worshipping it or pathologizing it.