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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
Why You’ve Lost Your Creativity, Curiosity, and Spark After Success
After a decade or more of hard work, most successful people start to notice that something has gone quiet in them. The work still gets done. The numbers still go up. But the curiosity, the play, the taste that used to feel automatic — none of it is reachable the way it used to be. This essay is about what actually happened to those qualities, why they are not gone, and how the figures whose later work is more interesting than their earlier work got them back.
The Reason Achievement Never Made You Feel Loved | (#087) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
There is a certain irony in your situation, visible only if you step back far enough.
You have spent your entire adult life getting very good at one particular skill: earning. It built the career, the bank account, the reputation. Then you walked into the one room in life where earning stops working — love — and wondered why your strategy had failed you.
Your strategy didn’t fail. It’s just that the room is now different.
Why You’re Never Satisfied No Matter What You Achieve
You won. But it didn’t feel the way you thought it would. The numbers that used to keep you up at night have stopped doing that. And yet you cannot rest, you cannot stop competing, and when you win, what arrives first is relief — not joy. This essay is about the question that arrives sometime after the win, and what the people who hold up over decades have done with it.