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David Tian, Ph.D., is a private adviser to founders and high achievers on the bigger questions behind what they’ve built.
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’ve built, through Asian philosophy, psychological insight, and relational depth.
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How Success Costs You The Good Life | (#100) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
Most achievers believe that once they become successful professionally, then personal success will follow: the loving partner, the loyal friends, the children who still want to connect with them at fifty.
But it works the other way. Professional success can often cost most people their personal lives, and it can do the damage while they’re doing everything else right.
Nobody wakes up and decides to postpone a family or let a twenty-year friendship go. It happens in half-hour chunks, over ordinary weeks, and each of those choices makes sense at the time you make it.
This episode explains why, and why it comes out of the same instincts that built your career.
Marriage Isn’t the Risk. The Wrong Partner Is | (#099) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
You’ve watched a friend go through it. The house, the filing, the number the lawyer gave him. He built that business staying up late for years, and now he’s watching half of it get divided by a stranger in a courtroom. You went home and did the math on your own situation that same night.
Two years in with a partner who seems good, but still no proposal. You tell people it’s timing. But you know it isn’t just timing.
This episode is for the person who sat down with the numbers, the way he sits down with every serious decision, and concluded the downside can’t be insured against.
Discipline Got You Here, But It Won’t Get You What You Really Want | (#098) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
There are two kinds of success. From the outside they look a lot alike.
One of them you already know. Push through, exert your will, apply more effort to the friendships, the relationship, the career, even to your ability to relax.
That kind can work. But that’s the trap. It pays out just enough to keep you doing it, while the bill accumulates somewhere you’re not looking — each success means less than the last, and the people you pushed hard to earn have gradually thinned out.
You can feel what it costs. You’ve just been filing that under drive.
The second kind keeps every hour of the discipline but drops what’s making it expensive.
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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've built. 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 underneath 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 therapy?
Coaching optimizes toward a goal. Consulting advises on the business. Therapy 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 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 ignore.
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.