Try It Yourself
These frameworks aren't just for young people. They're descriptions of how every human works. Try them on your own life.
The Argument
Everything in steamHouse Commons describes something universal — how decisions work, how consciousness develops, how purpose shapes a life. The Core Curriculum lays this out as a story in four parts: the autopilot you're waking up from, the response that becomes possible, the architecture you're built with, and the foundations that hold it all together.
These tools let you turn that story on yourself.
You have automatic patterns you didn't choose. You have mental models you've never examined. You have habits that may or may not serve what you actually care about. That's not a character flaw — it's being human.
The question is the same one we ask young people: Are you the author of your life, or is it being written for you?
These tools help you answer honestly. Not as a test with right answers, but as a mirror — a way to see where you are so you can decide where you want to go.
[Read the Core Curriculum →] The full intellectual architecture — 9 ideas, one throughline, in about 20 minutes of reading.
Your Personal Development Tools
steamHouse offers three self-reflection instruments at three different depths. Start wherever feels right. Come back when you're ready for more.
Know Your Starting Point
The 58 Development Markers — Interactive Self-Rating
steamHouse identifies 58 specific competencies that develop across a lifetime, organized into three domains:
Gold Stars — 15 character qualities (your heart: what you care about)
Red Lenses — 24 thinking frameworks (your head: how you make sense of things)
Green Keys — 19 practical skills (your body: what you can actually do)
Rate yourself on all 58. Not to judge yourself — to see yourself. Where are you strong? Where are you still building? What surprised you?
This takes about 5 minutes and requires no login, no email, no data collection. It's between you and you.
These markers are the same 58 competencies the Core Curriculum develops across its four sections. Rating yourself here is a snapshot of where you are in that developmental story.
[Rate Yourself on 58 Markers →] /markersinteractive1
Your Gold Star Kit
Purpose, Paradigm, Practice — A 15-Question Self-Assessment
Everyone carries a set of operating equipment through life — what you care about, how you make sense of things, what you're practiced at doing. Most people accumulate this by accident. The Core Curriculum calls this your Gold Star Kit and devotes an entire section to how it's built.
This assessment asks 15 questions across the Kit's three dimensions:
Purpose (Heart): Do you know what you care about at the deepest level? Can you name it? Does your life actually reflect it?
Paradigm (Head): Do you have tested mental models for making sense of what happens to you? Or do you rely on default assumptions you've never examined?
Practice (Body): Are your daily habits and skills deliberately chosen to serve what matters? Or did they just accumulate?
This isn't about getting a high score. It's about seeing the gaps — the places where what you say matters and what you actually do haven't caught up with each other yet. That gap is where growth lives.
[Take the Gold Star Kit Assessment →] /gold-star-kit
The Personal Annual Review
A Structured Practice for Examining Your Life — 20 Minutes or 90 Minutes
This is the deepest, most comprehensive self-reflection tool steamHouse offers. It's a free downloadable guide that walks you through an honest examination of your life — not the life you present to others, but the one you're actually living.
The PAR draws on ideas from across the curriculum — Purpose from Section III, Principles from Section IV, the authorship frame from Section II — and applies them to the question: what kind of year did I actually have? ★
The Quick Check (20 minutes): Five questions that cut through the noise. Where am I? Where am I headed? Am I being honest with myself?
The Full Review (90 minutes): A complete structured practice covering purpose, trajectory, principles, seeing clearly, and making change real. The kind of thing you do once a year — at New Year's, on your birthday, or whenever you're ready to look honestly at what you're building with your life.
[📖 Download the Personal Annual Review →] EPUB download
Practice Your Thinking
Self-knowledge is the starting point. But knowing yourself better only matters if you can think better and decide better with what you learn.
These tools map to the first two sections of the Core Curriculum — the Wake-Up (recognizing your autopilot patterns) and the Response (learning to think again). Each one takes 3–10 minutes. Free, no login, no data collected.
Know Your World — Context & Perspective
[Where Do You Stand? →] Discover your position among 8 billion people across 8 dimensions — income, education, health, and more. Most people are surprised.
[Perception vs. Reality Quiz →] Test your assumptions about the world against actual data. How accurate is your picture of reality?
[Random Earthling Generator →] Meet a randomly generated person from somewhere on Earth. A 3-minute exercise in perspective.
Know Your Mind — Self-Knowledge
[Thinking Bias Profiler →] Discover which cognitive biases are most active in YOUR thinking. Not a generic list — a personalized profile of your mental blind spots. (This is the Autopilot curriculum applied to your own brain.)
[Yummy Unit Calculator →] Calculate your personal value exchange rates. What is an hour of your time actually worth to you — and what does that reveal about your priorities?
Make Better Decisions — Applied Thinking
[Decision Audit →] A 20-question bias check on any decision you're about to make. The defensive play — catching errors before they cost you.
[Action Calculus Decision Maker →] A structured 4-stage analysis for important decisions. The affirmative play — building a decision you can stand behind.
[Decision Advisor (AI-Powered) →] An adaptive conversation that helps you think through a real decision. Uses AI to ask the questions you're not asking yourself.
For People Who Work With Young People
Everything above is for you — the human. But if you mentor, teach, coach, or parent young people, there's an additional layer.
The Mentor Mirror adds instruments designed specifically for the mentoring relationship:
Mentor Stance Inventory — 8 questions about how you show up. Am I guiding or controlling? Teaching or telling?
Safety Check — 8 questions about the environment you create. Do young people feel safe to make mistakes, speak honestly, and be themselves?
The Integrity Question — Do you live what you teach? Not perfectly. But genuinely.
The person you are shapes the mentor you become. Start with the universal tools above. Then go deeper with the Mentor Mirror.
[The Mentor Mirror →] /mentor-mirror
[The Full Mentors Page →] /mentors1 — Bootstrap Guides, the 12 Core Team Curriculum Lessons, and everything you need to implement steamHouse with your team.
What Makes These Tools Different?
Most self-assessment tools are designed to categorize you — to put you in a box with a label. These are designed to help you see yourself, so you can author yourself.
No personality types. No fixed categories. No "you are an INTJ" or "you're a Type 3." Instead: here's where you are on 58 specific, developable competencies. Here's how clear your sense of purpose is. Here's what your daily habits reveal about your actual priorities.
Everything here is built on the same intellectual framework the Core Curriculum teaches — the same ideas, turned into instruments you use on yourself. The tools are the curriculum made personal.
That's authorship.