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Life’s Great Question - How To Find MEANING In Your Work & Life with Tom Rath

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In this episode we ask the big question - how do you find meaning in your life and work? When you’re starting death in the face, life’s purpose becomes clear. We learn how to harness those lessons to find meaning in your own life and discover a few simple things you can do every day - starting right now - to increase your odds of living a longer, healthier, happier life with our guest Tom Rath. 

  • How a shocking cancer diagnosis and crippling blindness at the age of 16 transformed Tom’s life and put him on a path of transformation.

  • What are the simple things you can do every day - starting right now - to increase your odds of living a longer, healthier life?

  • If you want to be effective as a leader, or in your career as a parent - you have to start with YOURSELF. You have to put your oxygen mask on first. 

  • Most people are operating at 20-25% effectiveness in today’s work environment. 

  • Even one good night of sleep is like a reset button for your life. It gives you a clean and clear slate for the next day to get started on the right foot, and can create an upward spiral of health and productivity. 

  • Building better default choices into your shopping and your environment is a great way to improve in a simple, small way

  • It takes one little turning point, and then your life starts to go into a more and more positive direction. 

  • It’s a mistake to think that more time = more productivity. The marginal effectiveness of working over 50-60 hours begins to be negative.

  • We need to think about work as performance challenge - how do we optimize PERFORMANCE instead of just maximizing time.

  • Wellness is not about disease prevention, it’s a question of PERFORMANCE and being as effective and being your best self. 

  • Wellness/wellbeing is not a “nice to have” - it’s not about “disease burden reduction” - it’s about performance and results - and until we shift that focus and understand that these interventions are the KEY to unleashing more energy, creativity, and results in your life - we’re missing HUGE tools for being more effective leaders and producers. 

  • The psychological and physical steps you can use to create better DAYs in your life. 

    • Eat, move, sleep

    • “Other people matter” - interactions and connections with people we love increase daily happiness.

    • We have to find ways to create MEANING in our work. Meaning more than money will be the currency of work. 

  • We really don’t take enough time in a given day to ask meaningful questions of the people we love and care about. Invest in your closest personal relationships.

  • Be known for not using your phone. The new status symbol is that you don’t have to be tethered to your phone.

  • Walking outside for 10 minutes a day with someone can be a powerful way to improve your thinking and your relationships. 

  • Consider having WALKING meetings with friends and colleagues. You have much more expansionary and open conversations when walking outside. 

  • What is the difference between meaning and happiness? What happens when we get them confused? 

  • How money can kill meaning and actually demotivate people. 

  • How do you bring meaning back into your work and make life more meaningful?

  • Life’s great jobs are MADE not FOUND. You can craft the job that you have into one that you love and find meaning in in most cases. Start with the job that you have. Look at the tasks that you achieve every day and start to connect that to serving a bigger purpose for OTHER people.

  • Start tying the tasks that you do to the people that are helped by your work. 

  • A great step to doing this is to help another person tie their work into how they help other people. 

  • We ALL need reminders of how our work helps others, even nurses! 

  • There’s nothing more powerful you can do from a contribution standpoint than to help another person spot how THEY are helping people. 

  • When you’re starting or joining a new team - take the time to get aligned with everyone about what your strengths and contributions are and where you can add the most value.

  • Dr. Martin Luther King: "Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?"

  • It’s a better use of your time to invest in things that can compound even if you're not directly moving them forward. 

  • How do you identify the most significant contribution we can make in our lives?

    • Ask yourself - what are the central ROLES that you play in your life? Are you doing a good job in those roles and serving others? Mother, Father, sister, brother, parent, etc

    • Figure out your “Defining Roles” and see how you can contribute to them?

    • What are the 2-3 most significant life experiences that have changed your life? Positive and negative. How did they shape you?

  • How can we each get clarity around the 3 core areas of contribution?

    • Create something 

    • Operate together 

    • Relating to one another 

  • What should you do if you can’t find meaning or passion or purpose in your life? What should you do if you can’t 

  • Forget about finding your passion or purpose - that’s a counter productive goal. Purpose and meaning are journeys that occur over decades, and it’s not a straight line, it has ups and downs. Purpose is a myth. 

  • Find your greatest contribution, NOT your passion. There are a lot of passions that don’t do a lot for the world. Start with something that is directed at other people, find something that you can help even one other person. 

  • Stop looking inward to find your meaning. Look outward and focus on contributing to others. 

  • How do you balance doubling down on your strengths vs fixing your weaknesses? 

    • Spend 80% of your time on your strengths and 20% of your time on fixing your weaknesses. 

    • You can’t ignore your weaknesses, they can be big blindspots. 

    • This all starts with self awareness - it’s a KEY component of all of this. 

    • This is a balance - it’s not all or nothing. 

  • Homework: take a moment right now and do a retrospective reflection on your typical day of work. See if you can draw a few direct lines between what you do during an average work day and how that helps another person. What’s something that you can do TODAY that will have a positive influence on another person? What can do you do remind yourself of that day after day?

  • Homework: Do something today that helps another person you work with or care about to spot a way that they’re making a difference and contributing.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we ask the big question, how do you find meaning in your life and work? When you're staring death in the face, life's purpose becomes clear. We learn how to harness those lessons, to find meaning in your own life and discover a few things that you can do every day starting right now, to increase your odds of living a longer healthier happier life, with our guest, Tom Rath.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we wished you a happy Thanksgiving with a beautiful compilation of some of our favorite takes, themes and ideas around the importance of gratitude and how you can be more grateful in your life. If you want to tap into the incredible power of gratitude and how we can transform your life, check out our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Tom.

[0:01:54.0] MB: Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Tom Rath. Tom is a consultant and author on employee engagement, strengths and well-being. He's best known for his studies on strength-based leadership, well-being and synthesizing research findings in his series of best-selling books. His 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies and he's made hundreds of appearances around the globe on best-seller lists. He also serves as a senior scientist and advisor to Gallup, among many other companies. Tom, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:21.6] TR: Thanks so much. It's an honor to be talking with you, Matt.

[0:02:23.6] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on the show today. The topics that you've covered in your work are so fascinating and important. I think especially in today's world, these questions of meaning and contribution and what do I really want to spend my time on and focus my life on, these are things that I think about all the time, I know so many people are really concerned with.

Before we dig into that, I want to almost follow the narrative journey of your publishing career in some form or fashion, because there's so many lessons that come out of it and it's amazing how interwoven these things are. Let's start with you have a book, title is very simple, called Eat Move Sleep. Tell me about that project, how did that come about and what were the big lessons?

[0:03:08.8] TR: Yeah. The project came about, it does have an interesting backstory, but also I think has influenced the rest of the work that we'll talk about quite a bit. I'm now 43-years-old for context. When I was 16-years-old growing up a normal child, that I grew up in Nebraska in the middle of a country and I was having trouble seeing out of one eye.

Eventually went to an eye doctor and he said, “Well, you've got a lot of large tumors on the back of your left eye. They’re cancerous.” He said, “You'll probably lose all sight in that eye over the next few months.” He said, “In addition to that, we think you have a really rare genetic disorder that essentially shuts off the body's most powerful tumor suppressing gene.”

He said, as a product of that, we don't know the estimate at the time and said I might live to be 37. When I did some research and digging on it, but they said you will have cancer in your kidneys, in your pancreas, in your spine and a host of other areas. To make a really long story short, I am currently battling cancer in all those areas and I did lose all sight in my eye when I was young. The thing I struggle with most now are some large spinal tumors.

As a part of that journey, having that diagnosis when I was 16-years-old, I've essentially spent all of my time since then, or a good chunk of every single day I wake up and I just read through all the medical research and literature that I can get my hands on thousands and thousands of articles about what are all the small steps that I can take today that simply increase my odds of living longer in good health.

You mentioned the book Eat Move Sleep. When I turned 37, I viewed that as a moment to step back and say, “Hey, things have gone pretty well. I've been able to keep this at bay and live a relatively normal life for quite a while.” I thought that was a good time to step back and say, what are all the specific tips around eating, moving and sleeping better that aren't just good for me and my long-term health and keeping cancer at bay, but what are the things that anyone that I care about could learn from all of that research in order to have better days, be better role models and to increase their odds of decreasing things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer and all those odds as well?

The big takeaway as I got into that book was even for a guy like me with that extraordinary risk and threats every day, it's still really not a great motivator for me to avoid the cheeseburger and French fries at lunch today. What is our connecting the research with these moment-by-moment decisions to knowing that I need that energy to be my best in a meeting at 4:00 today. Boy, do I need a lot more energy when my kids get home at 5:00 tonight so I can be a good dad.

As I started to connect all these small, little daily choices about being more active and eating some of the right foods and getting a good night's sleep, I realized that that can help me and a lot of other people just to prioritize our own health and well-being in the moment today, so we can be better spouses, be better workers, be better members of our community.

[0:06:09.5] MB: I can't imagine getting that diagnosis, especially at such a young age. I'm sure that in many ways has shaped your focus and the journey that a lot of your work is taking you on. I want to come back and dig in a little bit more, because you said something really important, which is this idea that it's very hard to tie these important long-term goals into our daily choices. We know the things. In many ways, eating, sleeping, moving, these are things that we know how important they are, they're almost so simple that nobody even wants to hear that advice. It's almost demotivating or not motivating. How did you find a way to bridge that gap between the things we know we should be doing and what we actually do on a day-to-day basis?

[0:06:56.6] TR: One of the big realizations for me and especially thinking about it from a career and a leadership standpoint is if you want to be effective as a leader, or in your career, or as a parent, you have to put your own health and well-being first. Let me start with that, where it's the very tried but true oxygen mask example on an airplane. Most people are showing up at work today and I think they're operating at about 20%, 25% of their effectiveness based on my estimates. We need to say, “Hey, I'm going to prioritize my health and energy first, because I need it, my customers need it, my clients need it, my career needs it.”

The way to do that is in what's the encouraging thing I learned from all the deep research I did on eating, moving and sleeping is if you just get one good night of sleep, even if you've had a crummy day today, everything's gone wrong, you get a solid seven or eight hours of sleep, it's the reset button on a Xbox, or a smartphone. It just gives you a clear slate the next day and you're more likely to be more active and move around throughout the day. You're more likely to eat healthier foods. It starts these upward spirals where your days get progressively better, because you made the right, small choices in the moment.

The same thing applies in the other direction the way those three things work in tandem, where if I've had a pretty good night's sleep and I've been active and moving around throughout the morning and then all of a sudden, I see a bunch of people who I'm out to eat with and they make indulgent choices, a bunch of fried foods and have dessert at lunch, whatever it might be, then I go into a meeting at 4:00 that afternoon and I'm half asleep, I don't have anywhere near the ideas or creativity that I need. That's likely to disrupt my sleep and send things in the other direction.

I think when people start to see the interconnectedness of these small choices, then they realize that they need to build better default choices in. When I say build better default choices in, make sure the right stuff ends up in your grocery cart at the store, because then you're not going to be tempted in a weaker moment like we all are to grab for the bag of chips, or for me, it's peanut butter pretzels I can't resist, right?

How do you build some healthy choices into the place where you work and your home as well? Then to start to think about how do you just build a little bit more activity or into your routine. Like you mentioned, it's not big overarching changes. I think what I've learned over the last decade is that I think when a lot of us here, you need to have 30 to 60 minutes of intense cardiovascular activity five days a week. We just throw our hands up and say, “I’m not going to do that.” The bigger public health problems and bigger challenge for most of us is we just need to not sit in a chair with our butts glued to it for six to eight hours a day, because that's causing more cardiovascular disease, that's causing more diabetes, obesity, it’s causing all kinds of problems.

The solution to that is just to do what I'm doing right now. When you're on a phone call, be up and moving around and pacing around a little bit. It's that subtle variance in our activity that can reel long-term rewards for our overall health.

[0:09:55.0] MB: It's amazing, the power of upward spirals and how even one really small victory can compound and begin to grow into more and more positive healthy life choices.

[0:10:08.6] TR: Yeah. It just takes one little turning point there and then everything starts to go in the right direction in that. The things you do – the other thing I've learned through experience is that let's say you're in a workplace and you're someone like me, I'm normally a little more introverted, I've never preached to anyone about health. Even though I wrote the book Eat Move Sleep, but I would never even tell one of my relatives or in-laws or best friends what I think they should do with their health.

The one thing I do is I'm very careful to be a good example for my kids, for my friends, for my colleagues and with my own actions. It may take six months, sometimes it takes three years, but eventually people start to pick up on things that we do and we set better examples for the people around us and people we care about. I'm increasingly convinced that demonstrating good health and well-being is one of the most important things that leaders and organizations can do today, because if the opposite is true and you see leaders who are sacrificing their sleep first, which many, many leaders do and you see people who are setting bad examples with what they eat and they're not prioritizing sleep and so forth, boy that sends a message to the rest of the people, in that workgroup and maybe throughout the organization that prioritizing your own health and well-being isn't acceptable here. I don't think that's going to be acceptable for leaders to act like that 10 years from now. I hope not.

[0:11:25.7] MB: That comes back to what you said a minute ago as well, this idea of the oxygen mask principle; you have to start with yourself. In many ways, that seems like it's missing in our lexicon, or our understanding of productivity and health and happiness today.

[0:11:44.2] TR: Yeah. I grew up in a real hard-working farming Midwestern town in Lincoln, Nebraska. I never met a role model who I want to look up to who would admit that they needed seven or eight hours sleep back then. It was always a badge of honor to say, “I only had four hours sleep and I still did X and Y and Z.” There's that industrial mindset from a workplace standpoint and you have that paired with some of that real good intended upbringing and US is a country that tries and works hard and so forth.

I don't think we've taken enough of a step back yet to realize how much unintentional collateral damage that can do when everyone around you is just trying to ramp up and work longer hours. There's a lot of good research emerging the last five years that I've seen showing that just encouraging people to do long, work longer hours, after about 40 hours to be really specific from a research standpoint and I've looked at this and written about this, the book called Wellbeing that we worked on when I was at Gallup, once you get past 40 hours, hours 40 through 50 and hours 50 through 60, they're just nowhere near as productive as the first 20 or 30 hours.

It's a mistake to think that more time equals more productivity and it's certainly doesn’t equal more quality. It equals more errors and more variance and more safety challenges in the workplace.

[0:13:06.2] MB: That principle is something, I've seen that in the research, I've heard it echoed by a number of guests on the show and yet, even just being American, as part of our culture, that's something that's hard for me to internalize and I'm constantly battling that same internal dialogue of, “Oh, this isn't that productive, but the flipside of that Puritan work ethic that I need to be working more. I need to be doing more stuff. I need to be hustling harder.” How do we start to really internalize that lesson and come to grips with the notion that working harder doesn't necessarily lead to more productivity, more output, more result?

[0:13:45.1] TR: It's a great question. I think a part of the answer lies in just having open discussions about it with the people you work with and destigmatizing the notion that – I mean, I've been in cultures and worked with companies where it's always sudden, people feel they need to be the first ones to show up in the office in the morning, the last ones to leave.

I think if we just start to talk about that openly and say what are the ways that each of us can have our schedules work and our habits and patterns and defaults and the things that are available to be active in an office and the foods that are available and so forth, how can we all make that work so that we have more energy and more creativity at 3:00 in a meeting when we really need it most, or for a big client presentation? How can we think about optimizing the flow of people's energy within a work team, so that we can be at our peak as much as possible?

I think to your question, which is a very good one specifically, I think we need to start to look at it as a performance challenge to say how can we optimize performance, instead of just maximizing time. What I've seen that hasn't worked, to be really honest, I've spent 10 years on this well-being stuff, and when it's seen as a disease burden reduction program, or a benefits program that's about wellness and keeping people from having diabetes and obesity and stuff, boy, that's not seen as a real leadership issue, or a legitimate conversation in most work circles.

I think we've got to talk about it more about how can we be effective and be our best by tweaking these things and start to view it as an energy prioritization exercise, not a disease burden reduction exercise.

[0:15:29.9] MB: That's a great point, this whole endeavor of optimizing your life trying to pursue wellness is not – there are these ancillary side benefits around health outcomes and things like that, but really if you look at it from the lens of a ruthless performance-driven individual who wants more output and more results, a lot of these strategies are actually the most effective path for you to pursue, but the way we think about them in today's world is often counterproductive.

[0:16:02.0] TR: Right. I’ve spent a lot of time just on the semantic to this. I mean, all the work I’ve done on well-being, if it even sounds like wellness, it seems like a nice to have, right? It doesn’t become a part of the performance, critical conversation that leaders have in the workplace in too many cases. I think we start to get it more about leaders have been able to grasp my work on this and that my most recent book before this one coming out in 2020, that – called Fully Charged.

The point there was to get people talking about what do we all need to be fully charged like our devices and have as much energy as possible in a day to be productive and of course, that also benefits our health. I think putting it in the frame of energy and creativity and productivity makes it a more relevant and open conversation for people to have in the workplace.

[0:16:51.5] MB: Let's dig into some of the lessons and themes from Fully Charged, because there's so many great takeaways from that book. How did the journey progress? We've started answering this already, but how did the journey progress from eat, move, sleep, to fully charged?

[0:17:06.7] TR: Yeah. It's interesting, because a lot of the work that I mentioned on well-being, people talk about whether you want to call it well-being, or quality of life, or basically all the things that are important to how we think about and evaluate our lives is how we define it when I was at Gallup. It's supposed to be the biggest umbrella you can think of.

One of the fascinating findings for me from all the global research that I've been a part of is that if you ask people if they look back on their overall life over 30 years, or 50 years, or 70 years, how would you evaluate your life, if you do that and you line that up with how much money people make, it's almost a perfect correlation between the two.

When you ask people to just evaluate their life in a huge sum like that, people who live in wealthier countries rate their lives higher, we each doubling of income buys you about a point on the ladder you'd put yourself on and money matters too much when you ask people a big evaluative question like that.

What was more encouraging that I've seen in recent data is that if you ask people how much fun they're having right now, how much energy they have right now and do they have negative emotions, positive emotions, and you look at daily well-being, which I would argue having a bunch of good days is a lot more important than one rating, looking all the way back at the end of life. When you look at that, it's nowhere near as income-dependent and it's all about the little things we do during the day. It's about the people we're with, how much social interaction we have if we'd have done some meaningful work, if we feel we've had that physical energy we were just talking about.

The good news there is that after a threshold level of income, in the United States it's about depending on location, it's between $55,000 and $75,000 per household in income. That is a great equalizer where the relationship of income flattens out and doesn't predict how much daily well-being people will have. You see this across countries as well, with the countries with the highest daily well-being are countries like Panama and Paraguay and Uruguay, they're happy central American countries, to oversimplify it. It's not the real wealthy Nordic countries you normally see pop up in the big life satisfaction studies.

What I learned from that research and talked about in the Fully Charged book are the psychological and physical steps we can take to create better days in particular. The three big ones in there, we've talked a lot about the physical energy part of it, in terms of eating, moving, sleeping, so forth. The other one that according to all the psychological research I've studied, my grad advisor, Chris Peterson, used to say, “Other people matter,” was his summary of decades of psychological research.

There's no better predictor of how happy we’ll be in a day than the amount of time we spent around people we enjoy being with. If there's one spot that we'll talk about today that I have the most concern about frankly, even more than inactivity and stuff, it's the fact that we really don't take enough time in a given day to ask meaningful questions of the people we love and care about and close our own mouths and just genuinely listen to those responses.

You obviously do a lot of that with the work that you do, but we need more people who are really focused on keeping their devices off and stowed away and genuinely listening to and investing in their closest personal relationships. I think that's the one thing that people who do that really well are going to be increasingly valuable, especially in the workplace over the next 25 years, because there's so much flying out, it's just going to get harder and harder and harder to do.

When I spend time with groups talking about some of the concepts in the Fully Charged book, I challenge people to be known for not using their phone. It sounds simple, but when I was a kid it was always glamorous for people to be out seen smoking, right? Now they have to hide behind dumpsters and don't even want to be caught on the property having a cigarette.

10, 15 years ago when people first got cellphones, it was a big deal for a realtor to be carrying around a big bag, so you knew they were important and had to be accessible all the time, right? Now, I think the new status symbol needs to be that you don't have to be tethered to your phone and you can choose to pay attention to other people and care about that instead. That's the head of this Fully Charged factors, I think that's the big one we're going to face.

Then the third one folds into what I've been working on more recently, which is that we have to find ways to see how we're doing meaningful things through our work, because I think meaning more than money will be the new currency for careers and influence in the future.

[0:21:50.3] MB: So many things to unpack from that. I want to come back to what you said a minute ago around how we don't create enough time in our lives to ask meaningful questions of the people that we love and care about. Putting away your phone is obviously a huge step towards doing that. What are some other strategies, or things that you can do to create more meaningful connections in day-to-day life?

[0:22:14.1] TR: Yeah. I think we've got to be pretty deliberate about the investments we make in our very closest relationships and think about what it takes to nurture those relationships. I mean, in some cases it's about growing new ones. I think the part that a lot of us and gosh, I hate to start out as much, but I think men and I'm in this bill myself, are just horrible at it on average. I think to say what are you doing this week, to spend whether it's 15 minutes, whether it's an e-mail, whether it's sitting down with someone, asking someone to go have dinner, go on a walk.

One of the things that people never call out from the Walter Isaacson's great biography of Steve Jobs, people do – and there are all these quotes and everything else. My favorite part was were Walter Isaacson asked Steve Jobs. He said, “Why do you always ask people to come over to your house and go for walks around your neighborhood?” Jobs’ simple response was, “I think better when I walk.”

There are three things in that statement from Jobs; he's spending time with people one-on-one out in nature, we're not distracted. Just being in nature is huge. Being active, we all think better when we walk, but we don't – back to your question, I think all of us, we've got to force ourselves to get outdoors for at least 10 minutes a day just for our well-being and get some activity. Walk to the second closest Starbucks if you live in a city like I do. Find ways to build that in your routine, both activity and relationships, because they can go hand in hand.

My wife and I have created a pattern and ritual over the five, six years now, their kids have been in the elementary school down the road here, that any day that the weather's nice enough to do it, we walk our kids to school first thing in the morning, because it gives us time to have one-on-one conversation on the way home and it gets our kids some activity before school, because they don't get enough activity in school nowadays at all.

I'll tell you this, when I've gone on walks with colleagues and friends for meetings, which I do all the time now, you have so much more expansionary meaningful thought, versus if you're sitting in a traditional conference room, or an office. I got so fed up. About two to three years ago, I got so fed up with the normal ballrooms and conference rooms and hotel meeting rooms I spent time in, that one of my big projects over the last three years has been – we've been trying to build an active learning warehouse that's in the woods about 30, 50 minutes from DC here.

The whole point is even when there's bad weather, we have poor treadmills set up where you can look out the glass and feel like you're on side-by-side walking out in the woods just to have mind-expanding meetings and conversations with people, even if there's inclement weather out there. On nice days, you can actually go around and walk through the woods on this property. I did that, put that whole project together just because the traditional set up we have for meeting rooms and offices is so hard to work around in many cases.

[0:25:12.4] MB: That's a great and simple piece of advice, one that I definitely am going to integrate into my own habits and routines and meetings.

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[0:26:35.5] MB: I want to come back to the broader topic that you touched on a minute ago and the importance of meaning. What is the difference between meaning and happiness and what happens when we get those things confused?

[0:26:48.7] TR: Yes. I think those two words are at the center of a lot of good research. I think there's also a lot of misdirection that takes place sometimes where – I mean, I honestly, I've been a part of that doing a lot of research on happiness. My degree is in positive psychology and well-being over the years. Because I think happiness to me has more of an implication of looking inward and taking steps to make yourself happy. The thing I've learned through studying this in real good experiments and trials and the like on these topics is that if I had a friend who was really struggling and I sat down and had a long conversation, went for a walk with that friend, the last thing I would ever do is help him to map out ways to try and make himself happy.

The first thing I would get him directed on is what are some specific efforts he could take to do things that increase the happiness of people he cares about, to feel better about what he's doing to serve customers, or to feel better about projects he's involved in with his church, or with his community, or whatever that might be that actually leads to more happiness based on everything I've studied.

[0:28:09.1] MB: I want to drill down into another theme that you expound upon, which is this notion of the relationship between money and happiness and meaning. I just did it myself. I just confused meaning and happiness. What is the difference between, or the relationship between money and meaning and tell me more about what you touched on a minute ago, this idea that money can actually kill meaning in our lives?

[0:28:31.7] TR: Yeah. There's a great piece of research that – we put together a documentary called Fully Charged a couple years ago. We interviewed a professor named Amy Wrzesniewski, who’s at Yale now I believe. She did some research, I think it was with Barry Schwartz and a few others on Cadets West Point. They looked at these West Point cadets and said, do they have intrinsic motivation and they're driven from some internal desire? Or are they doing things because of external motivators, extrinsic motivators, like reward and prestige and pay and things like that, right?

I might have thought going into that study if you were to say okay, intrinsic, internal thing motivations are better, probably better than the external ones. I had a hunch that was right going in. What they found that surprised me is that even if you're really internally motivated, also having the external motivation is bad for the eventual outcomes for those cadets. I've seen evidence similar to that in other experiments and realms as well, where almost any – I'm trying not to use the word quid pro quo, because I’ve heard it way too much lately, but almost any incentive that is purely monetarily-driven is likely in my experience to drive motivation in the wrong direction.

If you're a manager right now in particular, or you're just an individual thinking about how do I motivate myself to do better work, I think the more you can see metrics and outcomes that are about the meaning and mission and purpose; for my work, if I focus more on how many people my work is reaching, or people that I've heard from who say their life has been demonstrably impacted by some of my research, or a book, or a talk, or whatever it might be, that's a much better motivation than counting dollars, or trying to count things that are more about financial and external metrics.

I think we've got to find ways, especially with the cohort of people entering the workforce today. Let's say between 18 and 35-years-old in particular, I pick on right now. I'm excited about that generation entering the workforce, because I think that generation has much higher expectations about working for a purpose that's bigger than a paycheck. It's so clear in all of the studies that I read. I think it's fun to see, because there's a generation past me where I think that the generation leaving the workforce right now, work was very little more than an economic transaction. It was sterile and there wasn't a lot of thought given to how people can see the meaning in their work. I'm encouraged that that'll be vastly different 10 or 20 years from now.

[0:31:28.0] MB: How do we start to bring meaning back into our work and make our work more meaningful?

[0:31:35.8] TR: I think it starts with the job you have today, which is one of the things I talk about in the new book Life's Great Question is about – a good friend of mine who passed away a couple of years ago, who was the world's leading researcher on hope, his name was Shane Lopez. What Shane taught me is that great jobs are made, not found. That's how he put it.

Basically, what he taught me and what I've learned from a lot of the research from some of the best professors in Michigan's business school in particular is that you can craft the job that you have into one that you love and find meaning in in most cases. That starts by taking a pretty careful look at the tasks that you do each day in a pretty functional way and saying, what are the things that I do each day and how does that connect to serving a bigger purpose for another person?

Even if that's indirect, if you can start to draw the line – so I mean, GE does a great job of helping people on their manufacturing floor. They bring people in who are making them, or who are making MRI machines, for example, and they have them hear from customers and people who are battling cancer who have benefited from that imaging. Facebook does a similar thing, where they bring in people who have met long-lost loved ones, or a friend they haven’t been able to get in touch with and have developers who are working on the platform hear from people who have benefited from that work.

Or the company can do that, but on an individual level, I think a part of it is auditing the tasks of our day and making sure that as many of those tasks as possible, you can draw a direct connection how you're serving a person or a group of people in a positive way that improves their life. I mean, there are some professions frankly, where and I've done some work on this where if you're working for a company that does nothing other than produce cigarettes for example, or sugar water, or whatever it might be, it could be difficult to draw those connections. If you care about that, you might want to ask much more serious questions.

In 95%, 98% of roles, there are pretty direct ways where you can connect what you're doing between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon with the purpose it’s intended to serve, whether it's to keep people safe, if you work in a safety department or in a government agency that regulate things, or whether it's to reach more people if you have an important medicine or product.

I spend a lot of time with people in the healthcare industry, who you'd think that nurses in the hospital – hospice nurses and home care nurses and you'd think that it would be so obvious to them the purpose of their work serves every day. Even in those professions, they still need reminders. One of the more powerful things you can do of course is to help another person to see how their work tomorrow makes a difference for the life of another person, because we're not that – we're probably better at doing it for others and it's easier to do for others than it is to remind and do it ourselves all the time.

[0:34:44.8] MB: That's a great strategy, the idea of starting with someone else and helping them figure out how their work creates meaning, because oftentimes, you can get clouded or confused when you're trying to examine your own contributions.

[0:34:59.6] TR: Yeah. One of the stories I talk about in some detail in that Life's Great Question book is that I grew up in a family full of psychologists and teachers. When I was a little kid, they gave me every Rorschach test and block stacking thing. They were trying to figure out what I was good at. I was four, or five-years-old. I'd been through all that. Then when graduated from college, one of my first jobs was to work on the strengths finder application at Gallup that you might have heard of that it gives people their top talents out of a list of 34. I went through that 10 or 15 times while we were building it. I'd done all that.

Even then, by the time I was I think about 25-years-old and I've gone through all those batteries and had all this information, I still thought at that time that I was a really horrible writer and that was the one thing I was never going to do. Because a teacher, an English, an AP English teacher in my high school told me that I should stick to numbers and math, because writing wasn't my thing.

To make a long story short, my grandfather at that time challenged me to work on a book with him under some pretty extreme circumstances. He said to me, he’d been reading a little piece, a letter that I had written him, just a personal handwritten letter and he said, “I think you've got a little talent to bring things to life with words and I think we should try to put this book together in his final year to life.

Anyhow, the long story short is that book turned out to be a book called How Full Is Your Bucket, that caught on and that's what got me into doing all the writing I'm doing. I bring that up, because if he hadn't said he spotted a talent, even after all the batteries and diagnostics and everything else and giving me a real specific challenge on one day, there's no way I would have ever shared an article for public consumption. Instead because of what he noticed and pointed out, it completely altered the direction of my career and what I do.

My learning from that is that there's nothing more powerful you can do from a contribution standpoint than to help another person spot a talent or something meaningful they're doing that they might not have noticed. Boy, is that an important thing to do for other people in the workplace and in your home as well.

[0:37:11.1] MB: What are some ways that we can start to help others see their contributions?

[0:37:18.5] TR: The first thing that comes to mind to me and it sounds obvious, but it's just old. I think to hold up a mirror when you spot things and help people to see things that they're already doing and they're taking it for granted, because we all need that motivation of why we're doing things in order to keep going and to keep doing our best work.

The other thing that I've been working on specifically with this Life's Great Question book is how can you – when you start new teams, or when you join a new team, or you start a new job, anytime you're joining a new group trying to do something, how can you all get together and say, “Here's who I am, here's what motivates me, here are the things I'm interested in and here are the ways that I think I can make a unique contribution to this effort as we move forward.”

I'm amazed by how I'm guilty of doing this myself in recent years, where excuse me, where I get a team together and we're all charged up about a mission or something that we want to do, and six months later we all come back and realize that hey, nobody said they wanted to go sell this mission to the world and be the one that was helping us to bring in new business and get people interested in this. I think to level set expectations, anytime you form a new team or group and talk very openly about how each person can best contribute to the mission is a pretty important step.

[0:38:39.2] MB: You said something earlier that it's really stuck with me and defines the way that we think about contribution in a sense that maybe, or at least from my perspective and I think many people's perspective is not that intuitive, which is that contribution is about how you're serving other people. Tell me more about the importance of others and how serving them is such a cornerstone of meaning and contribution.

[0:39:09.8] TR: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, because it brings me back to the root of where some of my thinking started on this. I've always just personally been motivated and haunted in my daily work by a quote from Dr. King. What Dr. King said was he said, “Life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others?” I've tried to wake up almost every day, whether I'm driving, or out for a walk early in the morning and orient my efforts in that direction to say what am I going to do today that in my case, I asked a question that will continue to grow when I'm gone?

I say grow when I'm gone with double meaning. I mean, a part of it is I have all these threats to my own mortality and health challenges and so forth. The bigger part of it is I think it's a better use of my time to invest in efforts that can compound, even if I'm not actively involved in a book or in a business or with a group or whatever it might be. I think when you orient your efforts to one, orient your efforts outwards about how they're going to have a positive influence on other people, that's the best place to start.

Then I would take that one more step beyond and say, how can you also start to think about what are the things you'll work on in the next few months that can continue to grow and pay dividends, even if you're not there actively involved in managing? That's one of the beautiful things about what you're doing right now with the podcast, or I've been working on with a book where – or anyone who's in a company working on a new product, or service, whatever it might be. If you can put something together that once it's out there, it continues to produce growth and meaning and wellbeing for people, even when you're not involved putting more hours in. I think that's just a best possible scenario for optimizing our time over the span of a career in a pretty general sense.

[0:41:04.8] MB: I love that quote and it brings me back to trying to wrap my head around this whole project of bringing more meaning into our lives and into our work. You touched on one or two of these strategies already, but what are some of the other core things, or really important steps that we can take when we want to identify and uncover the most significant contributions that we can make.

[0:41:31.1] TR: Yeah, one simple thing I've been putting together, this contribute my profile that's the – my goal with this recent book and the website and the company is I want people to put something together that's a nice one-page baseball card of who they are emotionally, that's a lot warmer and more personal than the sterile, lifeless resumes we pass around right now to get to know one another.

The first thing that I ask people on that profile that's at the very top of it is what are the essential roles you play in life? These roles are like for me, it's a father of two kids, and my son, daughter, the husband. Then the third most important role is being a researcher and a writer. I ask people to start there, because I mean, in the end, nobody's going to put – I hope nobody's going to put on their headstone that they had a 100,000 followers on Twitter, or that they made a million dollars or whatever it might be. I think in the end, we want to be remembered by the most important roles that we play in our lives overall and that's both personal and professional.

I would recommend that people get back to that and say, “Why am I doing what I'm doing today? Is it because I care about my family? Is it because I really want to share my faith? Is it because I'm so passionate about making the environment better?” Whatever it might be. Have those, I call them defining roles, the very top your radar screen. Those defining roles.

The other piece that I have learned through talking to people is what are the two or three most searing and influential life experiences? I call them miles in this profile, or most important life experiences that are about what are the things that really change your life? Some of those are really good positive moments for me, like when my first daughter was born, I reoriented a lot of my thinking in life. Some of them are really challenging, traumatic moments, like my final days with my grandfather that changed the way I think about some of the meaning in my work.

To sit down with whether it's your family, or your colleagues, or group of people and talk about why you're doing what you're doing, who it makes a difference for, boy, we get to relate and get to know each other on a very different level. Then the third element of that profile that I spent a lot of time on is how can we each get clarity around these three core areas of contribution?

In any team, you've got a team really needs to create something and they need to continue to operate regularly and they need to relate to one another. I went through thousands of job code categories that what does everybody really have to do on a team in any type of work, or industry, or role anywhere in the world? You have to do all those three things.

How can we sit down and say based on my interests and my motivations, my experience and the roles I want to play, here's how I want to contribute to this team. I think those are three of the big questions to ask, so that you can have your daily efforts much more closely aligned with how they make a substantive contribution to other people in the world eventually.

[0:44:28.0] MB: You've already answered this in part or in whole, but I want to repeat it or rephrase it, because I hear this so often, for someone who's thinking, “I can't figure out what my purpose is, or what my passion is. I don't know what I should be doing with my life. I don't know how I can find meaning,” what would you say to them?

[0:44:52.4] TR: I would say, start by finding exactly one thing that you can do that improves the lot in life of another human being. I think a lot of times – and I would also say, forget about finding or following your passion or purpose. Just forget. I think a lot of that conversation is counterproductive, to be honest. I don't think there is one singular purpose in life. I think purpose and meaning are both journeys that occur over decades. There are times when you really accelerate and get more purpose in a job, there are times when you go backwards, all of this.

Well, I have ups and downs, but that's an ongoing journey. I think to give up on the myth of you either have it or you don't, you find it don't. Then I would really say strongly that find your greatest contribution, not your passion. Because my passion could be golf, or playing Xbox, or whatever and some of the – there are a lot of passions that really don't do a lot for the rest of the world, to be honest. I would start with something that's other-directed, because I think if you want to find sustainable meaning, you need to start with something that serves the world, not just your own passions or interest.

[0:46:06.1] MB: Great piece of advice. I really like the perspective of forgetting about your passion and focusing on other people and how you can contribute something to them.

[0:46:18.1] TR: Yeah. I think a lot of these conversations, there are so many of us that are really interested in productivity and self-development all these things, but a lot of the writing and advice on this topic that I've studied at least, I mean, I've done it too, will pull you to look inward. I think the more time you spend looking inward that’s often at a detriment to time spent trying to orient those efforts to contribution and outwards. We've got to at least try and bring that into balance. That's what I've been working on with some of this latest project.

[0:46:51.6] MB: There's one other question I wanted to ask you. It's not directly about meaning, but interrelates with this in many ways. Coming back all the way to a lot of the research that you've done around strengths finder and finding your strengths, how do you reconcile, or think about the potentially conflicting pieces of advice around finding your strengths and doubling down on your strengths, versus fixing your weaknesses?

[0:47:17.9] TR: Yeah. I've always advocated for a balance of time spent on strengths and weaknesses. I think when I entered the workforce several decades ago now, in a typical performance review, manager would spend about 80% of the time telling you what you did wrong and maybe 20% of the time telling you what you did right. I've always thought that if you just inverted that, we'd be in a much better place. If you spend 80% of the time talking about the successes and celebrating victories and talking about people's strengths, that'd be good. Then you spend 20% of the time on their gaps and their areas for improvement. You got to have those tough conversations in the workplace.

I've never in any of the research I've seen on strength, or anything I've written about, I would not recommend ignoring weaknesses. I think weaknesses can be big blind spots that when I ask executives about some of the most influential development programs they've been to, they often talk about programs where they were either on video cameras, when they're in a meeting, or they did a 360 audit or something and they found clarity and blind spots and now they're aware of and they know how to manage around. Boy, that stuff's important.

Let's just take that back a little bit more broadly for a minute and say, I do think self-awareness is very important, both self-awareness about your strengths and your weaknesses. I think self-awareness about your natural talent is the single best place to start. I mean, even though I'm talking about contribution, I would argue that you need to know some of your natural talents before you can figure out how you want to best contribute and apply those to things that you're also interested in and that motivate you. I think that's a really good starting point, but I think you have to have some balance around that overall self-awareness.

[0:49:06.0] MB: That's a great piece of advice and the notion of keeping those things in balance with maybe a weighting more towards focusing on strengths is a really good perspective on that.

[0:49:14.7] TR: Yeah. There's some research on this where it's the basic human interaction. When we go through our days, we plow through our days, we need 80% of those comments to be positive, versus maybe 20% or the negative, just to get through the day with decent well-being. There's been a lot of work on ratios of interactions in workplaces and in marriages and relationships. You need four or five positives for every one negative, because one bad exchange with another person outweighs a good one, or outweighs four or five good ones. I think if we can look at the balance of time spent on development in a similar vein, it should be helpful.

[0:49:53.9] MB: For somebody who's listened to this conversation who wants to take concrete action and implement some of the things that we've talked about today, what would be one action step that you would give them to begin, or start taking action on something that we've discussed?

[0:50:11.6] TR: Yeah, I think the first thing I would recommend is to just take a moment right now and do a little retrospective reflection on your typical day of work and see if you can draw a few direct lines between what you do almost every day, or every weekday at least and how that helps another person. Going back to Dr. King's question, what's something you'll do yet today that will have a positive influence on another person? Then ask yourself, what can you do to remind yourself of that tomorrow and the day after and the day after? Because we need reminders of why we do what we do, so we can continue to make a big contribution there. That's one thing.

Second thing I would recommend is do something yet today that helps another person you work with, or care about to spot away they're making a difference and they're contributing. See if you can do that at least one, two, three times every week.

[0:51:10.5] MB: Both great pieces of advice and so simple to execute, great ways to really begin down the journey of creating meaning in our lives. Tom, for listeners who want to find you and all of your work online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[0:51:28.6] TR: Yeah, all of my books and writing can be found at TomRath.org. The new book Life's Great Question has a website called Contribify, that's diagnostic and profile that I encourage people to try and build, that will get that conversation started and it's meant for teams to use around the top of a contribution.

[0:51:48.7] MB: Well Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this wisdom, some really great insights into how we can create meaning in our work and in our lives.

[0:51:58.6] TR: Thanks so much. It's been a really fun conversation. I appreciate it.

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