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- [00:00]
A
So what if the reason so many small business owners feel quietly stuck even when the numbers look fine is not burnout or strategy, but the slow drift away from a clear answer to one question? What's the point? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Tom Rath. He's the number one New York Times bestselling author whose books on strength, well being and contribution have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, including Strength Finders 2.0, Eat, Move, Sleep, which we did an episode on this show. Tom started his career at Gallup where he helped build the strength space tools used by millions of people. He's now the Co founder and CEO of CareerSight and, and his new book, what's the Point? Is out now and we're going to dig into why that question matters more than most of us want to admit. So, Tom, welcome back to the show.
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B
Good to see you again, John.
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A
So how is everything that you've written about strengths and well being and contribution kind of made this question, what's the point? Something you need to spend a whole book on?
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B
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I realized in my own life and in teams and leaders and people that I'm working with that it's gotten so easy to just go through the motions in a given day because it's, I mean, it's almost easier to just feel like you get to inbox zero and you respond to the things you're supposed to respond to. You finish your day's tasks, you do your expense reports, you get home and then you catch up with some of your family members, you let the show play on Netflix, let the next one go, and you just kind of become a little more passive in terms of the way you're kind of going through days in life and, and it's. That's almost more enjoyable and easier to do sometimes. And so I think we need to, especially with all the automation and everything coming our way right now, we need to do a little bit better job. And at least I realized that I did of kind of shaking myself out of that routine and saying, are you dedicating some time to more creative pursuits? Are you building things? Are you investing more deliberate time in relationships and conversations with people that matter so that at the end of the day, you make sure that you reserved at least, I don't know, 20, 30% of your time at a minimum, for doing things that might really matter a week from now or a year from now or maybe even a decade from now, so asking what's the point? Not as some broad philosophical, sunny day, once in a lifetime question, but more as a guiding light for how you prioritize every hour within a day is what caught me and has really helped and worked pretty well. Yeah.
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A
And I think that's true of many small business owners. I mean, the crushing noise, you know, seems to take over. And if you can, you see lots of people advise this. If you can get in the habit of saying, okay, what's like the one thing that if I did that today, you know, that would move the needle instead of all this other garbage, which 80% of is probably just busy work. So it's not like you said, it's not just self development. I mean, it's a very practical business tool, isn't it?
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B
Yeah. And I think that one of the very just. I'm always looking for the most practical tips and tools from the research, but what I figured out is if you can try and restructure or reprioritize the order in which you do things in a given day so that you ensure that you're not going to go a day without working on some meaningful, purposeful items, that, and that can just be having a 15 minute conversation with someone who works for you and really listening and closing your mouth and keeping your device stowed away and investing in someone's development and then realizing that kind of is the point and that is the purpose and that's not a waste of time because it's those kind of trust and relationships that really build speed and efficiency and creativity and innovation over time.
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A
So many people, there's lots of stories of people being kind of woken up to this idea by something that happened. You've been very open about your own health journey. How is that? In fact, we. You're one of your last books. We talked about that on the show. But how much does your personal experience sit underneath this new book?
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B
You think it sits under this new book to a degree where. I mean, I probably realized much earlier on because I was told I had a debilitating genetic cancer syndrome when I was 15, that I needed to try and pack more life into those years than a lot of people think about pretty early on. But one of the things I realized when I worked on the book about health, eat, move, sleep that you mentioned was that even with all those big threats to my health and I had active tumors in my kidneys and pancreas and spine all over, that wasn't a very good motivator to skip the cheeseburger and French fries at lunch and to get a salad instead. So that research I did on health kind of taught me that we all need better ways to just give ourselves short term incentives throughout the day to do things that matter and that make a difference. Because just knowing that in the end the eulogy virtues will matter more than the resume virtues, as David Brooks described it, that doesn't stick with me at least to change the priorities of what I'm doing within eight hours that I'm working in a day. But what can shift that is when I'm able to connect back an hour that I spend editing a draft with the difference that will make for someone who can read something faster without all the kind of extra bloated sentences and fluff and all the things around it. And realizing that is a part of why I'm doing what I'm doing. And so I think, you know, one of the things as I started to work on this book that hit me, I hope at the right time, is I was going to title the book around the word purpose. And I think it was purpose Unlocked or something like that. And I realized that right now we have a semantic challenge where when most of us hear the word purpose, we think of some big grand thing that's almost intimidating. It gives us anxiety when in reality we kind of need to learn to just make purpose a part of our toolbox that we tap into and use every hour throughout a day, essentially. And it can be something pretty pragmatic.
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A
It's funny, as I listen to you talk about the editing of the draft, I had an editor that, that used to tell me, why are you doing all this throat clearing? You know, like, get to the point. I was. That's always stuck with me anytime I find myself running on. Yeah, so you've spent a ton of time in, in very large companies. A lot of the research and done at Gallup, I would say that this idea of what's the point? I'm not saying it's exclusive to small business owners, but I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I think that that question just almost haunts them a lot of times. Do you find that, you know, this work is maybe more appropriate for one audience or another?
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B
I think in smaller businesses that I've been a part of, in startups, there's more of a natural and healthy tendency to be asking that question to say, what's the point of doing this? Or we're wasting time doing this. And as you get bigger and as more layers come in, it's a lot easier to have larger groups of people or teams or people on a team who are essentially sleepwalking through a lot of their days. And I think whether you're in a business large or small, one thing that's hit me as I've started to have more conversations about what's the point is that I really do think when you look at what AI and automation can and will do not three years from now, but six to 12 months from now, it's the places where people are just going through the motions and responding and doing routinized tasks that can easily be done by a machine that will be taken out most rapidly. So I've learned more urgency about this question in the last six or 12 months as the tools that I use have gotten so much better. So I think it's going to become maybe a more qualifying and pressing question as well. Because I would have been hesitant a year ago to tell people that they need to be builders or they need to be creative or they need to be initiating instead of responding, because I kind of saw that as the purview of some people and not others in my traditional world. But I don't think that can be the case anymore. Because if you're just the responder, there's a cloud update coming for you that's
- [08:24]
A
going to do it better than you.
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B
When I got out of college, I was trying to be a McKinsey consultant or an Accenture consultant. And 99% of what I was aspiring to do could be done better today by one of, by a large language model, right?
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A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think AI is going to force the point of what's the point might be the only point, you know, really for people that can actually address that. You know, if you ask a lot of people starting a business, they would say the point is, well, make money, have SaaS status or the big one to have freedom. You know the jokes on them on that one. But, but does your research suggest that the real answer is different?
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B
Yes. All of the research that I've studied on well being and positive psychology and kind of workplaces and life satisfaction over time would suggest that the more you treat and put financial status or raw income as kind of the outcome or dependent variable that matters in your life, the less likely you are to, to be satisfied in terms of where things come out at the end of your life. Because there's that kind of hedonic treadmill that researchers talk about where you're always chasing another. Whether it's you think another doubling income might make you Twice as happy, but in reality, that might get you 5% and you spent twice as much time chasing it.
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A
Yeah, so. So we've spent a lot of years, last 10, 15 years, where engagement, employee engagement in particular, was a real big metric for employers to say, hey, I'm being successful. Is there a gap between, you know, to people who are addressing this, what's the point? Do they tend to be more engaged or do they tend to be less engaged? Or is there a gap that you can actually identify and measure?
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B
I think it's kind of asking what's the point? And moving with purpose is kind of a definitional component of engagement to me, because it means that you're in tune with why you're doing what you're doing throughout the day. And I think disengagement to just broadly kind of stereotype. What that is, especially that active disengagement people talk about, is when you're either actively frustrated with your job or you're just kind of letting it pass by. And I'm more concerned about people in that sort of neutral state being blindsided as innovation starts to move at the clip it's moving at right now. So I hope that for friends and family members and people that I care about that we can kind of find ways to snap ourself out of that and do things with a little bit more intent and purpose in a given day.
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A
So many people spend a. I mean, when you. If you throw out sleep, the time they spend at work certainly dominates a lot of how they spend their time. Is. Is it important, you believe, to have some connection to meaning, like, I'm making a difference. What I'm doing. Making is making a difference in your work for you to really kind of have that what's the point Answer.
- [11:29]
B
I think so. I don't if. If there are things that you're doing in the span of a given day that, when you really think about it, don't improve the lot in life of another human being or make them a little bit better off. So if you're working as a barista at Starbucks and you have a customer that comes in and she's having a real tough day, or kids are dragging on her asking her questions, and you take her from a day that's a negative five to neutral, that's a pretty big contribution that makes a difference. And you need to step back and acknowledge that in the moment or ideally have a manager that acknowledges that and helps you to see it too. Right. So I think that is if you're not making those Connections and you're like, if I'm spending an hour of my day responding to cold emails from people I don't even know or it's not making a difference, that's an hour that's taken away from a good conversation with someone who works for me or one of my kids. At the end of the day that could be pretty meaningful. And so I think to kind of think about that trade off in terms of how you allocate your hours has been really helpful too.
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A
Yeah. So the message is don't reply to email. Just let it pile up.
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B
Don't reply to pointless email. And I would say save the responsive stuff for the end of the day if you can. Or later in the day where.
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A
Yeah, right.
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B
Make sure you pump the meaningful stuff in early on or it's going to get away. And you. We always say we'll have tomorrow and kind of take it from somebody with me with all these life threatening conditions, you don't tomorrow. You never do the stuff you put off till tomorrow.
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A
You wrote a book called life's great question. Is this an extension or does this push up against that idea?
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B
Well, you know, it's interesting. Life's great question was kind of about the contribution and other orientation at a pretty high level. And so, you know, as I tried to. The first book I wrote 25 years ago was called how full is your bucket. And that was the most kind of just dead simple, pragmatic thing because you get the whole thing in the book's title. Every time you talk to somebody, it either fills their bucket or it takes from it. There's no neutral in between. And you can kind of apply the concept if you don't even read the book description. Right. And that's. So that's what I was trying to get to with bringing some practice to purpose and meaning and these things that we all want and we think we want to get to in life. But how do you just do it in the next hour or on a Wednesday morning? Right.
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A
Okay. So I don't think there's too many people listening, at least listening this long today that would argue that this is a very important, you know, step, meaningful step and makes total sense. But how do you get to it?
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B
Well, I think you get to it by saying when you step back and look at what we all do for a living that you mentioned, like kind of the outcome. And if I would argue the outcome is not making more money and the outcome is not more titles or a better title and the outcome is not more followers and some of those kind of superficial things that you can chase endlessly, forever, even if you have a billion dollars. So if you are agree with that and you say at the end of your life, I'd rather be a good dad, a good spouse, a good member of my community, someone who ran a business that mattered, and a good manager and a good leader and a good mentor, if those are the things that matter, then you almost have an obligation to figure out how you build that into the way you execute your job and the way you lead people and what you're doing in life. And that's not something that you can just say. And it is, because it is. It's something that you have to pump into the conversations you have with the people who work for you, the people who look to you for leadership, to spot what they're doing, to tell them where they make a difference. And that's been one of the most powerful strategies I've seen work in this regard is where you can turn that outward and help spot someone else doing something that's meaningful, spot one of their talents that they hadn't noticed. And if you just work on doing that in an outward manner and that's it makes an immeasurable difference for other people and you kind of pick it up in the process as well.
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A
So do you have, in this work, do you have a series of, you know, sometimes it just takes exercises, you know, to form habits. Because I do think a lot of this work is habit. Just like you get into busy work and having too much to do is somewhat a habit. Do you have some techniques or practices that you've used to help people break those bad habits and maybe establish a habit that centers them back into this important question?
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B
Yeah, you know, I think this is going to sound a little counterintuitive based on what we've been talking about, but I would say the first anchoring habit that I would recommend for anyone listening is to make sure that based on what time you need to wake up tomorrow morning, that you work back from that by eight or nine hours, or how many hours you need in bed to get a good night's sleep. And you make sure you get a solid seven or eight, because that's the reset button on the video game. That's our life. And then you get up the next morning and you're going to have a lot more energy to say, how do I wake up and tackle things that are more meaningful and more purposeful early on and structure my day so that by 10 o', clock, by noon, you ensure that you've had some of those meaningful conversations, you've worked on a project that might continue to make a difference for someone a year from now or at least a week from now. And to structure your day so you kind of have the ebb and flow of energy and you're more active, you get things done, you have energizing conversations with people and to think about it that tactically. So how do I build the cadence and momentum of that of my day so that I have the opportunity to be my best? And then you allude to this too, where small business owners and leaders are often the very worst at making sure they put their own energy at the forefront and they end up kind of burning out, working longer hours than they probably should. And the small business owners, I'm one of them that have done that. I mean there's this tendency to say, oh it's okay for me, even though I want my people to have well being and to take a vacation where they're not responding and all that. That's not realistic. If you're doing that as a leader, it sets a tone that it's not socially acceptable for everyone else. So I think we all have to do a little evaluation in the mirror about the expectation we're setting for the people in our business, the people we lead, and then do better job of modeling that as leaders as well. So that's another piece of the kind of practical step I'd encourage people to think about.
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A
I have kids that have worked in large corporations and it was kind of trendy a few years ago to have the unlimited vacation. Like you don't have three weeks off vacation. And so consequently they nobody took vacation.
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B
I've worked in places where it's unlimited vacation is no vacation and no time off.
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A
Yeah, it's funny. So I don't know how much access you have to Gallup data anymore, but I'm sure at some point you had a lot of access to it. Would you if you had to predict or maybe again as I said, you've seen the data have the strengths finders outcomes changed dramatically as know people view work differently than Maybe they did 15, 20 years ago. Do you think that like what people value and even the traits that come up as their strengths would change based on this idea of, you know, focusing on, you know, the point?
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B
You know, I never in the time I was working on that, I never really saw a lot of variability in the actual traits or talents that were measured there because those were meant to of find things that were more enduring or consistent over time. But what I have seen in just longitudinal data and surveys of different generations and cohorts is that the generation entering the workforce today, they have a much higher want and need and threshold for doing work that they see as meaningful and serving a purpose and making a difference in their community. And to a lot of managers and leaders of my generation, they complain to me and they're like, oh, we have these very. They use the word needy. So sometimes there's a mismatch entitled.
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A
That's another one.
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B
Yeah. So it looks differently, but I think what you see traces of there is actually good and productive for society, in my opinion, where I think it's. I think it's a good thing that people who are 25 expect to have a job that makes a difference in the world. And it's not like my grandfather or great grandfather's generation, where the job was just a means to an end and you. It was okay if you didn't like it. There was a whole different expectation there. And so I think that's. I'm surprised it's taken that long to evolve, frankly, from the industrial era. And we're still kind of coming. We're still recovering from that bad relationship or expectation to a degree. But I'm. But I think that's something that we can look forward to now. I mean, it's. And people of that generation, they don't want to go be managers at a tobacco manufacturing company or whatever. And I think that's good.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We use Strength Finder with all of our people, and we don't just do it once and say, okay, chuck a box. We do it over a period of time. And one of the things I will tell you that I have recognized is that people's. As they advance in maybe position or responsibility, their strengths change. And I think it has a lot to do with what they believe is their strength changes because, you know, because their role changes do. I know that doesn't have much to do with this book, but I'm curious if you saw or have some insight about that idea.
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B
No, it does. I mean, I've. A big part of what I've been working on lately is trying to help younger people in particular to see a much broader range of what's possible and what's out there in careers. Because by my estimation, most young people, when they're asked to choose a major or spend four years studying something or pick a job, they've seen somewhere between two and five possible careers. And you'd need to see 50, just have a broad view of 50% of the US workforce. I've done the math on this. And so we're kind of making huge life decisions with about 5% aperture in our lens for what we can see out there. And so, I mean, as I get into this, it sounds really boring to say, but we don't know what we don't know. So if you haven't seen these things or you haven't seen these possibilities, it's really hard to answer an interest inventory or a personality assessment or a survey or anything else at all. So I think a real fun part of life as we get older is you get to bring in more experiences and have more inputs and then you're better off at connecting some of those dots and saying, how can I take who I am and meet some new needs there in the world? And so that's one thing I did write about in this current book is I think we've got to do a better job of not just saying here's who I am as a person, my self awareness, but saying start with what the world needs, what your community needs, what your clients need, what your customers need, and then map back to how you can do that well based on who you are with your personality traits and dispositions and interests and all that stuff.
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A
Awesome. Well, Tom, again, it was a pleasure having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and I wonder if there's someplace you'd invite people to learn about your work. Work, obviously. Pick up a copy of what's the Point.
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B
Yeah, they can learn about all this stuff@tomrath.org thank you, John. I appreciate it.
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A
Awesome. All right, again, appreciate you stopping by me. We'll see you one of these days out there on the road.
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B
All right.