1401: Tom Rath | Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower

1401: Tom Rath | Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower

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Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what if you spent your whole life checking boxes only to realize that none of them were yours?

Today I'm joined by Tom Rath. At 15, he was diagnosed with a rare condition that left him facing a lifetime of tumors and wondering whether he'd reach 40. Well, he did.

Then came another uncomfortable question. What was all that achievement actually for? We'll explain how we inherit other people's definitions of success, why follow your passion can and usually is terrible advice, and how to reclaim your day from obligations that keep you busy without actually making your life better.

Here we go with Tom Rath. Before we get into purpose, take us back to age 15. You had this genetic condition that you were diagnosed with.

It seems like a pretty heavy thing for a teenage boy to deal with.

Tom Rath: It shaped so much of my work and what I've been doing since then. But when I was 15 years old, I was living a real normal childhood, having a lot of fun, grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and out doing normal kid things. And I noticed a lot of spots on the back of my left eye and my visual field when I was playing basketball and eventually went into an eye doctor.

An eye doctor said, you have several large tumors on the back of your left eye. And that's not what we're most concerned about. The problem is that we're going to need to radiate and laser and try and remove those tumors and you'll probably lose all sight in your left eye pretty quickly and permanently.

But it also means that you're very likely to have a genetic condition that just essentially shuts off the body's most powerful tumor suppressor and causes pretty uncontrolled cancerous growth over whatever course a lifetime might look like. And so it was really hard at that age to deal with. Over the next year, I pretty much lost sight in that eye permanently and I'm still blind in that eye completely, in my left eye.

And I had to go through genetic testing and a lot of MRIs and CTs and scanning, which I've done every six or 12 months since then for the last 30 years, to look at, did I have cancer in my kidneys, my pancreas, my spine, my brain? And over the last few decades, I've had cancer in all those areas as a product of this rare genetic defect. So it was a lot to deal with at the time.

And I remember that happened when I was 15, and by the time I was 18, I started to read some things in the early iterations of the internet and figured out that the average lifespan for someone born in 1975, when I was born, was about, I think it said 37 years.

Jordan Harbinger: So... Not everybody's lifespan, but somebody with this particular condition.

Tom Rath: Somebody with this specific genetic mutation that causes tumors to grow everywhere.

Jordan Harbinger: So you were just going to be a young man and then pass away from some horrific condition?

Tom Rath: It's almost more chronic, because it's these slow-growing tumors that show up in your pancreas and your spine and all over, of course. And it's kind of like whack-a-mole, where you're doing the scans every six or 12 months and cutting things out, and you have a lot of deficits, and there really hadn't been any drug for it at all. And so I was forced to kind of reckon with, I've got to pack as much life as I can into whatever life I can live between 15 and 40, roughly, right?

So I spent so much time between 15 and 40 saying, I've got to do a lot with my life, I've got to build a family, do all this stuff. And then kind of the irony of it, and what I've been working on lately, is I made it to 40, I'm in relatively good health, even though I've had tumors in my kidneys and pancreas and spine and the like I'm battling, and then I kind of look back and realize that I'd just been trying to live up to like parental or societal expectations or something. And it's been an interesting journey because of that.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm curious about some of the cancer stuff, because, so you're 15 and you're old enough to know that cancer is a deadly kind of thing, right? You're not eight. You don't have to have it all explained to you at that level.

But you start to go blind. I mean, how were you feeling? Were you thinking like, oh, I'll deal with it as it comes, or were you thinking, wow, this is a really crappy hand, I'm a little bit hopeless?

Because I think now at age 46, if I were told I was going blind in one eye, I would be like, that sucks. Am I still going to be able to drive? Okay, it's going to be harder.

Well, I'll just get a Tesla that has self-driving. I don't know. But if I was 15, I would probably be a lot more catastrophic about it.

Oh, no woman's ever going to love me. I'm never going to have a normal life. I'd have way less perspective, I think, than I would as an older person.

So I'm wondering, now that you are my age plus, what do you think? How did you handle that when you were 15? Your parents must have been a wreck, by the way, too.

My gosh.

Tom Rath: I was surprised by how resilient and supportive my parents were and the people around me. And that's probably what made the most difference in helping me to look at what could be done and be a little bit more resilient. But to answer your question more directly, what you mentioned were my exact first thoughts.

I was 15. Can I still get a driver's license at 16? Because that's all I cared about.

Would anybody want to date me because I have this rare condition once everyone knew about it in my social circles? And could I live a kind of normal life? Could I keep playing basketball for my high school and so forth?

And those were the things a kid at that age cares about in that moment. And so it did take some time to work through that. But knowing that I could do scans every six or 12 months to kind of try and stay ahead of it and have surgeries as I needed and so forth, and to try and figure out what I could look out to in the future to maintain a little bit of hope, I think that's what made the biggest difference.

And I know you've interviewed a lot of people who are kind of noted psychologists and the like, and they didn't have this terminology or these studies back then. But in the 20 years, 30 years since then, scientists have really found that a lot of times when people that age face those situations, it produces what they call post-traumatic growth, where you come out of it a little bit better than you would have guessed. So 30 years later, looking back at it, I would say that I probably experienced as much resiliency and post-traumatic growth as I did any feelings of helplessness or depression or anything of the like.

Now I have a shortened lifespan to try and get a lot of stuff done.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The shortened lifespan thing would have been obviously the worst part of the whole thing because you're 15 and you're like, wait a minute, I had maybe not plans because you're 15 and you only care about getting your driver's license. But you're thinking like, when I'm that age, and then suddenly you go, oh, I might not actually ever be that age.

And it's true for all of us. I could walk out my door here, get in the mail and get hit by a garbage truck. But you almost had a ticking clock.

They said you're probably not going to make it to 40. Was that the prognosis?

Tom Rath: They just said you're going to have to fight cancer in your eye at first, and then early in your kidneys and your pancreas and your brain and your spine over the next 10, 20 years. And you can try and stay ahead of it. It actually took me going through the old gopher sites in the early days of the Internet to find a paper where I read the number 37.

That was the average lifespan for someone born at my age. And I'm sure now the lifespan for someone born with this condition in modern medicine is quite a bit longer, by maybe even a few decades, if you were born today. So there's been good progress.

But I had to find that one on my own. And that did, I think, add to my urgency in the early days of my career and building a family and the like.

Jordan Harbinger: Can I ask what the thing is that's the switch that's turned off in your body that the rest of us have on, so to speak, with the cancer and tumors? Because someone listening to this right now has the same thing, almost for sure. They're waiting for me to go, ask him if it's this, because I'm so curious, right?

I'm going to get an email if I don't.

Tom Rath: Yeah, it's called von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, and it's a tumor suppressor protein. And there are a lot of people who, if they have the switch either mutated, or I was kind of a de novo mutation. Normally, it's familial, and you have a 50-50 chance of getting it if one of your parents does.

But I was just an out-of-the-blue-nowhere new mutation.

Jordan Harbinger: Lucky you, radio quotes.

Tom Rath: Yes, lucky me. I think about 70 percent of people who have sporadic kidney cancer also have alterations in that gene. So it's connected to that, and that's where a lot of the research comes from.

But I think there are probably maybe 10,000 people in the United States that have it. So it's not very rare, but it's rare.

Jordan Harbinger: That seems pretty rare. But you're right. It's not like five.

I had someone on the show, Dr. Fajgenbaum. I don't know if you know him. He uses AI to find rare drug treatments that could work for things.

He had something, I think it was called Castleman disease or something, and that was like single digits or low double digits or something like that in the country. And it was just like, oh, my gosh, you could fit all these people in an airplane.

Tom Rath: But it's similar to his condition. I've read his book and loved his work where you kind of need to take over and spend 20 percent of your life trying to figure out your own health and stay ahead of it. And so because there's not a single physician in the entire United States who just specializes in von Hippel-Lindau, the condition I have.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. They wouldn't be able to make a living doing it, right? Okay.

So enough about that. Thank you for indulging that little aside there. It seems like this could have gone either way, right?

It could have made life really vivid for you at 15 or it could really make you crawl into a hole and give up early. I wonder if it maybe made you a little bit compulsively productive. You've achieved a lot in your life.

And I think sometimes people who think, oh, I'm not going to make it, they might step on the gas and other people might say, what's the point of stepping on the gas? Where's the weed? And you went in the one direction.

Tom Rath: It's a great way to think about it because I did step on the gas probably too much from a career and a productivity standpoint, to be honest. And so that's what was crazy about it because I finally make it to this age 40 that I didn't think I'd get to. I look in a mirror and say, I'm in relatively good health.

I've got two kids who were like 14, 16 at the time, doing pretty well. And what was all this for and what was I trying to do? And I realized that I'd stepped on the gas so much that I'd fallen into this, I'd call it a trap now, of trying to reach these expectations that were maybe some of my parents, maybe some of the people I grew up around, a lot of what society tells me, and that I hadn't really stepped back and asked, what is the point of this?

Why am I doing this? Is this good for me, for my well-being, for my family in the long term? And am I focused on the right things that really matter to me in my heart and so forth?

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, because borrowed time, if you can call it that, we're all on borrowed time, right? But it can create clarity. But yeah, it can create some sort of achievement addiction.

And I wonder how much, especially if you're 20s and 30s where I also had achievement addiction, how much of that was purpose, which is what we're going to dive into here in a minute, and how much of that was just existential panic wearing a suit?

Tom Rath: I think it's existential panic wearing a suit. It's also, we're falling into the defaults of what our parents and our teachers and society has been telling us to do for a long time. If you really get clinical and look across everybody in the workforce, I'm increasingly convinced that 80% of us wind up in jobs and careers because we just fall into that default pattern and we never try and stretch our field of view and look outside of that.

I did that.

Jordan Harbinger: You're right. I got really lucky because I was one of those overachiever wannabe kind of guys, went to law school, got a law job, got a job in mortgage-backed securities, 2008 happens, I'm a second year associate and they're like, we have no use for you and we're probably going to close. So I had this forcing function of, I made it to the top of the beginner game, right?

Oh, you have the top market job in a great field that pays a lot. Suddenly you don't, right? And I'd already started podcasting and I was on the radio.

I can't just stop doing my lawyer job now. I have student loans. Who gets to the Olympic qualifying finals of a career, at least the first year of a career in law, and then goes, yeah, I'm done with this, right?

No, you have to stay for like a couple of years, pay some loans. And then four years goes by and you're like, oh, well, I've got a boat I've got to pay off. And then, well, I've got a wife and she's going to want kids and she wants a summer home and the kids are expensive and they're in a boarding school.

And then you just realize you could never quit your law job. You've got the golden handcuffs. I didn't have that problem because the economy crashed and it was like, get out of here.

Good luck with your future. And I was like, I've got this other thing that I actually enjoy doing. Maybe this is the best excuse ever to stop chasing money and just do this thing that I like.

And I was still young enough in my twenties to go, I can take a two thirds pay cut and maybe my parents will be a little disappointed, but it's not like I'm failing. I can just adapt to this. I don't have any other responsibilities to other people.

Tom Rath: And most people go all the way until they're 60, 65, 70 years old and they keep doing the chasing. And then they get to the end of that and realize that they've effectively squandered the 10, 20, 25 years that they could have in good health to do the things they told themselves they wanted to do while they were working too hard throughout that phase.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. There's a book, I think it's called Die With Zero, and it's essentially don't put everything off and don't work to save a bunch of money for the next generation. Like do the things that you want to do.

Basically live your life now. And I think that's a really interesting message that a lot of people don't get, like you said, until it's too late. I think it's fascinating though that a possible death sentence that you got at that age, it still didn't free you from other people's expectations, right?

And I guess the 15-year-old who goes, you know what, I'm not going to go to college. I am going to drop out of high school. I'm just going to work at a ski resort as a lifty and ski all day.

And if you're that kid's parents, you're probably kind of like, okay, what are we going to do? Make him do stuff he doesn't want to do. He might only have five or 10 years left on this earth.

You get a pass. I'm not going to write bestselling books and I'm not going to go to college. Maybe your parents would have reacted differently, but I think a lot of people would have gone, look, we understand.

You do whatever makes you happy. We all got limited time on this earth. I think you could be forgiven for becoming an artist that lives in a cabin.

Tom Rath: Yeah. And I think it's an important way for people to use that as kind of a lens when they look at their own life and what they're doing in a lot of ways. Because I do see people who receive a diagnosis with the same condition I've had and they choose to put their head in the sand and say, I'm going to act like this isn't happening.

And it's fascinating because with my condition, the only way you can stay alive a long time is to do the MRI scans every six or 12 months because they know statistically that if a tumor in your kidney is under three centimeters, it has no chance of metastasizing, for example. And so if you're doing the scans and they're watching that tumor grow and they know to cut it out before it hits three centimeters, you don't have metastatic kidney cancer. So if you put your head in the sand, it's going to grow beyond the three centimeters.

It's going to spread. It's going to kill you pretty quickly. So in that condition, I think in most conditions, and even if you think about it psychologically or people who are afraid of AI even, you could use it in that regard, if you put your head in the sand or you just keep responding and going on autopilot, you're more vulnerable to any disruption in life.

Jordan Harbinger: So I wonder how you were eventually able to tell which choices were yours and which were inherited from other people's expectations.

Tom Rath: I am still just blown away by how little of where we end up, even by the middle of our careers and lives, was determined by any sort of real free will. If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and you say, how many jobs are out there in the U.S. workforce? You would need to have an awareness and knowledge and competence about 50 different jobs to just know what 50 percent of the U.S. workforce looks like. So I'd need to know what a veterinarian does, what a flight attendant does, what a ER nurse does and so forth. And most people, when I've looked at this longitudinally every time, you grow up and you see what mommy did, you see what daddy did. You might see one mentor, someone in college, so maybe if you're lucky, you see two, three, some people might see five professions out there.

And then all of a sudden, when my daughter is 17 right now, and she's already being pressured to say, what do you want to major in? What do you want to study in college? What do you want to do?

We're already trying to narrow. She's pretty much seen what a writer does and what a teacher does, which is my wife's profession. Right.

And so I think we're going out there with, I don't know, maybe five, 10 percent aperture, if you think about the camera lens, for example. And we need to help people to see 30, 40, 50 percent of what's out there. Otherwise, the product of what goes wrong there is that most of us make it all the way to the end of our career and end of our lives.

And we didn't even get to see, let alone try or work in the areas where we could have been best in life. And that's the part I'm most concerned about for my kids.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm with you 100 percent. Most people can't aspire to what they cannot see. And I think you wrote that in the book.

And so exposure unlocks all these different avenues. When I was younger, I wanted to run a business, but the only people I knew who ran businesses owned Greek restaurants or dry cleaners. And I was like, that's not what I want to do.

So maybe I don't want to run a business, not realizing that everything else is also a business. Right. I've got little kids, as we said before the show.

And the only jobs they know are teacher, policeman, fire, nurse, army doctor. And then when they're a little older, they'll maybe understand what my wife and I do or what their uncles do. And then you get to be an adult and are a young adult.

And then maybe, you know, what your friends, parents do a little bit. It's only maybe after college. And even then, maybe after college, do you even know what some of the things are out there?

You think, oh, I'm going to get into sales or something. Or like your uncle hires you to, I don't know, make copies at his law firm or his real estate broker. So you'd see what's going on in there.

But yeah, there's all kinds of jobs that even now I meet somebody out here in Silicon Valley and they say, what do you do? And they're like, oh, I'm a data analysis engineer. And I just go, oh, what does that mean?

What do you actually do? And I'm 46. Right.

So you can't really understand what any of these things are. I don't know. Somehow we also expect kids to be able to pick that when they are 17.

Tom Rath: The thing that really struck me as I was looking through some of the research on this is, if your mom's in HR, you're 76 times more likely to end up in HR if you're a young woman. And if your dad hangs drywall, you're 136 times more likely to hang drywall when you're older. So when you look at, especially when you look at some of these longitudinal studies that started in Europe in the 70s and went through about 2000, not only are you very, very likely to go into the exact same profession as your mother if you're a girl or your father if you're a boy, but you're extremely likely to work for the exact same company over time.

And a lot of this just evolved, I think, from kind of the industrial era. Good intentions. I grew up in Nebraska.

You want to pass the family farm to your son and your daughter or whatever, right? And if you are a cobbler, you want to help your son to learn that trade, and it's kind of that thing going on. If you're a dentist, that's what your kids learn and so forth.

So I get why that happened economically 50 to 100 years ago. But in a much more adaptive economy like we have today, I really think that most parents want their kids to see what's out there and not just follow in their footsteps because they feel like they have to, but yet we don't send any messaging to tell young people that.

Jordan Harbinger: Those stats are staggering. I thought you were going to say almost twice as likely to join HR, almost three times as likely to be a mechanical engineer, 130 times. That's... it's almost a miracle anybody gets a different job than their father at those levels.

Tom Rath: I've been interviewing people while I worked on this book for two or three years. I'm with a group of oncologists at a conference. How did you end up in oncology?

Oh, my dad was an oncologist. But they all go there. For every 50 people I talk to, I meet about one who, because of their own volition, completely broke out of the mold.

And so I don't think most people realize how common it is that we just fall into at least some exposure gap. And sometimes when I was doing my undergrad at Michigan, a lot of kids are pre-law, pre-med, business, but that was because that was society and money telling them where to go to. So I think there's a financial and social expectation overlay on it too.

But if you combine that with kind of the parental and exposure piece, after everything I've seen, I would argue that we might be better off after high school or college simply randomizing people to jobs because we'd have a better hit rate.

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I'm still so hung up on this. You're right, it's actually incredible how stuck in that rut you end up getting. Like you said, your dad works on the assembly line at Ford and works his way up to an engineer and he says, this is a pretty good job.

I've got a pension, I've got healthcare. Look, we live in upper middle class or middle class lifestyle, whatever it is. You should do this because it's what they know and they could be navigated.

So it totally makes sense. I just didn't think that transferred within a specialty. Like, if your dad's an oncologist and you become an orthopedic surgeon, that makes sense, right?

Like, my dad was a doctor, fine. But no, my dad was a cancer doctor and I'm a cancer doctor. I mean, really, you're falling into the subcategory even here.

That's crazy. So it's not just your dad was a contractor, so you're a contractor. It's you're literally doing the exact type of work on a home.

My dad installed solar panels, so I'm installing solar panels. It's actually crazy that anybody breaks out of this if you're really 130 times more likely to be in that same profession, that same exact profession.

Tom Rath: The thing that scared the crap out of me, I had my daughter over here in my office helping me work on some stuff a couple of years ago. And she must have been 14 at the time, let's say. And I said to her, you know, given everything you've seen, what do you think you might want to do when you grow up?

And she's like, I think I'm a pretty good writer or it might be fun to be a teacher. She was two for two and nothing else that she mentioned. And so a year ago, I sat both my kids down and said, you know what?

I've been working on all this stuff for a long time. I just want to tell you right now with your mom, we want you to explore everything else. And if you end up doing one of those two things, we'll help you.

That's great. But we don't want you, we're not expecting you to, or we're not telling you that you need to think about or study to be a teacher or a writer because we want you to know what's out there and be the best at what you could be really good at.

Jordan Harbinger: It's probably hard for a lot of kids to tell their parents that. My parents did not care that I didn't want to be a teacher or work for Ford. My dad saw the writing on the wall in the 90s with the auto companies.

Then you reach 40, the age you were not necessarily supposed to reach. What was the actual moment when you realized you'd spent decades living somebody else's definition of success?

Tom Rath: I looked a lot at how I spent my time in a given day and was thinking about, I was running a consulting business when I was at Gallup through most of my twenties and thirties and spending a lot of time working on books and research and different projects. And I realized that a lot of my day was dependent on what one client needed and that day-to-day consulting work. It was all about being the first person in, the last one to leave the office, showing all your hard work and traveling all the time and being 24-7 on email and responsive.

And I think having young kids, and my kids were really young in particular, helped me to realize that there are a lot of things in a given day that I spent too much of my time doing that were taking time away from quality time with my kids in those key years while they were still young enough to appreciate it and want to spend time with me. And also looking back and saying, now that I'm nearing 40, if I want to continue to live to maybe even 60 or 70 or 80 and in relatively good health and be able to get around, how do I make sure that I'm prioritizing my health and my energy and spending more time on the things that I want to spend my time on that I think make a difference for other people? I looked back and I realized so much of my time was just responding to and answering questions and other people's needs and that I needed to take ownership to realign how I spend my time with where I think it'll make a difference, not even just in my 40s, 50s, 60s, but so I'm spending time on stuff that might help people even once I'm gone.

Jordan Harbinger: Did any of the boxes you had checked by then, so the books, the speaking, you probably had money and status, you had a family, did anything feel hollow or did it just all shift?

Tom Rath: I think the way that I had used my time felt a little bit hollow. I'd realized that the boxes that I had spent my 20s and 30s checking might not have been my boxes. So I spent all my time on all this StrengthsFinder work and helping people to get into self-discovery and learn more about themselves and all those things.

When I looked back at how I had prioritized my time and my goals in particular in my work, I realized that I'd been trying to live up to the expectations of my family members and society and the people that I'd admired growing up to, and I started to get into where's the real part of me in that and how can I make sure that I'm expanding that as much as possible so that I'm even at age 40 and through my early 50s, I'm at 50 right now, I'm exploring topics that I missed and didn't get enough exposure to when I was 18 to 22, let's say.

I've been deliberately doing more and more of that.

Jordan Harbinger: The scoreboards are external. That's really common for 20s and 30s though, although like you said, it can last until you're 60 if you're not paying attention and you're not conscious of any of this. So give us the Tuesday afternoon version here.

What were you doing all day when you finally said, okay, what's the point? The title of your new book, by the way.

Tom Rath: The thing that I realized pretty quickly, especially in the last three to five years, I would say, I think a lot of us have gotten so caught up in all of the stimuli coming at us. There's no shortage of emails and things to respond to and social feeds and media is just plentiful and abundant where it's so much easier to just try and get through your email on the day, play another episode of something, of Netflix in the evening, instead of saying, how can I wake up and look at my schedule at eight o'clock in the morning and say, what's the point of this first hour of my day?

Am I going to use it to respond to emails from people I don't even know and might have little to no return? Or am I going to shut things off and try and create something, edit a book that I've been working on, work on a product that I've spent a lot of time on that means something and then take the next meeting? What's the point of the meeting from 9:00 to 9:30?

Should we even be having this meeting or can we all go do something else? I logged into LinkedIn yesterday after being gone for 10 days and not looking at it all. And a couple of the messages I had on there, people were asking me, hey, I have a good idea for you.

Have you ever thought about writing a book?

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah, I get those.

Tom Rath: But I can't get those 10 or 15 minutes of my life back. And just reading those messages comes at a deficit of 15 minutes of a good conversation with my son when he gets home from school tonight, right? So literally saying, what's the point of how I structure and prioritize my day?

And what I realized at the time is that I was spending, let's say, 75% of my time doing things that were more response-oriented and just replying and going back to things and maybe 25% of my day on things where I was really creating or initiating or building stronger relationships and having real quality conversations with the people that I work with or serve. And I was able over the span of three to six months by just asking, what's the point of this meeting? What's the point of this 30 minutes?

What's the point of editing this draft or blurbing this book or whatever? By doing that structurally, I think I'm at the spot where I go pretty much from 7 in the morning until 1 o'clock with pretty meaningful activation-oriented tasks. Between 1:00 and 2:30, I'm having meaningful conversations with people I care about that I initiate. And then I save kind of the maintenance and expense and responding to email stuff in an ideal day until maybe 3:00 to 4:30. And then after that, I make sure I have enough energy still to have really good quality time with my friends and family members.

Jordan Harbinger: So turning the title into a tool, you ask, what's the point? What is a good answer and what answers should make me cancel or redesign whatever it is?

Tom Rath: When you ask, what's the point of something you're doing at 10 o'clock in the morning, if you feel like what you're doing uses your strengths and it's a good use of your time, if you feel like it's something that energizes you, I would add to it, for me at least, if it's something that makes a difference for someone else that you can see and quantify so it motivates you and you want to do more of it, that's a pretty good litmus test. But if it's something that you think could be automated, is not a great use of your time, somebody else might do it better.

It's a better time than ever in our lifetimes to say, how can I automate this, make this more routinized and push this off maybe permanently, or at least until the end of the day when your mind's worn out and you've got less creative power and save your creative power for earlier on when you're doing the good stuff. It's interesting, you know, I started off working on some of this get to know yourself and your strengths material. And it was always, you need to find other people to surround yourself with to do the things that you're not good at.

But over the last 12 to 18 months, I've used co-work and code and AI-based tools to offload about 70% of the stuff I didn't enjoy doing as well. It's a better time than ever to optimize your schedule so you're doing things throughout the day that do have a point to you personally and you feel good about.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So how do we get started with this? Because I think for a lot of people, they're going to go, okay, well, it says shower and breakfast.

What's the point? Well, I've got to eat and I smell kind of bad. I assume when we start this, we look at maybe the largest time commitments of each day or something like that.

There's got to be a practical exercise we can do here. And I know that you're a fan of writing the answer in five words or fewer. Why is that?

Tom Rath: Yeah, I think anybody, if you just want to say, how can you create better days for yourself and for others to take a clinical look at each thing you're doing hour by hour throughout the day and say, will things be better off tomorrow? Because I spent an hour having a really meaningful conversation with somebody I work with and asking a good question and closing my own mouth, keep my device straight away and saying, how can I really help that person to learn and grow and see something they might not have? So I would argue that anything you're doing that makes a substantive contribution to another person, if you can lock in on that and optimize your day.

So at least start with just making sure that a day never escapes where you didn't spend at least 60 minutes doing something meaningful, where there's a real good answer to what's the point that you feel really good about.

Jordan Harbinger: What if you can't answer or you just really hate the answer? What do we do with those commitments?

Tom Rath: In a given hour?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You've probably even researched examples where somebody has a commitment and they just really don't like the answer that comes up when they say, what's the point? I've really got to do this because something that's uncomfortable for them.

Or the answer is, I don't know, we've always done it this way and I feel compelled to do it because I don't know, have anxiety if I don't do it, even though it's not that productive. What do we do with the junk? Just don't do it.

Tom Rath: No, if there's stuff you have to do, I think we've all got to embrace that 20 years ago when I was working at Gallup, we asked a question that was all about how much time people get to spend using their strengths. And it was, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day, was the exact question. And the key word in there is opportunity.

None of us get to spend 80% of our day doing stuff we love and have fun all the time. That's just not real. But if we get a chance to spend even 10, ideally 20% of our day doing something that is rewarding and we think it makes a difference for someone else and we want to do more of it the next day, it's just making sure that you have at least 20% of your time in that zone.

And over the course of a career, if you can get to spending more than half your time, ideally 75% of your time doing things that utilize what you do best and you feel good about and they're rewarding, it's kind of just about tipping the balance of those scales. And so there are some people right now who might spend 100% of their day doing things that they have to do and they don't enjoy, but they need the paycheck and that's absolutely worth it. And we all go through those phases in our careers and keep doing that, but try and figure out ways outside of work where you can carve 10% of your time to do those things that are meaningful and that are substantive.

And it does feel kind of like you're making a positive contribution, at least to another person, if not to society.

Jordan Harbinger: In the book, I love that you call passion cotton candy. A luxury item is a first world problem. I would love to define passion and purpose carefully so we're not knocking down a straw man.

Tom Rath: Passion, to start with, that's one of the most misleading and I'd say reckless things that I hear given as advice. It's especially egregious to tell someone who's living paycheck to paycheck to go find their passion, right? That's like Marie Antoinette telling people to eat cake.

Jordan Harbinger: Let them eat cake, yeah.

Tom Rath: Back to the thing what I faced when I was young, I was graduating from college, my undergrad, and I had a guidance counselor tell me to go out and find my passion. And I can't think of anything that's rang less hollow that someone said to me in the last 50 years. And so to get into the semantics for a minute, if you think about passion, I think for people to just, the next time you hear passion, just think hobby, okay?

So passion is something you might enjoy, you might be good at it, you might be terrible at it, it might be good for society, it might have absolutely no redeeming value for society at all. So if I'm really passionate about golf, I go do it, that doesn't make a bit of difference to my neighbors or a lot of people in my community, right? So I think we need to delineate passion, which the other scary thing about telling somebody to follow their passion is that if I tell a young person who's 21 graduating to follow their passion, that just assumes that they're going to jump out into this big work world and just say, hey, world, revolve around me and expect that all these jobs in the work world is going to continue to converge around what they care about, what they enjoy doing and so forth. And I think that's where we've really misaligned a lot of our thinking about human development broadly, where we tell people, oh, know thyself and learn more about yourself and be self-aware.

When you tell people, just focus all your energy on self-development, that's almost completely ignoring the demand side of the equation of what the whole world needs and what the community needs and what our customers need and what your listeners need. And so I've been pushing people to say, focus on purpose, where purpose is more about understanding what the world needs, understanding what your clients need, your customers need, what your community needs, and then work back to who you are. And so that's where I do think focusing on purpose can be important, but even the word purpose is a little bit challenging.

And again, the thing I love about getting old is that I am continually proving myself wrong in my deepest held beliefs, right? So last summer, I'd been working on this book, and the book was all titled something about purpose. I think we were calling it Purpose Unlocked.

And I started to dig into some of the work on this, and I realized that most people, when they hear the word purpose, their chest tightens up a little bit, and they get nervous, they get apprehensive. It scares them. It gives them anxiety, because they think of purpose as some giant thing that descends from the heavens every 10 years on a sunny day or whatever.

The good news is that's not what purpose is, as I started to get into it, and that led me to completely retitle and realign the whole book I was in the middle of at the time.

Jordan Harbinger: So passion asks, what do I want? And purpose asks, what does the world need? That might be a little too clean.

Tom Rath: It's close. It's very close. I would say it's passion and self-awareness ask, what do I want to be?

And purpose is about, who do I help? And so I think if you can wake up each day and focus more on purpose, and not big P purpose, but I'd say the small P purpose, which is, what am I doing throughout the day, each and every day, to focus on things I'm doing to serve other people, that's a better north star for anchoring your daily energy than anything that's self-focused, even if your only goal is to boost your own well-being, ironically.

Jordan Harbinger: You touched on this earlier, but I think we need to address it explicitly. What do we say to a listener who's like, but I can't take a major pay cut. I can't quit this draining job.

I can't reorganize my life around service because I got rent. I got kids. I need health insurance.

You touched on this before because telling somebody like that to follow their passion is basically a slap across the face to somebody like this.

Tom Rath: I would say the same thing with telling them to find their purpose, frankly, the more I got into this. So maybe the answer for that person is that purpose is not something to find. It's something that they can create and manufacture in the lab of their daily choices with people.

So if you're working at a Starbucks, kind of living paycheck to paycheck, and even if that's not what you want to do long term, if a woman walks in at 10 o'clock in the morning, she's got three frazzled kids with her asking her questions, and you can tell she's having a heck of a morning. If you're the barista working there, and you kind of smile, defuse some of the frustration that she's got in that moment, and take her from a negative five, let's say, to a zero where she's at neutral for the day, that is a big, meaningful win. And if ideally that barista's supervisor acknowledges that and helps her to see that she's made a difference for that customer that walked in, I think that is what purpose is.

And that is where purpose is created. Purpose is not something you find once every three, five, 10 years.

Jordan Harbinger: What is maybe the minimum viable version of purpose inside a financially necessary job? Does that question make sense? It's a little cryptic.

Tom Rath: It is. I think the minimally viable purpose is answering, what did you do that helped another person today? One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he said, life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others? And I think what's the point is just a litmus test throughout the day to say, do I get to do something today that makes a difference for another person? And even if you're in a job that's burning you out and you're just doing it to pay your rent and you know you're going to try and find something better, chances are, unless you're just mass-producing cigarettes all day or something, chances are you get to do something in a day that makes another person's life a little better, their day a little better in any profession. And you've got to challenge yourself to make sure you pay a little bit of attention to that.

And let me qualify that. This is actually more about some of the most admirable sacrificing jobs I've seen, where I've spent a lot of time with hospice nurses who do some of the most amazing work ever, home care workers and teachers and the like. And they get so into the kind of self-sacrifice that I would assume that they could see the richness and the meaning in their job.

But when they don't take the time to step back and say, in the middle of the day or at the end of the day, here's what I did that really made a difference for this family at their deepest time of need, for example, right? So we all need to do a better job of that. And we need to do a much better job of helping the people we work with and the people we care about to acknowledge that in the moment so that we all have a little bit more motivation to do it essentially.

Jordan Harbinger: I think a lot of employers can tell poorly paid workers that their work is meaningful and use that meaning as an excuse for low wages or bad conditions. How do we prevent purpose from becoming a discount employers apply to compensation?

Tom Rath: Yeah. And that's another reason why I started to worry about or cringe at that term of purpose, because as someone who spent a lot of time in the corporate consulting space, I've seen exactly how companies and leaders at retreats, they co-opt it into something that they use to kind of coerce people to do more and to work more in a way that's not that helpful, right?

Jordan Harbinger: We're all a family here unless you need something from me, in which case it's a company.

Tom Rath: And that's where realistically, I spent a decade, the last decade of my career in the corporate space, trying to help convince companies that they needed to do more and care about the well-being and health and kind of involvement in the community and finances and so forth of their workforce. And at some point, I figured out that I almost conceded and gave up that's not going to happen. And at this point, I'm convinced that each of us as individuals need to be more thorough in evaluating, not only am I getting the paycheck from this job that I'm doing, but is my life better off because of it?

Do I have better relationships with my spouse or partner, my kids, my friends, because of this job? Is my health better or worse because of the company I'm working for right now? Do I have more financial security?

And I think we need to be asking those questions to determine what we're getting out of the relationship in a way that people didn't even think about 25 years ago, in almost a more objective and clinical way.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, meaning can really be used to romanticize suffering. So not even just work, but a bad marriage or something like that as well. So how do we distinguish between meaningful sacrifice and a damaging practice or habit that should end?

Tom Rath: Yeah, that's where I think people get into these cycles of thinking that they're doing things for reasons that we haven't even talked about necessarily. The most egregious one is some of the hardest working people that I've looked at in the standpoint of their career, they'll go through decades and decades of working 60-hour weeks and for years on end, even though they've saved up enough, but they're telling themselves that they need that for something in retirement. They need that for their kids.

And then they get to that point, and it's almost too late to do some of those things. And most of the research I've looked at suggests that people who are consistently burning out and working those 60-plus-hour weeks, it makes them 40% more susceptible to heart disease through those most critical periods of their life. So not only are you doing things in the name of something that will probably never appear at the rate they're going, but they're also sacrificing their health.

I'm convinced they're sacrificing their relationships and family quality as well in the process there. So I think for people to say, if you're going to hold something out there, whether it's a financial goal or a status goal, ask yourself, what's the point of that goal? Because it might not be aligned with how you're spending your time in your weeks as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Follow your passion is great advice from somebody whose parents followed them around with a checkbook. For everyone else, there's rent. Speaking of paying the bills, let's hear from our sponsors.

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It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Tom Rath. I also get the, hey, you should write a book.

Sometimes my agent will say, hey, I'm just saying, I've got like a tentative offer from the, and they try and dangle the carrot of money in front of you. I routinely tell my agent right now, my goal is to maximize Lego time with my kids because they're four and seven. And I don't want to write a book and like, oh no, you know what?

It's not going to be that big of a time commitment, which is Tom, you know that they're lying now because you've written a bunch of books. And so, oh no, we'll have somebody help you with it. And then you just do a short media tour.

And I'm thinking even if it's an hour a day, which is a quote unquote, small commitment, I might get 90 minutes of Lego time per day with my son until he's what, 11. And that doesn't want to be caught dead with me. I don't know what age that starts.

I'm not looking forward to that. So am I going to sacrifice the bulk of that time so that I can write a book? And like you said, they said, look, this can do so much for you because if you have a book, then you can start speaking.

And all I heard was once you spend all this time that you don't want to spend writing a book that you don't want to write, then you can travel a lot more to places you don't want to go to talk to rooms full of people that are not your kids. And I just remember going, this is a terrible idea. And I talked to a bunch of other folks who I respect, my friend Rich Roll, who's another sort of big podcaster.

He said, hey man, my kids are grown. And let me tell you, my work was still there when they left the house. So you can just do all this later.

That was enough for me. I was like, all right, I'm out. No book.

Tom Rath: That might be the best explanation I've heard is I would just always, if you can, financially and so forth with your time, optimize for Lego time and not the other stuff. Because my kids are at that point in age where they're already off with friends and doing things. And I don't think you can get some of that time back.

And I sometimes talk about, I live across the street here from a sprawling cemetery in Virginia. And I walked through there and I've read thousands of headstones at this point. And there is not a single headstone in that whole place that talks about how many hours someone worked or their titles or how much money they made or anything else.

It's kind of like a loving husband and a father. And so if those are the things that somebody is going to put on your headstone, align your hours to it as early on as you can in life. Right?

Because that's the stuff that really matters. And take it from someone like me who's kind of lived with a ticking clock each day. Those are the things you can't get back.

And if you just continue to grind and grind as hard as you can and burn through, that time is going to be gone. The thing that I've really learned from observing people over the last 30 years is that we always say we have tomorrow, but we don't ever do the things that we put off until tomorrow. So if there are things like you're talking about the Lego time, optimize for that today because the only thing that we all know for sure and have in common is we've got today to do those things.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm imagining a headstone that says something like exceeded quarterly revenue targets eight years in a row. It's actually completely ridiculous.

You're right. Nobody puts that in there. You wouldn't even put that in your Twitter bio, right?

Wouldn't even make it to that. I want to go back to parenting because I love this topic, actually. What should parents be asking their kids instead of what do you want to be when you grow up?

You gave us a little bit of a hint earlier. You told your kids that you didn't expect them to become writers or whatever. What do we actually ask them or do we just avoid the topic?

Because aren't we trying to expose them to different things when they're young?

Tom Rath: Yeah, I think career exposure is the biggest element. You said it sounds so simple, but we don't know what we don't know. So I would argue that parents and schools and teachers and even early in college need to be trying to maximize exposure and to widen the field of view or to widen the aperture of what young people see so they have a bigger and broader idea of what they can do in the world.

My own goal with my kids is to make sure that they don't get to the end of their careers and end of their life and they didn't even get a chance to see or have a preview of what they could have done best in life. And right now they haven't really seen anyone who's in medicine up close. They haven't seen anyone in finance.

They hadn't seen anyone in engineering or architecture. I need to make sure they have exposure to things so that they don't miss the opportunity that they might have to make the greatest contribution to the world in a way that's fulfilling for them. And so I've been trying to drag them through and do rapid prototyping in a lot of areas.

And a lot of what I do is just observe and ask questions about what they want to do right now and what kind of young kid jobs they might want to try, who they might want to shadow or learn about, what YouTube videos on things they might want to look at, a variety of means to say, what do you like doing now? What problems do you care about among your peer groups, your friend groups, and in the world? My daughter, I've already noticed, really cares about environmental concerns.

So we've tried to have her explore that more, do some camps on it, try to get her into some internships for those things that aren't on our radar at all and we don't even know anything about. So it's trying to push the envelope of exposure a little bit is important. And I also have been careful not to ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up or what do you want to do when you grow up?

Because I feel like that's almost an accidental narrowing question. It makes them feel like they need to start to get into the box earlier than I believe they should.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a really good point. I wonder, how do parents expose children to possibilities without turning their childhood into a career optimization program?

Tom Rath: Yeah, I think it's just to have fun with it. I walked into the pharmacy with my son and my son really gets into stuff and can remember things and routinized. And I was showing him what the pharmacist did.

I said, can you see what he's doing? Learn a little bit about that. And I think he might've seen 5, 10% of what it might be like to look into a career like that.

I can kind of see knowing his personality, that's something maybe he should look into in a little bit more depth, right? So I think to try and be an observer and connector. And I would argue that most of us, even at my age of 50, I would be a better human being and a better friend to my friends in the neighborhood here or whatever, if I had more awareness of what people do in careers.

There's a kid across the street here who we talked to and he was really interested in being a veterinarian. And then he went in and spent a day in a veterinarian's office and realized, of course he loves dogs and so forth. But really in that office, most of the time is spent trying to put an IV in a furry paw to a dog that won't stay down.

And then the other part of the day is telling a family with little kids that their family best friend needs to be put down. The minute you go in and do a day of that, you realize, hey, maybe that's not four years of education for me because I could never do that. Growing up as the laboratory that it should be instead of the sentence to follow the family footsteps is what I've been trying to do.

Jordan Harbinger: I think most of it, there's a sort of running joke among every lawyer that if you had actually just worked at a law firm for a summer before going to law school, that's what we always tell people, what should I do? I want to be a lawyer. Go work at a law firm for a summer or even longer before you go to law school because then you won't ever want to go to law school because you'll go, wow, this is actually a lot of sitting in front of the computer because you think it's going to be like law and order and you're going to be in court doing a lot of stuff.

And maybe if you become a public defender, there's plenty of that. But outside of that, no, you're deep in the Excel spreadsheets, basically, most of the time, if you're in finance or corporate. And otherwise you're in some sort of document editor that hasn't been updated in 15 years right on your computer.

That's what you're doing for 12 or 16 hours a day. How do adults explore dormant interests, abilities, whatever, without detonating a stable life every six months? Because people are going to go, great.

I don't have kids. How do I do this for myself? I'm definitely not in my zone of purpose with my career as a car wash attendant or whatever they're doing.

Tom Rath: I think everybody, all of us, myself included, are going to have to do that in terms of exploring other things that weren't on our radar screen over the next, I would say, two to three years. And then from there on forward. Because I look at the way my daily routine and my team's routine has changed over the last 18 months with just complete immersion in artificial intelligence tools.

And I think if you look even within a company, the lines between someone who's in marketing and someone who's in software development are already getting blurred, right? And so I think we're all going to need to be a lot more nimble at doing a lot of things very differently and thinking about a very different distribution of our time. And so if you would have asked me three years ago, what's my best advice for people, I would have thought that there are a lot of people out there in the workforce who kind of just have a job where you're responding to things and you're getting your tasks done and checking things off a to-do list or your Slack channel or whatever.

And that would suffice. But the more I got into this work about what's the point with AI in particular, it's pretty clear to me that if you are simply responding to things most of the day working through a task list, you're the most susceptible to disruption with automation and tools coming along. And so we all need to step back and say, how can I build more?

How can I create more? How can I do more now that I have the gift of being AI enabled in order to make a greater contribution to my organization, to my company, and to my community and to be able to do things that are beyond the repertoire I ever imagined when I was graduated from college. I graduated from my undergrad in 1999, right when the internet was kind of taken off, right?

And I never thought I'd get a do-over where I got to do something as exciting as I'm immersed in right now. And to now to have the ability to scale and do things that I didn't think were even in my intellectual capability set or purview is pretty remarkable. And so I think all of us are going to face that challenge in the next few years.

And we're going to have to step out of this comfort zone that we thought we were trained and honed into over the years and realize that a lot of people who don't have our background in training and education are going to be able to do things that we thought we were uniquely capable of. And so in turn, we need to broaden what we're capable of and interested in and want to do.

Jordan Harbinger: I think one practical example here or one practical bit of advice would be I often tell people if you can choose something like take an online class or shadow someone, go ahead and do it because even as adults, you can find opportunities like this, right? You could take a day off and you could ask a friend if you can shadow them. It might be weird when the person shadowing them is not in college, but they can explain that to their boss.

I've had listeners do this before and it turns out to be really useful, right? You have somebody, hey, I thought you were going to bring in like your nephew or something. This guy's 50.

It doesn't really matter. Workplaces are surprisingly, some workplaces, I should say, are surprisingly accommodating with this. Anybody can take an online class, right?

I think these days and it's quite easy to do. The trickiest part is finding the time to do it. In the book, you have these purpose profiles.

Is that something that we can break down easily in an audio format or is that something that people have to see visually, you think?

Tom Rath: Yeah, and I think they're online for free too. I think my point with that was just to say what are the 50 most common careers in the workforce today and how can we get at least an initial encapsulation or overview of what people do in those jobs and forget about it for what do you want to do with your own career for a minute here. I would argue after my own learning from getting into understanding those 50 careers in more depth, I'm a better friend to one of my wife's best friends in our neighborhood here who's an architect because I've learned a little bit about what an architect does all day and what the stressful parts are, what the fun parts are, what the boring parts are.

Because my wife's a teacher, I know more about all the administration that goes into that, the lesson plans, the things that are going on. And so if I meet someone or I'm working with someone who's an educator in K through 12, I can relate to them better and be a better challenging coach or friend to them because I know what someone in that job does. So I think just for the sake of being a better partner, spouse, friend, it's a good idea to get at least a cursory knowledge of what people do in a lot of different careers.

So I was traveling last week and as a customer walking around with my kids, I was impatient waiting for something and my wife looked at me and said, have you ever worked in food service? Do you know what it's like? Do you know what they're going through right now?

And I did not have that background and it humbled me quickly. I think to try and put yourself in that mode of being curious and exploring careers just so you can kind of be a better human being walking through your life is also helpful.

Jordan Harbinger: There's a lot in the book about why you should stop comparing yourself to other people, especially your career, making a difference, putting your strengths into service. One thing I found in the book that I think a lot of listeners can relate to is there's a story about this woman, Emma, and she was searching for one perfect calling and it basically led her through all these health care jobs. I think it was four health care jobs in three years and it was kind of a disaster.

Tell us about this because I think, again, I think a lot of people listening can relate to this. Oh, this one's not my calling. I've got to jump ship and that's not quite the recipe for success.

Tom Rath: Yeah, that's what's been one of the most interesting things that I've learned from a lot of the work, I think what academics call job crafting, where there's a continuum if you think about where you are in your career, where if it's a job, it's something that essentially you're getting paid to do it, kind of making it through your days. And if something came up that looked more appealing, you would probably take it or if you had more freedom. So we go from a job where even within a job, I think it's important to point out, like you said in that example, if you have a job that's really miserable and there's nothing you can do to fix it, you've tried, you've tried changing the structure of what you do time-wise.

You've tried spending time with different people at your job. You've tried asking for help from your manager, whatever it might be. And you're still absolutely miserable every day.

There are a lot of cases, maybe the Allen's five or 10%, where being in an awful job is worse for you mentally and physically than being unemployed. 15 out of 16 life factors when we measure this are worse than unemployment. If you're in a job, you really hate horrible manager or whatnot.

So if you're in that situation, by all means, get out of it. But for most people, if you're in a job you don't like, there are a lot of things you can do to take the job that you have and make it into one that you want. And so that involves, like we talked about changing your schedule, avoiding the people that bring you down throughout the day, spending more time with people who pick you up, finding more meaning in the things you're doing throughout the day.

And so you can probably take a job from a negative five to a zero, or maybe even a plus three doing that. And then once you get to the next level of what researchers call it goes from job to career, a career is something that's more sustainable. You enjoy it most of the time.

You're getting paid enough to keep doing it. You feel pretty good about it. And then so that's the rung that a lot of people are in the middle.

And then the top rung of that is kind of a calling where you feel great about it. Your days are pretty energizing. You might even keep doing it or want to do more of it, even if you weren't getting paid as much, for example.

And so over the span of whatever a lifetime or a career is, if you can get closer to the point where you're doing things that energize you that you're not doing just for the money. Moving along that continuum is what's most important. It's also important to note that's never a real smooth climb.

It's a jagged edge and it's spiky where you're going to make some progress and then everything's come to a screeching halt and go backwards by three or four years. And then all of a sudden you're going to see big acceleration and to embrace that's the way careers work. And it's not some monolithic 20, 30 year, you're stuck in it thing like my parents or grandparents might have grown up in is important.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there's a lot in the book about career crafting, job crafting, so ways to craft tasks, relationships at work, even the cognitive work that you do. Again, we don't have time to dive into all that, but I think it's important to mention that the book gets into that stuff at a deep level. It's not a motivational book about finding your purpose.

There's a lot of practical information in the book itself. I wonder how you know when to modify or craft the job that you're in. How do I get this job from a negative five to a zero or plus three versus just jump ship?

How do you know, OK, this is uncraftable, right? There's nothing here that I can salvage or there's nothing here that I should salvage. I should move on to something else.

How do you make that decision?

Tom Rath: If you've been in a job where you've tried a lot of the structural things, you've tried rearranging your day, you've tried doing things your own way instead of the way they told you to do it and adapting the structure. So if you've tried all those things and you still don't think it's working, I would say to ask your spouse or your partner or your best friend, am I a better person when I come home since I've been doing this job? Or do you see some changes that might be worsening your own well-being and might not be that good for your family?

When your kids is old enough, ask them if they feel like you're a better parent when you come home in the evening than you were in the mornings or you are on the weekends and so forth. And to get some of those external perspectives, because I think we all need to do a better job of making sure that the job that we're in right now, it's kind of like the medical thing, first, do no harm. If your job is actually not a net positive for your life at the moment, then you better be working every day to try and fix it.

And if you can't fix it, be looking for a different job with all of your spare discretionary time, because life's too short to spend multiple years in a job that's not good for you, your family or your friends or your well-being and especially your health. But so many people just accept it and keep doing it for decades.

Jordan Harbinger: We're a family here. Is corporate speak for we'd like some unpaid labor and your actual family can go fuck themselves? Let's hear from the sponsors who support this show through the refreshingly honest arrangement of paying with money.

We'll be right back. Don't forget, you can always connect with me. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter, Instagram, or you can even connect with me on LinkedIn.

Now, for the rest of my conversation with Tom Rath. I would say old habits die hard, but I think a lot of it is just fear based, right? It's a lot of it is they're afraid to of the uncertainty.

And I think that's really a dangerous place to live. The book has a lot of productivity tips. I hate that phrase, but because it's not exactly productivity tips per se, but you write that you used to open your inbox first thing and let whoever emailed basically hijack your day, right?

The overnight emails. When you first audited your output, what did you actually created versus merely processed? I had to get over this myself where I had to stop checking email in the morning and looking for fires to put out and start doing something productive immediately.

Tom Rath: When I finally started auditing my day by saying, what's the point of what I'm doing at 7:00 a.m., at 7:30, and so forth and use that as my benchmark. It was about as humbling as when I look back on my career at 40, because I realized pretty quickly that as much as I talk about doing meaningful things and using your strengths and all that, first thing I got up in the morning, I saw this huge endless to-do list on my email and my whole goal and identity was like, wait, can I get all the way through this by the end of the day? So I feel like I got something turned into my to-do list.

And I've done a lot of very in-depth investments and private and public stuff and complex trading things for 25 plus years. And so I spent so much time looking at stock quotes, financial news, had a screen running CNBC in the background for 25 years. And I realized I was spending at least 30 to 40 minutes looking at stock tickers, where I knew in the back of my mind that the ideal thing to do that I've gotten good at is to sit on my hands and not trade or sell anything for years on end, right?

But I'm still doing that for kind of the stimulus and the response and feeling like it's some sense of security that's not real and looking through social feeds and the like. And so when I did a real thorough audit and inventory in the middle of working on this book, I realized that 80, I'm going to say 80 is fair, 80% of my time was spent responding to things and letting things into my daily orbit that were not a great use of my best time. And 20% of my time was spent doing things that were like writing a new page or chapter, editing something, having a real meaningful conversation with someone I care about.

That was about 20% of my time. And what's worse, I did all the reactive stuff early and I had the conversations late in the day.

Jordan Harbinger: Your best, most cognitively, I don't know, your freshness was used on watching stock tickers and all the really important stuff was when you were running on empty already.

Tom Rath: Exactly. And so weaning myself off of that stuff was almost like stopping alcohol or cigarettes or something for a guy like me at this age, because I had to build programs that sent me a digest of what's going on in my email at 8:30 and at 3:00 p.m. and try and keep my browsers closed and shut off all the tickers and financial news. And it took some time and it was hard to do.

I remember I probably got sweaty and shaky the first days, but eventually I realized that, hey, I can get a lot more done and nothing out there changed when I wasn't looking at it. And I'm cognitively calmer and more productive and more creative. And so now I'm probably at 75, 25, where before 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I think most of my time is spent on things that are pretty good and creative and doing real work and building applications and working on books and so forth.

And then in the early afternoon, I have real high quality conversations and focus time on the people who matter most. And I save all the stuff that I probably wouldn't do if I didn't have to until 3 to 5 o'clock.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's funny. I came to the same conclusion, which I had this urgency addiction or whatever you want to call it, but it was basically like, oh, I've got to do this phone call. OK, first thing in the morning.

And it's like a sales pitch from some company that I'm at. So now I basically don't do any of that before lunch, right? I do podcasts like the one I'm doing with you before lunch.

I might look at something that requires actual attention. I've got to write copy for the website. All right, put that in the morning, put that right in the morning.

And yeah, if I have a bunch of phone calls or meetings that have to get done at some point, it's either in the afternoon and ideally on Monday so that I can run into Monday, get all of it done. And I'm not interrupting a focus block on Wednesday morning to take a call from somebody who wants to talk to me about my car's extended warranty, right? I think of the book, you would call it initiation hours where I'm actually initiating things that's mornings, no email.

There's no meetings allowed unless it's like really important. Our lawyer needs to talk to us tomorrow. OK, well, it's happening.

That's different. But yeah, no sales calls, no sort of casual pre-interviews for the show. I wonder if you thought about this.

Why does responsiveness feel productive even when it produces almost nothing durable?

Tom Rath: It's horrible the way it almost feels better psychologically to do the responding thing and to get to inbox zero, even though it's bad for us in the long run, right? And so there's kind of that reward circuitry built that we have to break out of. And I would also just add that I know not everybody can queue their email until 8:30 and 3:30, right?

Some people have to respond every hour and be online doing things and all that. But all of the clinical research on this topic and how to optimize a day suggests that in an ideal world, you should at least focus on these initiating versus responding blocks for 52 minutes is the time people come to. So 50 minutes at a time of initiating, and then you can do some responding if you have to.

In a worst case scenario, spend at least 25 minutes initiating, working on something where you're focused, not paying attention to the email and stock quotes and social feeds, and then take a few minutes off. But we have to learn to work in cycles and bursts where we're initiating as much as we can and then responding when we need to. Because if we allow the constant pull and need to respond to consume our days, we're like one Claude point release away from having our job automated away.

There's almost emergency to it, seriously, where if you just fall into the sleepwalking responding stasis that most people are doing today, you are so vulnerable to having your job automated or eliminated. It's hard to describe after being immersed in these tools for a couple of years here.

Jordan Harbinger: So how do you distinguish an initiator and somebody who's protecting their time from a selfish person who's a bottleneck that ignores everybody else on their team?

Tom Rath: If you're just ignoring and being a complete bottleneck is almost worse than the perpetual responding thing. I think people need to challenge themselves. And this is the thing I've seen.

And I've learned it the hard way because I was on the other end of this for most of my career where I was saying to people, learn all about yourself, be self-aware, be more of who you are and all this stuff and then figure out how to make things revolve around you and all that. But I now can see that in where things are headed, if you're not very other aware or you don't know what your co-workers want to your point and you don't know what your customers are needing right now and you become a bottleneck and you're not focusing on the demand and the other side of the equation, that's going to be exposed much more quickly than it has been in the past, where if you're that bottleneck, it will stick out and you need to get into the collaborate, initiate mode pretty quickly because it's going to be much harder to hide.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to take a wild left turn here. Take us into the room on the evening before your grandfather passed away. Who was he to you?

What was his condition? What did the hospice nurse do for 20 minutes, even though he couldn't respond? That became kind of the purest example of purpose in the book.

Tom Rath: That's still a challenging one for me to take myself back to. My grandfather was a kind of a father figure, a mentor. We were as close as you could get when I was growing up.

He's the one that helped me through that illness battling cancer I told you about. And then I went to work with him right out of college because I followed in the family footsteps and we were working on this StrengthsFinder thing together. And as we were in the middle of that, he found out that he had stage four gastroesophageal cancer.

To this day, that's as rattled as I've ever been. I still, I was an emotional wreck. And so I went to spend the next months with him.

Just I took him to Mayo Clinic and down to Houston and all over just trying to figure out based on everything I knew about cancer at the time, how could we keep him alive a little bit longer? And somewhere along the way, I remembered that he'd always said it was such a shame that we eulogize people after they're already gone. So I said, I'm going to do something about that.

And even though I'd had an English teacher tell me to stick with math and numbers, that was my strength. Don't ever do writing because I couldn't do it. I decided I'm going to write my grandpa a letter by hand.

So I wrote him a 15 page letter while we were staying at a residence in down in Houston, like 100 and some degrees. And I stayed up late doing it and wrote him this letter about the difference he'd made when I was battling cancer and helped me to stay positive and all these things we talked about. And I handed it to him.

And he was moved to tears. One of the most emotional moments and one learning from that is if you ever get a chance to share something in writing like that with someone while they're still alive, do it as fast as you can. That's one thing.

But then the next day he came back to me and he said, I've been reading your letter and rereading it. And I think you have a real talent for bringing things to life with words. You don't know what you're talking about because everyone's told me the opposite.

And I'm like, OK. He said, and I'm wondering if we can write a book about this. This How Full Is Your Bucket? thing you've been talking about for many years?

I wonder if we can write a book together and do it in the next two months. And he was the most positive guy ever. And that was the only time through his whole journey he let on that he knew how limited his time was.

And so I said to him, all right, I'm a horrible writer, but maybe I can learn. Let's go and try it. Anyhow, long story short, we got a draft of that book ready just before he got to his sickest point and went into hospice care.

And then, as you mentioned in the epilogue of the book, I talked about how I'd read a draft to him while he was still alert and with it. And then a few days later, he was completely out of it, couldn't respond to any of us and the like. And I was staying in the room across the hall from him, and I couldn't sleep with everything going on.

Woke up at two or three in the morning, and there was a home care nurse in his room with him. There was a little light on by the nightstand, and she was reading a book and a story to him aloud. And I kind of walked up in the hallway real quietly.

She never knew I was there. And he was completely out of it. But she was reading with such intonation and emotion as if she was on a stage telling a story to a group of young kids.

And I sat there with chills, never went around the corner. And to see a human being doing something that meaningful, knowing that the patient, the family, no one was observing that. They weren't doing it because it was their job.

They weren't doing it for recognition. To me, that was such a pure form of doing something purposeful for another human being that, you know, I'll probably spend the rest of my life and never get to that level of doing something that purposeful in a moment like that. And so I think that's something we can all aspire to, is to say, how do we reorient our lives to say, how can we help people each day through the work that we're doing, essentially?

Jordan Harbinger: It's contribution without witnesses, doing something good because good needs doing, not because you're going to get proof or gratitude or credit or applause necessarily, but simply because it needs doing. I think it's an amazing example that I'm glad, I'm really glad made it into your book. OK, you made it past 40.

What are you doing with the, I feel bad saying this, what would 15-year-old you recognize is worth it that you're doing with the extra time that you have now? That feels wrong to say that somehow, Tom, I don't know. Why does that sound wrong?

Tom Rath: I am thoroughly enjoying the overtime in my life. It's been a good excuse to say, now that I've achieved what the expectations were in society, how can I make sure that I'm optimizing the rest of my life, not just for myself, but really optimizing it for the people that matter most. So I had a dad when I was young who kind of all the men I looked up to had this kind of work ethic of 80 hours and saying they didn't need any sleep.

Jordan Harbinger: I can relate.

Tom Rath: I'm sure my kids will say I swung the pendulum way too far in the other direction and I've been around way too much. And I hope I have been around too much and I hope they say that. I've moved in that direction and I'm always asking myself, am I going to spend time on things that can continue to make a difference first and foremost for the people I care about?

And then maybe even for friends and readers and people 10, 20, 30 years from now, whether I'm around or not. It's a great question you ask about the overtime, because the more I've thought about this and the example we just talked about, I think that maybe the best case is that I have a conversation with my daughter tonight about a challenge she's facing with a field hockey team she's trying out for whatever friend. And we have a good heart to heart about that.

And then 30, 40, 50 years from now, when she's talking with one of her kids or one of her grandkids and I'm no longer around, something that I said influences that conversation. And she doesn't even register it was because of a conversation with me, but it continues to have that positive effect on down the road. And so the more I've been able to get my mindset to thinking about the residual effect that we all have in the future, whether it's acknowledged or not, the more fun and the more meaningful it makes each day.

Jordan Harbinger: I'd love to end right there, but I'm also dying to know what are you still doing in your life that fails your very own what's the point test? What are you still doing that you totally know is a waste of time and you just can't help yourself?

Tom Rath: I'm still spending way too much time on following financial incentives like most of us do, frankly, right? Like I spend too much time thinking about and looking at and working on investments I'm involved with and businesses I'm involved with. And I spend far too little time building new and nurturing relationships like 90% of 50-year-old males, right?

And I think the best ROI of any hour I could spend in the next year is probably just investing more time, just fun social time and relationships with friends and extended family members and the like. Having some of those discussions and talking about things more openly and having good conversations about emotions with friends and family and the like. And so I'm under-indexed on that right now and determined to fix that balance over the next 10, 20 years.

Jordan Harbinger: A lot of us, apparently Michigan guys, we just are used to it's this Midwestern thing. We just work, work and if you're not working you should probably find something to work on. And then you look back one day and you go, oh, crud I didn't have enough Lego time.

So yeah, I feel confident now that I'm doing the right thing. And so thank you for reaffirming that as well and coming on the show today.

Tom Rath: Thanks so much. It's been fun. Those are some great questions.

That really got me thinking about some stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, good. I'm glad. I love that.

Tom Rath: My life's kind of been an open book but the quality of the questions is what made that really different. So it was like my grandpa and I are talking about like, we grew up as just huge fans of Charlie Rose and Larry King and watching all these interviews and stuff.

And that was kind of our entertainment time in the evening. And the questions you ask have a quality level that are different. So that's high praise because I've done, I don't know, 40, 50 interviews in the last three months.

And the emotional depth of that caused more introspection on my end than I'm used to. So that was great.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank you. That is high praise. Important conversation.

And thank you for humoring some of my deep dives. I know some of this stuff's not super easy to talk about. Tom Rath, thank you very much.

Ever notice your back aches or your head pounds when life gets overwhelming? Here's a preview with Nicole Sachs on how stress can keep showing up as pain even after you think you've moved on.

Nicole Sachs: The pain is in your head. You're making it up. You're hysterical.

You're oversensitive. These are things that have blocked people from healing for decades. It's truly a societal paradigm that I seek to shift.

We are not built for long-term fight or flight. We are built for bursts of being able to save our own lives. Pain meds do not help for chronic pain because chronic pain is a consistent firing of pain signals based on a nervous system that is dysregulated.

And so you might get some relief. If you take an opioid, you're just going to basically be high for a little while. And so you probably will care less about what's going on.

Two things. First is I'm not saying the pain is in your head. You are not hysterical.

You're not making it up. One million percent, this is neuroscience. Second is I don't want you to try to use emotional work or mind-body work for a tumor, for a blood disorder, for anything that needs medical attention.

It is simply neuroscience. If you believe that a stressful day can give you a headache, and if you believe that being super anxious can make you throw up, you must believe that doing journal speak and getting to the things that have been causing you to be in a heightened state of fight or flight will stop your chronic symptoms of inflammation, muscle constriction, spasm, and neuropathy from stop firing. You have to.

It is the same exact thing. Your nervous system will protect you without your permission and without your opinion. That nervous system is not going to stop.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear why that pain can linger and what might help you interrupt it, check out episode 1337 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Nicole Sachs. My biggest takeaway, what matters to you needs a spot on your calendar. Otherwise, it gets whatever scraps your inbox leaves behind.

You can keep saying family, friendship, and meaningful work come first, but your schedule gets the deciding vote. Pick one thing you keep postponing and give it some extra time this week. That's your life too.

All things Tom Rath will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the podcast, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. This show is created in association with PodcastOne and my team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who could benefit from Tom's message today, definitely share this episode with him.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.