Your Ambitions Might Not Be Yours | Tom Rath

Most of us reach our 40s and discover something unsettling: the ambitions we’ve been chasing weren’t entirely ours. They came from parents, from culture, from the two or three careers we happened to see up close. Tom Rath calls this looking through a pinhole, and he thinks it explains more midlife restlessness than most of us are willing to admit.

Tom is one of the most widely-read researchers on how careers shape health and well-being. His books, including the instant number one New York Times bestseller How Full Is Your Bucket? and StrengthsFinder 2.0, have sold more than 10 million copies. His latest book is What’s the Point?: Turning Purpose into Your Daily Superpower.

In this conversation, you’ll explore:

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from realizing your striving belonged to someone else. This conversation is for anyone in midlife who’s starting to ask whether the ladder they’ve been climbing was theirs to begin with.

You can find Tom at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sharing our conversation with Bela Gandhi to talk about why midlife is actually the moment most people become more ready for a real relationship — and what’s quietly getting in the way. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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photo credit: Charles King

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Episode Transcript:

Tom Rath: [00:00:00] Purpose is manufactured in the lab of our daily choices. It’s about what you decide to prioritize because it is something that will be meaningful a year from now or ten years from now. And asking why and asking what. The point of spending two hours on this activity is, or an hour investing in this relationship, or this effort, or this company or this product. Just ask, what’s the point all the time during the day, if you do that well, that is how you turn purpose into your daily superpower.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:26] So Tom Rath was diagnosed with a fatal illness at 16. Average life expectancy 34. When we spoke, he was 50 years old already, but it was his 40th birthday that became the real turning point when he asked himself, did I choose this life or just go along with the current that’s already running? Tom has spent decades studying how careers shape well-being, offering 12 books with over 10 million copies sold. His latest is What’s the Point? Turning purpose into your superpower. In this conversation, we explore the inherited ambitions that we carry without even realizing it. Why? The latter is the wrong model for a life well lived, and what purpose looks like when you stop waiting to find it. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project, and I want to start at the very beginning with Tom. We’ll jump in there right after this short break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:22] I have been following your work for for quite a while. I’m always fascinated to hear your take your lens on how to investigate big transitional moments in life. I want to take a step back in time, though, because you have lived with an awareness of your own mortality since your mid-teens. So, you know, this is probably a longer term exploration for you than it is for so many others. Can you take us back there and, and share a bit of the story about how this awareness dropped into your life?

Tom Rath: [00:01:54] Yeah, it is a good place to start because, you know, it’s been, um, Almost 35 years now since I had that initial challenge and diagnosis when I was 16 years old, and it continues to shape the first hours of every single day. And what I do and what I read about and what I learn in a way that’s was originally really beneficial to kind of keep myself alive a little bit longer, but has since transformed into something very different in terms of the intent and orientation around it. So to go back to that, I was diagnosed when I was 16 years old. I was living a real active, normal life and, um, realized I was having trouble seeing out of my left eye and some dark spots and couldn’t make sense of it. Went to an eye doctor. After a lot of rounds of testing and trying to figure out what was going on, they said, well, you know, you have several large tumors on the back of your left eye, and that’s not the worst news. The bad news is we think it means you might have a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors to show up everywhere, and that it essentially just shuts off the body’s most powerful tumor suppressing genes. So within a year of that initial diagnosis, I had lost my left eye and all sight in that permanently, which changed my day to day life quite a bit.

Tom Rath: [00:03:07] And I also realized that I was going to need to go through MRIs and CT scans every six months for the rest of whatever my life might look like at that point. So, I mean, you might think it’s a real challenging diagnosis at that point and something that rattles a 16 year old kid. But when I look back on it, I’m kind of amazed by how little it did to take me off that course. I still kind of hung out with friends, partied more than I should have, played sports, did all the normal things, and I had the people around me that kind of kept me focused on what was going right and what worked. And so a lot of that was kind of testimony to real good parenting and friends and family and being surrounded by the right people. And it also taught me, by the time I was 20 years old and the internet and all this information was starting to emerge that I realized, even though the initial over under on my life was 37 years, when I started to read about it, that that did two things. One is that it got me focused on, I need to live as much of a life as I can in about 37 years, professionally, family wise, and everything else. And it also helped me to see that the more I learned about this condition, the more I could stay ahead of it, and the more I could stay on top of it.

Tom Rath: [00:04:22] And so that’s when I mentioned the way it still orients my days today. I still wake up every morning and do at least one, usually two hours of reading on medical journals that are about health and cancer and my condition, because it gives me the knowledge and the psychological confidence to know that I can get out ahead of this thing and do everything I possibly can. And so I think when I when you ask that question, I don’t I probably haven’t given that enough thought, but it really has been helpful to focus my energy. And then something interesting happened when the pandemic hit. Uh, five, six years ago now where it was fascinating to me how all of a sudden, all these Zoom conversations I was having with leaders and friends and people, I kind of got this taste of it. They were jumping into my world for a little bit, and they had this taste of their mortality. And, you know, as I’m looking at what’s happening right now, I think I can see some of the residual of that where more people are asking questions about why am I even doing this? What’s the point of it? How do I focus on what matters most? And that might be a good byproduct of that kind of wake up call that a lot of people had during the pandemic.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:36] Yeah, I mean, that’s so interesting. Like this thing that was set in motion for you at 16 years old, getting you to look at the world a little bit differently, but also ask a different set of questions, and also just be very acquainted with your own mortality from the earliest days, even in your mind saying, okay, I’m doing a bit of research, the over under as you described it, or the potential like the, quote, average endpoint is 37 years old. So like, you’re almost like you’re working towards, it’s almost like somebody has told you like, this is when and I’m going to work backwards from there. And then we fast forward to the pandemic, when now millions of people are becoming, you know, like just deeply, viscerally acquainted with their own mortality. It’s almost like, well, you’ve had decades of training in living in that space already.

Tom Rath: [00:06:24] Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting because psychologists have studied for in recent years, uh, what they’ve called post-traumatic growth, where a lot of people who go through experiences that actually come out the back end more resilient and stronger. And they have a deeper ability, in my observation, to focus on what matters most. I mean, it’s, it’s a lot when you have that frame of mind, it’s a lot easier to say all these emails or this all this stuff flying at me. Does it really deserve my attention today when you’ve got limited time, right? And so it’s, for me, it’s been kind of a good way to prioritize my effort in a given within a day. Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:04] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You know, at the same time, again, sort of just bring us back to that those, those teen years, you know, like it sounds like you were living almost like these, um, these two different trajectories. Like on the one hand, you have this knowledge about what’s going on in your body. Um, and you know, what the science says is, quote, you know, like likely or out there in the horizon. And that also motivates you to just really deepen into research to stay on top of this. So it sounds like while one script was saying, okay, it is what it is, let me accept this and live the rest of my life. Now there’s a there was another curiosity, a seed that was planted in you that said, but maybe as I close the gap between now and that date, things will change. And I want to make sure that I’m on top of that.

Tom Rath: [00:07:51] Right. Yeah. That was the I mean, the only I think the thing that gave me hope in the midst of that initial diagnosis was that doctors and specialists said to me, you know, as long as you are getting full body MRIs and CTS of your brain and spine and abdomen every six months, as arduous as that is, because, I mean, I just go, I call it tubing every six months. I just go to the National Institutes of Health and sit in tubes for a whole week and get my blood drawn all week and meet with doctors. And that’s I mean, there’s some burden to that and stress during that week. But at the same time, I knew that as long as I did that, I could probably keep myself alive, even if it meant a lot of surgeries and so forth, and maybe hope to live a pretty normal life. And now I’m 50 and in relatively good health and hoping that I’m kind of at the midpoint of life right now in an ideal scenario still. So it’s the little seeds of hope that some doctors and family members and people planted back then has, has really worked out pretty well for me after several decades of this.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:55] Yeah. How do you feel like being so connected to this, and also then being so devout in terms of really examining what’s happening on the inside as well as on the outside on, as you described every six months, um, that that has put you in a stance where you’re so much better informed than often the typical person is about what is truly going on. And in a state where you’re actually accepting that rather than trying to deny it or push it off, um, that it’s almost led you to be able to be more proactive in making decisions about what you say yes or no to both in larger life, but in terms of your health from the earliest days, in a way where a lot of people don’t get to that place and lessen until something really major happens with their health, often decades later in life.

Tom Rath: [00:09:45] Yeah, I think I really the more I’ve learned about medicine and genetics and how one drug affects somebody so much different than another, and lifestyle and everything else. I think everyone, in my opinion, should be as open as they possibly can challenge themselves to be, to understand what’s going on inside their body and with their genes and everything else, because it essentially gives you a roadmap to know what you can stay ahead of. And I’ve learned more and more from that, and it gives me more hope and confidence for the future because I have that knowledge. And I mean, one of the things I learned many years ago when I worked on a book about this called eat, move, sleep, I discovered in my own kind of search about this when I was in my 20s, probably that knowing you have big genetic threats like that, it’s still not a great way to avoid having the cheeseburger and French fries or just laying around for a whole day, to be really honest. But what is is now that I’ve got kids who are 15 and 17 now, But when I was younger, I realized I need to do the right things in terms of being active and getting sleep and eating the right foods so I can be a good dad at 4:00 or 5:00, or I can be effective in a meeting at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, or when I’m presenting and connecting those short term dots, even for somebody like me with those big threats in terms of your day to day health and well-being. I think all of us need to do more of that, uh, short term incentive connecting things in order to make the right decisions that lead to the long term outcomes we care about. Because, I mean, just thinking abstractly about losing weight or staying alive another ten years, even in my case, is just a crappy motivator.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:31] Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Tell me if this is too personal, but I’m curious. You, as you shared, you have kids now who are sort of like similar age, um, as you were when you were first diagnosed. When you go back to the moment where you’re making a decision about, do I have kids or not? Um, I’m curious what that that moment is like for you.

Tom Rath: [00:11:56] You know, that’s interesting because my, uh, mom, who kind of was, I was real close with and, uh, parents and grandparents, the thing that they’d said to me really early on when I was probably 17 years old and, um, people kind of ask about that and I was trying to figure out where, where life went and if I could live a relatively normal life and have a family and all that. Um, I think, I mean, maybe within a month of my initial diagnosis, I, I still remember my mom saying something to me about, uh, you know, of course, that doesn’t preclude anything in the future because I mean, the life I had already had at that point was spectacular and about as good as it could have been. And I knew that I’d probably get to live another three, four, five, six decades, whatever it might be. And so it didn’t it didn’t really cross my mind that that was something precluding having a family and doing all those things in the future. And then, of course, as I got to learn more about the condition was and was really involved with the national organization and getting the depth and trenches of it and seeing so many people who did live good long lives with the condition and with a lot of monitoring and scanning and testing. I didn’t really think twice about that, and neither of my kids have the condition, but it I feel like we’re we’re at a point right now with genetic testing and monitoring. And now there’s a, there’s an FDA approved medicine for the condition that I have, which was approved in 2021. And nobody saw that coming, which kind of prevents and stops growth of tumors as long as they’ve been testing it here. So the and all the things I’ve seen recently, to be very honest with the way that AI will change the speed of medicine, that’s the one place where AI is going to rattle things in a good way, in a revolutionary way that no one really sees coming right now.

Tom Rath: [00:13:48] But I spent so much time reading about it, I’m really confident about it. So yeah, I’ve got a whole I feel like I have a whole new lease on life in the last 12 months, just because of what I’ve learned about that. Even if you have people who are the top minds on rare cancer research in the world, you get them together and so forth. As human beings, we’re not capable of looking at all of the permutations of what’s going on genetically, what’s going on biologically, and the combinations of different drugs and the new compounds that can be developed. It’s it’s just astounding what I’m seeing happen right now. I mean, it makes me very hopeful for everyone in our generation that’s dealing with, uh, life threatening diseases or debilitating diseases and how we can hopefully you already see this with some cancers in the last five years where we’re turning them into more manageable chronic conditions like diabetes and the like. And I think that’s going to happen much more rapidly than people are anticipating right now. And so that is that’s something for all of us to be hopeful about. And one of the things I would say to people, based on all of this experience I’ve had is that you’ve got to and you handed this knowledge and information can be powerful and help you to stay ahead of those things. As long as you don’t kind of put your head in your in the sand when it comes to your own health and medical treatment and so forth.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:11] I think often, um, especially as we enter midlife, as we sort of like, you know, get a bit older, we start to get concerned like we’re entering the season where, quote, things happen. We see it happening to friends, to family members. Maybe we feel something that just a little bit off inside of ourselves. And it, it engenders fear and understandably, we’re human. And part of that response so often is, well, I don’t want to actually acknowledge this. I don’t know if there’s something going on. You know, I’m in that age window where there’s probably something, but let me just put this off for as long as I can rather than saying, well, let’s just get honest. Like, information is better than ignorance in every situation in my mind, you know, like, let’s find out what is the truth. Like, what are the, what are the numbers say? And then we can make more informed decisions from there rather than just hoping and praying and trying to say like, there’s, there’s nothing going on, I’m fine. Maybe there is nothing going on, but information is better than ignorance. It’s just something I just keep going back to.

Tom Rath: [00:16:16] Yeah, I think in my experience, um, openness to new experiences and especially I think intellectual curiosity may be the most underrated health strategy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:27] Um, tell me more.

Tom Rath: [00:16:29] In terms of understanding how the right answer for one person’s health is night and day different from the person next to them? Right? And so we read these diet books where, and even if you’re reading a good diet book, let’s say weight loss itself isn’t the goal, if you really think about it. And what’s the point here? The point of a diet is not just to lose £5. The point of what you’re doing is to build a sustainable lifestyle that leads to more energy in a day, to be a better friend, to be a better spouse, to be a better parent, and to live longer in good health, I would argue. Right? And so if you want to do that and you presume that that’s a desired outcome, then the more information you have about yourself, about your genetics, about how your body responds to different foods, about what activity does for your routine, about your sleep patterns and how to master that, getting more knowledge and awareness around that and learning more about it for yourself. And really, I found taking ownership and saying, hey, you know what a physician has, I don’t know if it’s 3 minutes or 15 minutes to learn about you in a given year. So there’s, I, and I’ve learned this the hard way. There’s no doctor on this planet that’s ever going to know a 10th as much about me as I have the ability to do. And that’s not just someone in a condition like I have that applies to all of us. So to take ownership, to be kind of the Guardian or CEO of your own health, and then to learn as much as you can about that and be open minded and learn more. I think that’s kind of especially with all the information our fingertips right now. If you don’t do that, it’s on you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:08] Mhm. Yeah, I agree with that. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Let’s broaden the conversation out a bit. You know, we’re talking about being wise and getting information about our, our health. Um, but part of what gets set in motion with everybody, with you and a much earlier age than, than a lot of folks is this question of like, what am I doing with my life? You know, like what, what is a good use of my time on this planet, no matter how long or short it is? And, and so often we’re, we’re fed a series of questions and a series of expectations that we try and live into. And then we we find ourselves at a certain moment in life saying to ourselves, I, I feel like I checked most of those boxes and I don’t feel the way I thought I would feel. One of the words that so often comes up in this part of the conversation is, is purpose. Um, and there’s so much around and it’s to a certain extent, I feel it’s almost like a loaded word these days. You have an interesting take on purpose. Um, tell me more about your lens.

Tom Rath: [00:19:14] And, and yeah, I think I learned the hard way as I was working on this book. The purpose is to loaded of a word to even have in the book’s title. So we’ll come back to that. And so it changed it last minute. Um, but so I’m so as we talked about, I go all the way through life and I, I accomplish, I feel like I accomplish things I want to accomplish, have a family. My kids are in good health. Everything’s going good with my family. And then I hit the age of 40 where, I mean, that’s past the over under on the lifespan, right? And I kind of look back and say to myself, So what have I been doing and what’s next? Because I, I got there, right. And I look back and really try to think about it critically. And I had spent the first 40 years of my life essentially following in footsteps and expectations, like all most of us do, of what our parents did, worked for the same company and start up as my family and kind of felt like I checked the boxes and followed all those societal and familial expectations. But I was asking myself, what was the point of that? And is it really what I want to be doing and how I want to be allocating my time and what I feel like I should do in the next half of my life? Right? And so that’s what led to this book that’s now called What’s the point here that’s coming out? And originally I thought that book was supposed to be about purpose and career.

Tom Rath: [00:20:33] And so it was titled Purpose Unlocked. And the more I got into the research on it and talked to friends and family members about it, I realized that when most of us. And I’m in this boat too. You hear the word purpose. Your heart clenches up a little bit and you’re thinking, that’s a that’s a big thing that people feel like they’re supposed to find on a really sunny day, or it descends from the heavens and it’s, it’s, it’s just too much and it’s heavy, like you talked about. So as I got into the work on it, I was kind of refreshed to learn that really all of the purpose in life is built within the day, and purpose is about what you do in a given hour and prioritizing what you should be doing and asking why and asking what. The point of spending two hours on this activity is, or an hour investing in this relationship, or this effort, or this company or this product or whatever it might be. And so that’s where we evolved to saying, just ask, what’s the point all the time during the day? And then if you do that, well, that is how you turn purpose into your daily superpower, which was the subtitle of the book we kind of got to.

Tom Rath: [00:21:40] But just sorting that through took me several years and a lot of introspection, because I realized that in the last years of my life, I mean, I, I say, well, you’re supposed to do these purposeful things and focus on your strengths and all this stuff. But yet when I really looked honestly and clinically at what I was doing throughout the day, I’d kind of followed in my family footsteps for one. And then I also spent an extraordinary amount of time in my day just kind of responding to clients and customers and emails and studying social feeds. And the thing I was most guilty of in the last 5 or 10 years is, um, I spent too much time watching stock tickers and finances to be honest, and watching CNBC and following business stuff. And I acted on and did nothing based on that, but I just let it consume time and distract me. Right? So when I thought about it clinically, I’m like, just tune out those distractions, see what you can get done. Invest in a conversation with a colleague that matters. Invest in an hour of writing. Invest in an hour of having a good discussion with my kids, asking them questions, and realized that that’s where all the meaning and purpose is really built, and that you just have to build more of that into your day. And so that’s where a lot of it started.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:52] Yeah. I love that. I mean, that simple question, what’s the point of this? Like if you stop at any given moment during your day and just take a beat, look at what you’re doing or where your mind is or what you’re not doing, what’s the point of this? Um, I’m guessing for a lot of us, I’m raising my hand here. Solid chunk of my day. I’m going to be a little bit jarred by the way I answer that question. Mhm. Um, or maybe I actually am not even going to be able to come up with. I don’t know what the purpose. Like I literally, there’s, there’s no, no reason, like, I don’t know what the point of what I’m doing right now is which, which is information right there to you touched on something else, though, that I don’t want to gloss over, which is this notion that so often we hear some version of, you’ve got to figure out, quote, like your purpose. Like there is a singular, like unifying one grand purpose. And part of our work is, you know, we need to actually show up and do the work and investigate to define or divine that singular purpose, and then we can finally live into it. What I love about what you’re saying is like, maybe some people actually do have that moment. Maybe some people actually can find a singular thing where they’re just like, I want to pour everything they have into it. But in my experience, that is very much the outlier, not the rule. And for everybody else, you’re, you’re giving them a way to say you can still move through your days. And in all of these tiny little moments along the way, find a sense of purpose that is also deeply nourishing.

Tom Rath: [00:24:23] Yeah, I think in my experience as I’ve studied this now, I think purpose is kind of manufactured in the lab of our daily choices. So it’s, it’s about what you decide to prioritize because it is something that will be meaningful a year from now or ten years from now, or maybe when you’re gone. If you’re working on a big project or whatever it might be. And so when you bring purpose down to that level and say, I mean, I could I right now, I could go respond to five cold emails from people that I don’t have any relationship with that I don’t know, and that’s ten fewer minutes. I have to have a meaningful conversation with my daughter after school today. Right? And so when you put it in that frame, I can just ignore those emails forever. And it doesn’t matter because I’m doing something that’s more purposeful, right?

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:06] Yeah, that makes sense. So there’s another P word that tends to enter the conversation when we talk about purpose that is probably equally, if not more loaded. And that word is passion. And again, this is one of those words where so often the guidance is that you’ve got to, quote, find your passion or follow your passion. Good advice, bad advice.

Tom Rath: [00:25:26] Maybe the worst advice.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:28] Yeah.

Tom Rath: [00:25:29] I think, I mean, I think when I, when a guidance counselor asked me that when I was coming out of college and I’d already had to deal with all this stuff, it at the time, I remember that it sounded so hollow to me. But now that I’ve studied it, it’s even rings more hollow. Because when you tell someone that they just need to go out in the world and find what they’re passionate about. And so I think passion by definition is kind of self-oriented. And I would argue, whereas purpose is by nature other oriented, it’s about what you do that makes a difference for another person.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:04] So, you know, I think the conversation around purpose and passion is something that so many of us explore and, and sort of refocusing on, on the external part, on how can I help others is a really powerful moment. There is also this sort of like really interesting but also somewhat uncomfortable idea that you share. We touched on it a little bit earlier in our conversation. It’s this notion that many of us, we have these ambitions that are, for lack of a better word, they’re inherited, you know from from culture, from parents, from local community. Or maybe they just dreams of ours that we had at an earlier part of our life that are no longer really relevant to now. Um, how much in your mind, how much of a sort of like, you know, present day adult striving is really ours and how much of it is kind of borrowed?

Tom Rath: [00:26:59] Yeah. You know, it is an uncomfortable question that I had to wrestle with myself. I kind of looked back and said, you know, I felt like I or the story I told myself when I graduated from college was, you know, I had my own ambitions and wanted to do something new and different and all of that. And then by the time I hit 40, I kind of looked back and said, you know what? I grew up around, uh, researchers and teachers and entrepreneurs. And not only did I fall into that same kind of default track, but I went to work for the exact same company and doing the same things with family. And that’s, that’s really the default track over the last 100, 200 years. And some of it came about because of the best of intentions, where you have a laborer transferring a skill, whether it’s being a cobbler or working a field or being a dentist, whatever it might be, to the next generation. And so you have parents who kind of want to pass that along and see their kids follow in their footsteps and all that. Um, so some of it comes about with good intentions. Other spots are places where maybe the parents didn’t succeed but wanted to and pushed the kids into that. And that’s its own psychological thing. Um, but when you look at this across the labor force, what it leads to that is deeply concerning to me is kids get funneled into these paths when they’re maybe 14 or 15 years old.

Tom Rath: [00:28:16] And it hit me like a brick when I asked my daughter when she was 14 years old, I said, you know, what are you thinking about? What sounds fun to you when you think about the future? And I’d been working on careers and some of this work, and she said, well, you know, I think maybe I could be a writer that that’s a novel thought or maybe a teacher and my wife’s a second grade teacher. So those were her two thoughts. So she’s exactly two for two and didn’t mention anything outside of that. So I realized in that moment that most of us get all the way to the end of our life. And if we’re lucky, we’ve seen two, three, four careers in a good amount of depth. Yet when I did, when I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and looked at all the jobs out there, it turns out that you would need to know about 50 jobs to see 50% of what’s out there in the labor force. So most of us are forced right now to make big life choices. Where do you spend four years of your life studying or maybe more, or go into a job? When we’re essentially looking out of a pinhole, if you think about a camera lens and the aperture is at about 2 or 3%.

Tom Rath: [00:29:16] And so even if we were to be able to see 10 or 20 jobs, you’re still just getting a pretty small field of view of what’s out there. So I think as we’ve moved to more of an information economy where people are doing different things, it could be pretty liberating for a lot of us to look back and say, hey, you know what? I might have been in this job because I kind of fell into some parental defaults or some societal or financial defaults. And the result of that isn’t that you’ve wasted time in life. The result of that might be that you have a lot more opportunity to get into and do other things than you ever would have imagined. If you explore a bit more. So that’s that’s the optimistic side of it to me. There are a lot of pressures forcing kids to try and narrow and specialize, even when they’re 15 and 16 years old right now, which it seems like that’s the default thing for schools and parents to do, and they just do it without realizing it in many cases.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:12] Yeah, I really do think I agree with you. I think that that pressure just starts coming earlier and earlier, and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, it ties into this other topic which you you explore as well, which is this notion of what are we actually working towards? And this notion of enough or enoughness, you know, like, how do we what is there like? And, and you know, what does we are all working towards that moment where we kind of feel like, like we’ve accomplished enough. We have saved enough. There’s enough of however, you know, you’re measuring this thing. What do we get wrong about this notion of enough?

Tom Rath: [00:30:52] You know, one of the things that got my attention on that topic is when I started into wellbeing research, and we were looking at global wellbeing metrics when I worked at Gallup more than a decade ago. And the one question that academics we brought in had used for 50 years to measure wellbeing is a question developed by a researcher named Hadley Cantrell, and it’s called The Ladder of Life. And if you imagine a ladder with steps numbered one through ten, where do you stand today? Where do you think you’ll stand a year from now? And that’s kind of the gold standard default for how people have measured this wellbeing thing. But the more I got into that, it dawned on me that if you ask someone to imagine a ladder, that’s the exact wrong way to think about life. Because if you’re looking at life like it’s a ladder, you’re always trying to climb, and assuming that each rung adds a little bit more, and if you climb ten steps higher, you might double your income or double your happiness or whatever. And in an ideal scenario, that’s not how life works.

Tom Rath: [00:31:52] Life is not zero sum. If I get a lot happier and do a lot more, that means that my wife or one of my best friends is likely to be happier, not less happy. It’s not. It’s not a zero sum thing. And so the more we get wrapped up in social comparison, whether that’s comparison of titles, whether that’s comparison on social media, or whether that’s comparison of salary, that’s actually a big detriment to our happiness. And once you get to a certain point, it isn’t. It’s important to note that once you get to a point in income where it’s not causing stress every day, so you feel like you can pay your bills, you can pay your mortgage, you can put food on the table and the things that you need to do. Once you get to that point, I think it is important to try and disconnect as much as you can from chasing, especially financial status, because that’s a game that nobody’s ever going to win, even when you get to the billionaire level.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:44] Yeah. And yet so many of us aspire and, and like you said, when you’re playing the comparison game, which we’re all kind of wired for, you know, it’s almost like if you look at the ten people you surround yourself with and you feel like you’re, you’re constantly the one who’s in a state of lack. That affects us, you know? So there’s this really interesting and powerful dynamic of, you know, our sense of enoughness is in no small way determined by the choices we make about who we surround ourselves with also. Mhm.

Tom Rath: [00:33:14] It is. And I think one of the things that I learned while I was working on this book is that I live across the street from a big, sprawling cemetery here in Arlington, Virginia. And I walked through there. And I need some peace of mind sometimes. And if you look at just what’s written on the headstones, uh, I mean, it’s all just like a husband and a father and a mentor and all these things and a leader in the community. And I mean, there is not a thing on those headstones about status or titles or how much money you made or how many followers you have, just nothing at all. And so if you can try to deliberately orient your day towards the things that will be useful and helpful, whether that’s putting time into a relationship or helping your community that will be remembered, and knowing that those are going to be the anchors in the end and the money just passes on or expires or goes to the tax man or whatever. The sooner you can get to that and have the way you think about the importance of what you’re doing in your life, be non as non-comparative and non-financial as possible. It takes a lot of the edge off, at least in my experience.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:17] Yeah. I mean, which I think also brings us to the notion of legacy, you know, um, and it’s funny, I’ve been asked the question, you know, like what, what do you want your legacy to be? I’m sure you’ve been asked that. I’m sure so many of us have been asked it. I’m sure, like a lot of people, I think once we get to the middle season of life, we start to think about it. And so many of us are wondering, like, what is the thing we’ll leave behind? You know, it’s almost like when you think about legacy, like tied up in that is how strong is our quest for immortality. And, and, you know, like, what do we really want to represent us when we’re no longer here? And then the deeper question is, do you actually care about it at all? Take me into your take on legacy.

Tom Rath: [00:34:59] Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question. Um, and I think for me, I’ve realized more and more as I get to the second half of my life here, that the things that I do today that continue to grow a week from now, a month from now, a year from now are the most important. And that’s not just a creative project or a book or something that scales like that or a product. Most of it will be the product of what I’ve invested in other people and those relationships. And it will be when my daughter is 50 years old and she’s got kids of her own and she’s doing things, and she makes a decision that and she won’t even have realized it or think about it. Right. So I don’t I don’t know if that’s a legacy. I think it’s I’ve started to think about my days as just, I get to show up in the morning and plant a bunch of seeds that will continue to grow, ideally ten years from now, maybe when I’m gone and maybe people won’t even notice, but will have. I mean, I wrote the first book I wrote was called How Full Is Your Bucket when I was 25 years old. And they still use that in K-12 schools all over the country. And my kids started at the local elementary school here. And that’s kind of like the default curriculum. And it’s how the kids have their conversations and do drops for their buckets every day and stuff. And so knowing that that’s going on, I don’t have to see it. I don’t need any recognition from it. I don’t need anybody to give me credit for it now or when I’m gone. But just knowing that there are some residual seeds that are growing there, for me, that’s the whole ballgame, essentially.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:27] Yeah. I feel so much the same way. I think so often we’re looking for, you know, what is the big dent in the universe that we hope to make and then leave behind? And, and in my mind, I’m right there beside you. Like for me, it’s always like, you know what, what’s the small, the seed using your language that I can plant in the heart and minds of the people that are closest to me just on everyday basis, that carries on in some tiny, meaningful way. That is literally all I care about. Like I could care less if anyone knows of me or my work beyond those people. Um, there’s no, there’s no monument that needs to get built. There’s no entity that needs to be left behind. No body of work. I mean, I love the fact that there’s things that I create that make a difference, you know, beyond that. But, um, it’s really the people closest to me, you know, it’s my, my family and my chosen family, um, where I focus all of my energy now and where if I hope to have something that’s left behind, like that is where it lands. Um, and yet we often spend so much time trying to create something beyond that. Um, thinking that that somehow will be important. Um, and I just never bought into that.

Tom Rath: [00:37:42] And that’s really well put. And I mean, the more I got into this, I mean, I think a purpose is more like just gardening throughout the day than it is finding some grand thing or having some big accomplishment in life. Right? I mean, I think that’s when I did my 40 year old look back at how much driving I’d done. And was that really the, the right anchor? I realized that, um, that’s, I mean, all those things will disappear and be gone. The kind of individual accomplishments and things that people might think of in a traditional legacy mindset, but yet the influence on others. And I mean, I’ve, I’ve done a lot in the last years, like a good friend of mine who’s, uh, one of his parents had an aggressive form of cancer and just helping him out and doing that behind the scenes that nobody even knows about. That’s got more meaning to me than the last book I worked on, to be honest or whatever.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:28] Yeah. There’s, um, there’s a sort of a, I guess you’d call it a model. Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. Rambam’s ladder. It’s sort of a um and it comes out of Judaism is this notion of like the ladder of giving. Um, and what is sort of like the, I don’t know if the word pure is right, but like you’re sort of like rising up the ladder of like, what is the, the cleanest, the purest, the highest level of giving. And if I remember correctly, that the highest is giving, um, where the recipient doesn’t know who you are. In fact, nobody knows that you are the person behind anything that lands in another being’s life in a good way. And oftentimes we do the exact opposite. You know, we’re waiting for the naming rights rather than just saying that’s actually not what it’s about. Like, it’s, it’s, it’s a beautiful thing just to know that in some way, shape or form, somebody’s been touched by the fact that you were here for a heartbeat.

Tom Rath: [00:39:24] Right? That’s, you know, I actually closed this book out with a personal story where, um, my grandfather who I wrote, how we wrote it while he was in his last couple of months of life with advanced gastroesophageal cancer. And one night I was staying at his house and he was already he still couldn’t communicate with us the last hours of life. And I walked in the hallway to go see if he was still, um, with us. And there was a hospice nurse who was reading aloud to him and with, with just emotional cadence, like I haven’t heard with all the emotion and everything else. And I’m like, oh wow, is he awake or alert? And I kind of peeked around the corner and he was completely out of it, unresponsive. But she was doing that with just no recognition. She didn’t know I was there. Just nothing. And to me, that was kind of the purest form of what you’re talking about that I’d ever seen. And I’m not going to pretend that I get to that level even on my best days, but I think that’s something amazing to aspire to, because the more you get to that mindset, it it takes away a lot of the things that get in our way and cause stress in the course of a normal day in a life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:28] Yeah. So for somebody who’s been joining us in this conversation, they’re kind of listening and nodding along saying, a lot of this makes sense. And maybe they’re in a moment in their life where they are really thinking how they’re spending their days and their time and how they want to spend. Um, what’s a first step in, in your mind to, to having this day and then the next day and then the next unfold more intentionally.

Tom Rath: [00:40:51] You know, the biggest challenge I see right now is that, and I think we all see this every time we, uh, go out to dinner or walk through an airport or whatever is that I’m concerned that a vast majority of us are kind of sleepwalking through our lives and days right now because it’s remarkably easy and maybe even somewhat enjoyable just to respond to all the stuff flying at us in a given day. I mean, it’s, it’s easy and it’s fun and it’s light for me to say, hey, I got through all my emails today, or I read my entire social feed. Um, or I got, I got some project done I’d been working on. And it’s also really easy and enjoyable to just let the next episode play on Netflix, right? Because TV is better now than it’s been in my entire lifetime. So there’s all this stuff where it’s the path of least resistance is just to be a consumer and a responder. But yet, when you look at where the future is headed from a work and a purpose and a career standpoint, I don’t think that any of us can afford to get totally caught up in that mode, because if you’re just responding to things and doing things that are kind of, uh, routinized and mechanized, that will be the easiest thing to replace in six months or 18 months and definitely by 36 months from now. And so I think we’ve got to kind of challenge ourselves and challenge our friends and challenge our kids and everyone and our parents to say, how do you how do you kind of shake yourself out of this and make sure that you’re doing some of that gardening and doing work with purpose on a day to day basis, even if it’s just asking good questions and investing in relationships or whatever that might be, so that we’re doing some things with intent that make a difference each day, because that’s, that’ll probably be the one big emotional, competitive differentiator that, uh, we poor humans have over machines in a few years here.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:50] Yeah. Right there with you. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Tom Rath: [00:43:00] What comes up for me is to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, and to have as much of my time in a given day oriented towards efforts that improve the well-being or lot in life of other people. And I feel like if I do that well, my health and well-being and everything will take care of itself. Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:26] Thank you.

Tom Rath: [00:43:27] Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:28] So let’s talk about some of the big Aha’s and actionable takeaways from today’s conversation. The thing that I’m sitting with is something that Tom said about purpose being more like gardening than finding. We spend so much of our lives looking for the grand thing, the calling, the accomplishment that kind of justifies everything that came before it. And what he kept coming back to is that the most meaningful stuff rarely looks like that. It’s the seeds you plant without needing to see them grow. It’s helping a friend through something hard. It’s the conversation that you have with your kid that you won’t even remember having, but that lands in them anyway. So three things in particular I’d carry from this one. First, the concept of the pinhole. Most of us make enormous bets on what we want our lives to be, while seeing less than 5% of what’s actually available. That’s worth sitting with, especially if you’re at a moment of transition. Second, the idea of the latter versus the garden life isn’t zero sum. Someone else is flourishing, doesn’t subtract from yours, and the sooner you stop climbing and just start tending, the more of it actually just sticks. And third, the headstone test. Tom walks through a cemetery near his house when he needs a kind of a reset. Nothing on these stones mentions status or titles or salaries or followers.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:54] Just relationships. Just the people. Someone showed up for. If you can orient your days towards the things that would end up there, you’re probably pointed in the right direction. So this week, maybe notice one moment where you’re reacting to something an email, a feed, a reflex, versus one moment where you’re actually choosing. Just noticing is enough to get started. Hey, before you leave next week, we’re sitting down with Bela Gandhi to talk about why midlife is actually the moment most people become more ready for a real relationship, and what’s quietly getting in the way of finding love later in life. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. And do me a favor, a Seven-second favor. Share this episode with just one person who’s been quietly wondering whether the life that they’ve been working toward is really theirs. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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