April 29, 2026 • 25 mins
Tom Rath, author of What's the Point?, shares how to make work more meaningful
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode will be a slightly longer one part of the
series where I interview fascinating people about how they take
their days from great to awesome and any advice they
(00:24):
have for the rest of us. So today I am
delighted to welcome Tom Wrath to Before Breakfast. Tom is
the author of the brand new book What's the Point.
He is also the author of How Full Is Your
Bucket and several other books. Thanks he, Welcome to the show. Yeah,
I'm excited to have you on. Why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Kind of researching and studying what leads to great careers
in particular, and how work intersects with our individual well
being in health for the last twenty five or thirty years,
and kind of got pulled into the book writing accidentally.
But I've always been a researcher at heart, and I
spent most of my time just waking up and trying
to figure out each morning, how can I pull together
(01:05):
some research, distill some discoveries that help people to apply
things in a real practical way on a day to
day basis in my books and writing mostly.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, which you know, your new book What's the Point
is all about practical techniques, But fundamentally it's about purpose.
And I know when a lot of people hear that,
you want to set out that there's a difference between
sort of like find your passion, which everyone sort of
talks about in graduation season. Here, there's a difference between
(01:35):
passion and what is that.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Find your passion is relatively misleading advice because it assumes
that these things you're really passionate about. When when I
was a kid growing up, I mean, I was so
passionate about basketball, and I wish that could have been
my life, but my genetics did not have that in
the cards. I know a lot of people a passionate
about golf, passionate about causes. But that's starting with you
(02:00):
and assuming that the rest of the world will just
kind of get in line and revolve around who you are.
And if you go into the work world with that orientation,
things are going to come crashing down pretty quickly in
my experience, And so what I've been trying to help
people to do is to say, sure, it's good to
work on your talents and know who you are and
know yourself. But it's probably better to start with what
(02:21):
the community around you needs, what the people around you need,
what the world needs, and then work back to who
you are to make sure that you're not only having
fun each day, but you're making a substantive contribution that
improves other people's lives, because that usually ends up trumping
happiness five, ten, twenty years down the road.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And you suggest that we ask ourselves a different question,
not what do you do, but that as we think
about our careers, it's more who do you help?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, you for that all the day. We all deserve
to and should and need to know who we helped
or who's better off because of the work that we
did to day, not just in some grand sense. So
you know, and I've spent a lot of time working
with people in the professions that I admire most personally
teachers and nurses and hospice workers, and even in those
(03:11):
professions and physicians, they're often not very good at ensuring
that they connect what they did that day with the
way it had a positive impact on another human being
and reminding themselves of that. And we almost have to
do that, because it's in that reminder that motivates us
to get a good night's sleep and to be energized
and wound up the next morning and to do even
(03:32):
more of it. So you mentioned in the introduction that
you know, the book's kind of about purpose. But I
think when a lot of people, myself included here, the
word purpose originally just kind of gave me anxiety and like,
oh my gosh, I need to find this big hairy
thing this ends from the heavens someday when it's sunny.
But the more I got into the research and I
actually took purpose out of the book's main title because
(03:53):
of this, it turns out that purpose is just a
practical daily thing that we can use to reorient and
reprioritize what we do every hour throughout the day. And
when you do that, it's much more convenient and practical
and easier to get your head around.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you say in
your book that you know people want to find their calling,
and yet you know we're in these jobs that exist
now whatever it is, many of us are not, you know,
saving people's lives on a daily basis. So how could
we take a normal job and craft it to feel
(04:33):
more like a calling. If somebody is listening to this,
what are some things they can do over the next
day or two to make their job fail long.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I think a lot of it starts with reprioritizing what
you do during the day and kind of your time
allocation and figuring out, you know, one of the questions
that when I worked at Gallup fifteen plus years ago
we always ask was do you have the opportunity to
use your strengths every day? And the wording of that
was prett important because it's just meaning you get a
(05:02):
chance somewhere in a day to use your strengths. None
of us get to run around and spend eighty percent
of our day using our strengths and living in that
fantasy world. But almost anyone can carve out twenty thirty minutes,
maybe even two hours where you really feel like you're
at your best and you're helping a customer, You're helping
a young person to learn and grow, you're mentoring someone.
(05:22):
You're putting together content that really is of a quality
level that you think can help people, whatever it might be.
And I would recommend to some of your work that
people prioritize, ensuring that they get to be their best,
use their strengths, really serve and contribute to another person
as early on as possible in the day, and then
maybe later in the day to get to some of
(05:44):
the things that are more boring, monotonous, routineized tasks, such
as doing your expenses, financials, catching up on email, and
all those pieces that honestly are easier to start within
the day because it's kind of low hanging fruit. But
that's the wrong order in most cases.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
And if we're really focusing on serving someone, I mean
that doesn't have to be in a broad sense. I
mean you can make your colleagues life today.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Walking into an office and having a conversation with a
colleague that picks them up a little bit, even if
it's about something social or going on the media, celebrity news,
whatever it might be. That is a meaningful contribution. And
when people talk to me about the purpose I serve
in a given day, I mean, I think the biggest
purpose I serve on most days is putting all my
(06:31):
devices away and having a really good conversation with my
seventeen year old daughter my fifteen year old son when
they get home in the evening and asking some good questions,
keeping my device dowed away, and really listening to that.
And that is purposeful, and that is a big purpose
in a day because when we really step back and
say one of my big three purposes in life is
being a good dad and a good husband, we have
(06:52):
to prioritize those moments as well throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
And one of the ways, I mean, we talked about
how purpose isn't something that's descended from on high. There's
lots of small purposes within the day, and something might
be serving someone or improving someone's day, and maybe practically
for this podcast, you mentioned that reducing someone's friction could
also count as being a small p purpose.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
You don't talk a little bit about that. One of
the things I've learned from doing a lot of research
on well being all around the world is that if
you have a customer who's calling into a eight hundred number,
or you're in a retail store and there or you're
Starbucks and they're irate and they're really frustrated about something,
and you take them from a negative eight on a
(07:38):
negative ten through ten scale, if you take them from
a negative eight to a negative three, that's a really
meaningful victory and you do need to acknowledge it in
that moment. If you've even disarmed a situation because you
took something that could have been horrible for a person
in experience where they've never come in the store again,
and you got them out of that rut in that mode,
and that does count. And if you're a teacher in
(07:58):
a classroom dealing with the kid who's really struggling to
learn something and you get them to neutral, those can
be big victories in the day. So it's a really
good point.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, we're still moving in a positive direction. Well, we're
going to take a quick ad break and then I'll
be back with more from Tom Rath. Well, I am
back talking with Tom Rath, who is the author of
the new book. What's the point one of the topics
you covered You just mentioned this earlier of putting the
(08:30):
phone away and having a good conversation with people, whether
that's your kids or colleagues or someone else. You go
on for a bit about how people are, you know,
tied to their devices and we have turned into spectators
from creators. You know, how could we switch that mode?
I mean, what are some effects we can do.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
One thing I've really learned and doing a deep dive
on this and trying things out on my own, is
that our phones are very useful and powerful and helpful
device is when we're using the devices instead of letting
the devices use us and run our lives. So a
part of it's kind of just asserting some control to say,
if I need to change my thermostat or lock my doors,
(09:12):
or download a book on audible, or read a really
good article in the New York or whatever, my phone
can be a great learning tool and a resource to
get things done faster and to save time and all
those things if I use it in the right ways
instead of just using it primarily as a mindless consumption
(09:34):
device where I'm always just consuming and letting the next
show play on Netflix and going through social media feeds
and the like. And I think more and more people
are realizing how those things are easier to do during
the day. So we have to push back a little
bit and create some friction and create some resistance and
say I'm going to take control of this so that
(09:56):
I'm actually creating things, And it can be creating conversations
and relationships with people using your device or doing it
in person. Or it can be creating a work of art, music,
a new business Entrepreneurially, it can be creating something and
writing whatever it might be, so that you're actually building
something that other people can benefit from a week from now,
(10:18):
a month from now, maybe even ten years from now.
And I do where I almost didn't include the chapter
in this book, what's the point about challenging people to
be more creators than consumers? Because I had this mindset
that there's kind of this not all people are creatives
and the like. But the more I watch people who
are just you see four or five people at a
(10:39):
restaurant and they're all kind of scrolling instead of talking
to each other in person, I do think that all
of us need to kind of challenge our own conventional
wisdom to get out of the consumption mode at a
minimum and think about creating, even if it's just in
the form of kind of relationships and purpose for other people.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Well, it's about intentionally spending time and creating something in
the world that wasn't there before. You know, whether that
is a wonderful relationship, great ideas shared with each other
that we don't all have to be a Michael Angelo
to be creative, but part of you know, creating great
things is sometimes having the time to do it. And
you have some advice about carving out an intentional, bigger
(11:22):
chunk of time to make progress on something that maybe
has been lingering for a Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
The more I got into this, and one of the
main reason I worked on this book and some of
the things I've been doing for the last three to
five years is because I took a deep dive for
the sake of kids who are the age of my
children right now, to say, how do we make sure
that more people end up in the right jobs making
the right contributions over the span of a career. And
(11:47):
what I realized is that I would estimate eighty to
ninety percent of people end up at the very end
of the career, at their career and the very end
of their life, and they never even had a preview
of it. They never even saw, let alone worked in
the area where they could have made the biggest contribution
in life. And I say that after doing some real
math on it, because if you wanted to understand what's
(12:10):
out there from a job standpoint in the United States,
you would need to understand about fifty jobs just to
get half of the US workforce based on my math.
And so most people enter college, finish college, and maybe
they see what mom did, what dad did, They might
see one mentor maybe or maybe they're pulled by financial
or societal expectations into something, but they have about a
(12:33):
five to ten percent aperture of what's out there right
now based on all of my estimates. So I think
we need to challenge ourselves pretty early on to really reprioritize.
If you're going to say, I'm going to get to
the end of my life, and what do you want
to be known for. It's if you want to be
known for being a good dad being For me, it
(12:54):
might be a good researcher, someone who's communicated some of
those findings. If that's what you want things to look
like at the end of your career, the end of
your life. How to what degree is that aligned with
how you spend your time today? And so, to get
right back to your original question, working through that for
me personally has dramatically changed the way I structure and
(13:16):
allocate and prioritize my time in a given day so
that it's more anchored around what matters most especially in
the first quarter and half of my day.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Well, we're going to get to that in a minute,
I promise, because we always like to hear about people's
mornings on this show. But I have a question then
about I mean, so you you actually put in the
book like fifty careers. I mean I didn't count them exactly,
but it looked to be about fifty and how those
(13:48):
jobs are sort of done, what they look like, and
what the impact might be on different people. I'm curious
why you.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Decided what I do. So I mentioned I got into
this just kind of thinking about it. I want my
wife's a second grade teacher, I'm obviously a writer. And
I asked my daughter when she was fourteen, three years ago,
what do you think you might want to do, and
just out of curiosity, not like a formal thing, and
she said, oh, I think I might want to be
a writer or maybe a teacher. I'm like, well, that's
how and that's how I mean, And that's exactly set
(14:17):
up in the job I'm in right now. And most
people I interviewed ninety five out of one hundred. So
I realized at that moment that even my kids, who
are have great public school system and everything else, and
good resources they're probably going to need to pick a
major in college and a career with well looking out
of a little pinhole of what's available and what's out there.
So I've spent much of the last three to five
(14:39):
years sending camera crews and production crews out to look
at a day in the life of what it's like
to be a veterinarian, what it's like to be a pilot,
what it's like to be an engineer, so that young
people can gain a broader sense and field of view
around that. So, I mean, a big part of my
personal mission is just helping people to think much broader
about what they put atentially could be so that they
(15:01):
don't end up. I'm fifty years old right now, and
I really wish I would have known someone or seen
someone in medicine, because I think that might have been
my superpower. But it's probably too late now and I
never got to see that, right, And I think we
all have those little superpowers where it's kind of it's
and there's some excitement about that. As job markets change
with automation and AI and everything elsewhere. I don't think
(15:22):
people should be as scared of reinvention because most of
us are doing what we're doing today just because it's
what we saw and we kind of fell into a default.
And even we have a chapter that gets into this
in the book. But I think even most people, if
you ask them about their childhood dreams, they're not really
their childhood dreams. So I think their childhood dreams of
their parents and social expectations and a lot of other things,
and we never really step back to challenge that because
(15:45):
we get caught in the vacuum of expectations by the
time we were fifteen or something.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Well, if you did decide to go back into medicine,
I bet you still could. Lives are long at this point,
but it's a lot of work, So that's what you
have to think about. Well, we're going to make another
quick ad break and i'll be back with more from
Tom Wrath. Well, I am back talking with Tom Rath,
(16:11):
who is the author of the new book What's the Point.
He's also the author of several other books, including Eight
Move Sleep, How Full Is Your Bucket, several other titles
you've probably heard of. So, Tom, do you have a
morning routine? Then you mentioned earlier that you were very
careful with how you spent the early hours of the day.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
My morning routine, the number one thing by fivefold, is
just getting a good night's sleep the night before. So
my morning routine starts by making sure I'm in bed
by ten o'clock so I have a wide enough window
to hopefully get seven or eight hours of sleep before
I need to get up. And I've really learned that
no matter how rough things are, whether I'm traveling or
(16:51):
have a lot going on or stress, that if I
get just one real good night of sleep at least
seven hours, ideally eight, that's kind of like the reset
by on a smartphone or a video game or whatever,
I get a whole new energy level next morning. So
starts the night before, the good night's sleep. When I
wake up in the morning, I think if on days
(17:12):
when I'm not traveling, I can exercise really early on
getting ideally outdoors ten fifty minutes outdoors twenty minutes of
pretty vigorous activity where my heart rates between one hundred
and one hundred and twenty five to the point where
it'd be tough to maintain a real good conversation. That's
the key to having enough energy to get into my office,
(17:33):
make sure my phones are still on focus mode, not
getting into my email and response mode, and being able
to work on whether they're entrepreneurial projects or things I'm
working on with AI tools or new books, or getting
into editing, kind of that substantive hard work that I
feel good about. And I know that if I can
do that in the first three to four hours of
(17:55):
my day, then I will be able to kind of
get into the responsive stuff and feel good about it,
and then ideally I've spent ten years now working most
of my days on a walking treadmill desk, and that's
been one of the most transformative things I've done, because
when I worked on the book Movesleep, I realized pretty
(18:17):
quickly that as much as everyone's been promoting standing desks,
that standing all day is no better than sitting all
day and just physiologically, I mean like blood pools and
your ankles and all these bad things. And I think
people kind of make that mistake to say, oh, I
need a standing desk, when really I've learned that unless
I'm really doing something very creative and writing, that if
I'm editing or responding to email or doing things on
(18:40):
my computer, if I walk at about one point five
to two miles an hour, I can walk more than
fifty percent of my day. And if I do that
really well, by four o'clock, when my kids are home
and stuff, I can still go play basketball with my
son and go for a walk with my wife and
be real active and have as much energy as I
did at ten o'clock in the morning. So I've learned,
(19:01):
especially as I worked on this book, to structure the
meaningful and important and purposeful work early on in the day,
and then by three or four o'clock to do the
expense reports and accounting and taxes and financial and email responsiveness.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, so the stuff that doesn't demand the same focus
later in the day. I'm curious about your evenings. Is
there anything you do in particular to make sure that
you protect that getting into that arm clock.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I've been very careful about what I eat throughout my
activity and sleep and what I eat in particularly throughout
my day, so that I mean, I learned a long
time ago that if I for lunch, if I go
out and I have anything that's kind of a fried
food or a sandwich or carb heavy, that wipes me
out by about two or three in the afternoon. So
(19:47):
I've learned to eat in a way that manages those
energy cycles, and then to have kind of a light,
healthy dinner as well, and to cut off most of
my food and liquid intake by about seven o'clock. Ideally
I rarely eat anything after seven o'clock. And then to
just have some quality unwinding time with my wife and
kids and have some good conversations. And again, I mean
(20:10):
like when I'm talking to my kids or my friends
or my wife, to make sure that my device is
in my pocket, because even if I'm not using it
and scrolling, it just sends the wrong message if it's
out on the table. And I think we've all learned
a little bit from that over the years. And to
make sure that throughout the day I have my notifications
working for me as well, so that as much as
(20:31):
I can be, I'm in focus mode and I don't
feel that kind of Pavlovian need to respond within three
seconds to everything that dings or buzzes around me.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, so I have a question. I mean, you open
your book talking about how sort of you had to
think about purpose or what you were doing because you
were you had a diagnosis early in life that you
thought was going to mean that your life was shorter
than a lot of other people would, and yet here
you are still with us. So I'm curious as how
(21:02):
you think about time and your lifespan changed. I mean,
as you realize that you're going to keep going for
a really.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Fun question that I haven't probably put enough thought into.
But one of the things that I realized when I
first got into all the research on my hereditary cancer
condition when I was around twenty and the internet more
information started to come out. I realized really on the
over under for people born when I was about thirty seven,
so I really did. But somewhere between being diagnosed at
(21:29):
sixteen and thirty seven, I felt like I needed to
pack a whole career in there, and a whole lifetime
and a whole family and all that. So I did
all that. But then by the time I hit forty,
I kind of, yeah, I'm you're still here right now,
in active and everything great. And I realized though, that
most of what I'd done up to that point, especially
(21:50):
with my career, was kind of living somebody else's life
and living in social expectations that I grew up with.
And it's what a lot of us do, and so
I think I kind of got to that point and
realized that the things I'm really passionate about, and that
ranges from kind of helping my kids, who are my
a number one priority, to figure out all the things
(22:12):
that they could do in their life, and investing more
time and energy and funding, and being a part of
cancer research, which I do every day and have meetings
about every week, and helping people to connect their daily
energy with new purposes, especially as the nature of jobs change.
It led to a complete realignment of my time and
(22:33):
my work and what I invest my resources and my
time in over the last few years, and it's been
a lot more fun to kind of be open and
honest with myself and with my friends and family about
how some of those social expectations have shaped me and
how now I kind of get a new do over
to restart and do things because it's what I want
(22:54):
to be working on.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Excellent. Well, I always ask my guests, what is some
thing you have done recently to take a day from
great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know, the number one thing that I do when
I need to take a day from great to awesome
is on a day of the day basis I go
out for a long walk with my wife or one
of my kids, or a friend or a family member.
And I've found personally that that's kind of like the
(23:28):
trifecta of what makes a day better and well being,
because I mean, if I've eaten something, if I've had
a heavy meal, and I mean it lowers your glucose
and gets things going biologically. And when I'm out on
a walk with someone, we always have uplifting, productive conversations
that are night and day different from if we're sitting
in the kitchen or rushing around the house or whatever
it might be. And I think there's just something about
(23:51):
being out in nature that makes a big difference there too.
And then the other thing is I spend almost all
of my discretionary financial resources on experiences with the people
I care about most, with taking a quick trip over weekend,
one on one with one of my kids, doing that,
my wife, doing that with friends, going out to dinner
with family members. The older I get and the more
(24:12):
I realize this stuff, I feel like it's a travesty
to waste money on something material when it could be
an experience with other people.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I love that well. I like to spend money on
experiences as well. So, Tom, where can.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
We get a find information on all the books and
some tools and new resources at Tom Wrath dot org.
And so that's the best starting point. Excellent.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback on
this or any other episode, you can always reach me
at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening. Before Breakfast.
(25:01):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:23):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode will be a slightly longer one part of the
series where I interview fascinating people about how they take
their days from great to awesome and any advice they
(00:24):
have for the rest of us. So today I am
delighted to welcome Tom Wrath to Before Breakfast. Tom is
the author of the brand new book What's the Point.
He is also the author of How Full Is Your
Bucket and several other books. Thanks he, Welcome to the show. Yeah,
I'm excited to have you on. Why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Kind of researching and studying what leads to great careers
in particular, and how work intersects with our individual well
being in health for the last twenty five or thirty years,
and kind of got pulled into the book writing accidentally.
But I've always been a researcher at heart, and I
spent most of my time just waking up and trying
to figure out each morning, how can I pull together
(01:05):
some research, distill some discoveries that help people to apply
things in a real practical way on a day to
day basis in my books and writing mostly.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, which you know, your new book What's the Point
is all about practical techniques, But fundamentally it's about purpose.
And I know when a lot of people hear that,
you want to set out that there's a difference between
sort of like find your passion, which everyone sort of
talks about in graduation season. Here, there's a difference between
(01:35):
passion and what is that.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Find your passion is relatively misleading advice because it assumes
that these things you're really passionate about. When when I
was a kid growing up, I mean, I was so
passionate about basketball, and I wish that could have been
my life, but my genetics did not have that in
the cards. I know a lot of people a passionate
about golf, passionate about causes. But that's starting with you
(02:00):
and assuming that the rest of the world will just
kind of get in line and revolve around who you are.
And if you go into the work world with that orientation,
things are going to come crashing down pretty quickly in
my experience, And so what I've been trying to help
people to do is to say, sure, it's good to
work on your talents and know who you are and
know yourself. But it's probably better to start with what
(02:21):
the community around you needs, what the people around you need,
what the world needs, and then work back to who
you are to make sure that you're not only having
fun each day, but you're making a substantive contribution that
improves other people's lives, because that usually ends up trumping
happiness five, ten, twenty years down the road.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And you suggest that we ask ourselves a different question,
not what do you do, but that as we think
about our careers, it's more who do you help?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, you for that all the day. We all deserve
to and should and need to know who we helped
or who's better off because of the work that we
did to day, not just in some grand sense. So
you know, and I've spent a lot of time working
with people in the professions that I admire most personally
teachers and nurses and hospice workers, and even in those
(03:11):
professions and physicians, they're often not very good at ensuring
that they connect what they did that day with the
way it had a positive impact on another human being
and reminding themselves of that. And we almost have to
do that, because it's in that reminder that motivates us
to get a good night's sleep and to be energized
and wound up the next morning and to do even
(03:32):
more of it. So you mentioned in the introduction that
you know, the book's kind of about purpose. But I
think when a lot of people, myself included here, the
word purpose originally just kind of gave me anxiety and like,
oh my gosh, I need to find this big hairy
thing this ends from the heavens someday when it's sunny.
But the more I got into the research and I
actually took purpose out of the book's main title because
(03:53):
of this, it turns out that purpose is just a
practical daily thing that we can use to reorient and
reprioritize what we do every hour throughout the day. And
when you do that, it's much more convenient and practical
and easier to get your head around.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you say in
your book that you know people want to find their calling,
and yet you know we're in these jobs that exist
now whatever it is, many of us are not, you know,
saving people's lives on a daily basis. So how could
we take a normal job and craft it to feel
(04:33):
more like a calling. If somebody is listening to this,
what are some things they can do over the next
day or two to make their job fail long.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I think a lot of it starts with reprioritizing what
you do during the day and kind of your time
allocation and figuring out, you know, one of the questions
that when I worked at Gallup fifteen plus years ago
we always ask was do you have the opportunity to
use your strengths every day? And the wording of that
was prett important because it's just meaning you get a
(05:02):
chance somewhere in a day to use your strengths. None
of us get to run around and spend eighty percent
of our day using our strengths and living in that
fantasy world. But almost anyone can carve out twenty thirty minutes,
maybe even two hours where you really feel like you're
at your best and you're helping a customer, You're helping
a young person to learn and grow, you're mentoring someone.
(05:22):
You're putting together content that really is of a quality
level that you think can help people, whatever it might be.
And I would recommend to some of your work that
people prioritize, ensuring that they get to be their best,
use their strengths, really serve and contribute to another person
as early on as possible in the day, and then
maybe later in the day to get to some of
(05:44):
the things that are more boring, monotonous, routineized tasks, such
as doing your expenses, financials, catching up on email, and
all those pieces that honestly are easier to start within
the day because it's kind of low hanging fruit. But
that's the wrong order in most cases.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
And if we're really focusing on serving someone, I mean
that doesn't have to be in a broad sense. I
mean you can make your colleagues life today.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Walking into an office and having a conversation with a
colleague that picks them up a little bit, even if
it's about something social or going on the media, celebrity news,
whatever it might be. That is a meaningful contribution. And
when people talk to me about the purpose I serve
in a given day, I mean, I think the biggest
purpose I serve on most days is putting all my
(06:31):
devices away and having a really good conversation with my
seventeen year old daughter my fifteen year old son when
they get home in the evening and asking some good questions,
keeping my device dowed away, and really listening to that.
And that is purposeful, and that is a big purpose
in a day because when we really step back and
say one of my big three purposes in life is
being a good dad and a good husband, we have
(06:52):
to prioritize those moments as well throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
And one of the ways, I mean, we talked about
how purpose isn't something that's descended from on high. There's
lots of small purposes within the day, and something might
be serving someone or improving someone's day, and maybe practically
for this podcast, you mentioned that reducing someone's friction could
also count as being a small p purpose.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
You don't talk a little bit about that. One of
the things I've learned from doing a lot of research
on well being all around the world is that if
you have a customer who's calling into a eight hundred number,
or you're in a retail store and there or you're
Starbucks and they're irate and they're really frustrated about something,
and you take them from a negative eight on a
(07:38):
negative ten through ten scale, if you take them from
a negative eight to a negative three, that's a really
meaningful victory and you do need to acknowledge it in
that moment. If you've even disarmed a situation because you
took something that could have been horrible for a person
in experience where they've never come in the store again,
and you got them out of that rut in that mode,
and that does count. And if you're a teacher in
(07:58):
a classroom dealing with the kid who's really struggling to
learn something and you get them to neutral, those can
be big victories in the day. So it's a really
good point.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, we're still moving in a positive direction. Well, we're
going to take a quick ad break and then I'll
be back with more from Tom Rath. Well, I am
back talking with Tom Rath, who is the author of
the new book. What's the point one of the topics
you covered You just mentioned this earlier of putting the
(08:30):
phone away and having a good conversation with people, whether
that's your kids or colleagues or someone else. You go
on for a bit about how people are, you know,
tied to their devices and we have turned into spectators
from creators. You know, how could we switch that mode?
I mean, what are some effects we can do.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
One thing I've really learned and doing a deep dive
on this and trying things out on my own, is
that our phones are very useful and powerful and helpful
device is when we're using the devices instead of letting
the devices use us and run our lives. So a
part of it's kind of just asserting some control to say,
if I need to change my thermostat or lock my doors,
(09:12):
or download a book on audible, or read a really
good article in the New York or whatever, my phone
can be a great learning tool and a resource to
get things done faster and to save time and all
those things if I use it in the right ways
instead of just using it primarily as a mindless consumption
(09:34):
device where I'm always just consuming and letting the next
show play on Netflix and going through social media feeds
and the like. And I think more and more people
are realizing how those things are easier to do during
the day. So we have to push back a little
bit and create some friction and create some resistance and
say I'm going to take control of this so that
(09:56):
I'm actually creating things, And it can be creating conversations
and relationships with people using your device or doing it
in person. Or it can be creating a work of art, music,
a new business Entrepreneurially, it can be creating something and
writing whatever it might be, so that you're actually building
something that other people can benefit from a week from now,
(10:18):
a month from now, maybe even ten years from now.
And I do where I almost didn't include the chapter
in this book, what's the point about challenging people to
be more creators than consumers? Because I had this mindset
that there's kind of this not all people are creatives
and the like. But the more I watch people who
are just you see four or five people at a
(10:39):
restaurant and they're all kind of scrolling instead of talking
to each other in person, I do think that all
of us need to kind of challenge our own conventional
wisdom to get out of the consumption mode at a
minimum and think about creating, even if it's just in
the form of kind of relationships and purpose for other people.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Well, it's about intentionally spending time and creating something in
the world that wasn't there before. You know, whether that
is a wonderful relationship, great ideas shared with each other
that we don't all have to be a Michael Angelo
to be creative, but part of you know, creating great
things is sometimes having the time to do it. And
you have some advice about carving out an intentional, bigger
(11:22):
chunk of time to make progress on something that maybe
has been lingering for a Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
The more I got into this, and one of the
main reason I worked on this book and some of
the things I've been doing for the last three to
five years is because I took a deep dive for
the sake of kids who are the age of my
children right now, to say, how do we make sure
that more people end up in the right jobs making
the right contributions over the span of a career. And
(11:47):
what I realized is that I would estimate eighty to
ninety percent of people end up at the very end
of the career, at their career and the very end
of their life, and they never even had a preview
of it. They never even saw, let alone worked in
the area where they could have made the biggest contribution
in life. And I say that after doing some real
math on it, because if you wanted to understand what's
(12:10):
out there from a job standpoint in the United States,
you would need to understand about fifty jobs just to
get half of the US workforce based on my math.
And so most people enter college, finish college, and maybe
they see what mom did, what dad did, They might
see one mentor maybe or maybe they're pulled by financial
or societal expectations into something, but they have about a
(12:33):
five to ten percent aperture of what's out there right
now based on all of my estimates. So I think
we need to challenge ourselves pretty early on to really reprioritize.
If you're going to say, I'm going to get to
the end of my life, and what do you want
to be known for. It's if you want to be
known for being a good dad being For me, it
(12:54):
might be a good researcher, someone who's communicated some of
those findings. If that's what you want things to look
like at the end of your career, the end of
your life. How to what degree is that aligned with
how you spend your time today? And so, to get
right back to your original question, working through that for
me personally has dramatically changed the way I structure and
(13:16):
allocate and prioritize my time in a given day so
that it's more anchored around what matters most especially in
the first quarter and half of my day.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Well, we're going to get to that in a minute,
I promise, because we always like to hear about people's
mornings on this show. But I have a question then
about I mean, so you you actually put in the
book like fifty careers. I mean I didn't count them exactly,
but it looked to be about fifty and how those
(13:48):
jobs are sort of done, what they look like, and
what the impact might be on different people. I'm curious
why you.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Decided what I do. So I mentioned I got into
this just kind of thinking about it. I want my
wife's a second grade teacher, I'm obviously a writer. And
I asked my daughter when she was fourteen, three years ago,
what do you think you might want to do, and
just out of curiosity, not like a formal thing, and
she said, oh, I think I might want to be
a writer or maybe a teacher. I'm like, well, that's
how and that's how I mean, And that's exactly set
(14:17):
up in the job I'm in right now. And most
people I interviewed ninety five out of one hundred. So
I realized at that moment that even my kids, who
are have great public school system and everything else, and
good resources they're probably going to need to pick a
major in college and a career with well looking out
of a little pinhole of what's available and what's out there.
So I've spent much of the last three to five
(14:39):
years sending camera crews and production crews out to look
at a day in the life of what it's like
to be a veterinarian, what it's like to be a pilot,
what it's like to be an engineer, so that young
people can gain a broader sense and field of view
around that. So, I mean, a big part of my
personal mission is just helping people to think much broader
about what they put atentially could be so that they
(15:01):
don't end up. I'm fifty years old right now, and
I really wish I would have known someone or seen
someone in medicine, because I think that might have been
my superpower. But it's probably too late now and I
never got to see that, right, And I think we
all have those little superpowers where it's kind of it's
and there's some excitement about that. As job markets change
with automation and AI and everything elsewhere. I don't think
(15:22):
people should be as scared of reinvention because most of
us are doing what we're doing today just because it's
what we saw and we kind of fell into a default.
And even we have a chapter that gets into this
in the book. But I think even most people, if
you ask them about their childhood dreams, they're not really
their childhood dreams. So I think their childhood dreams of
their parents and social expectations and a lot of other things,
and we never really step back to challenge that because
(15:45):
we get caught in the vacuum of expectations by the
time we were fifteen or something.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Well, if you did decide to go back into medicine,
I bet you still could. Lives are long at this point,
but it's a lot of work, So that's what you
have to think about. Well, we're going to make another
quick ad break and i'll be back with more from
Tom Wrath. Well, I am back talking with Tom Rath,
(16:11):
who is the author of the new book What's the Point.
He's also the author of several other books, including Eight
Move Sleep, How Full Is Your Bucket, several other titles
you've probably heard of. So, Tom, do you have a
morning routine? Then you mentioned earlier that you were very
careful with how you spent the early hours of the day.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
My morning routine, the number one thing by fivefold, is
just getting a good night's sleep the night before. So
my morning routine starts by making sure I'm in bed
by ten o'clock so I have a wide enough window
to hopefully get seven or eight hours of sleep before
I need to get up. And I've really learned that
no matter how rough things are, whether I'm traveling or
(16:51):
have a lot going on or stress, that if I
get just one real good night of sleep at least
seven hours, ideally eight, that's kind of like the reset
by on a smartphone or a video game or whatever,
I get a whole new energy level next morning. So
starts the night before, the good night's sleep. When I
wake up in the morning, I think if on days
(17:12):
when I'm not traveling, I can exercise really early on
getting ideally outdoors ten fifty minutes outdoors twenty minutes of
pretty vigorous activity where my heart rates between one hundred
and one hundred and twenty five to the point where
it'd be tough to maintain a real good conversation. That's
the key to having enough energy to get into my office,
(17:33):
make sure my phones are still on focus mode, not
getting into my email and response mode, and being able
to work on whether they're entrepreneurial projects or things I'm
working on with AI tools or new books, or getting
into editing, kind of that substantive hard work that I
feel good about. And I know that if I can
do that in the first three to four hours of
(17:55):
my day, then I will be able to kind of
get into the responsive stuff and feel good about it,
and then ideally I've spent ten years now working most
of my days on a walking treadmill desk, and that's
been one of the most transformative things I've done, because
when I worked on the book Movesleep, I realized pretty
(18:17):
quickly that as much as everyone's been promoting standing desks,
that standing all day is no better than sitting all
day and just physiologically, I mean like blood pools and
your ankles and all these bad things. And I think
people kind of make that mistake to say, oh, I
need a standing desk, when really I've learned that unless
I'm really doing something very creative and writing, that if
I'm editing or responding to email or doing things on
(18:40):
my computer, if I walk at about one point five
to two miles an hour, I can walk more than
fifty percent of my day. And if I do that
really well, by four o'clock, when my kids are home
and stuff, I can still go play basketball with my
son and go for a walk with my wife and
be real active and have as much energy as I
did at ten o'clock in the morning. So I've learned,
(19:01):
especially as I worked on this book, to structure the
meaningful and important and purposeful work early on in the day,
and then by three or four o'clock to do the
expense reports and accounting and taxes and financial and email responsiveness.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, so the stuff that doesn't demand the same focus
later in the day. I'm curious about your evenings. Is
there anything you do in particular to make sure that
you protect that getting into that arm clock.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I've been very careful about what I eat throughout my
activity and sleep and what I eat in particularly throughout
my day, so that I mean, I learned a long
time ago that if I for lunch, if I go
out and I have anything that's kind of a fried
food or a sandwich or carb heavy, that wipes me
out by about two or three in the afternoon. So
(19:47):
I've learned to eat in a way that manages those
energy cycles, and then to have kind of a light,
healthy dinner as well, and to cut off most of
my food and liquid intake by about seven o'clock. Ideally
I rarely eat anything after seven o'clock. And then to
just have some quality unwinding time with my wife and
kids and have some good conversations. And again, I mean
(20:10):
like when I'm talking to my kids or my friends
or my wife, to make sure that my device is
in my pocket, because even if I'm not using it
and scrolling, it just sends the wrong message if it's
out on the table. And I think we've all learned
a little bit from that over the years. And to
make sure that throughout the day I have my notifications
working for me as well, so that as much as
(20:31):
I can be, I'm in focus mode and I don't
feel that kind of Pavlovian need to respond within three
seconds to everything that dings or buzzes around me.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, so I have a question. I mean, you open
your book talking about how sort of you had to
think about purpose or what you were doing because you
were you had a diagnosis early in life that you
thought was going to mean that your life was shorter
than a lot of other people would, and yet here
you are still with us. So I'm curious as how
(21:02):
you think about time and your lifespan changed. I mean,
as you realize that you're going to keep going for
a really.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Fun question that I haven't probably put enough thought into.
But one of the things that I realized when I
first got into all the research on my hereditary cancer
condition when I was around twenty and the internet more
information started to come out. I realized really on the
over under for people born when I was about thirty seven,
so I really did. But somewhere between being diagnosed at
(21:29):
sixteen and thirty seven, I felt like I needed to
pack a whole career in there, and a whole lifetime
and a whole family and all that. So I did
all that. But then by the time I hit forty,
I kind of, yeah, I'm you're still here right now,
in active and everything great. And I realized though, that
most of what I'd done up to that point, especially
(21:50):
with my career, was kind of living somebody else's life
and living in social expectations that I grew up with.
And it's what a lot of us do, and so
I think I kind of got to that point and
realized that the things I'm really passionate about, and that
ranges from kind of helping my kids, who are my
a number one priority, to figure out all the things
(22:12):
that they could do in their life, and investing more
time and energy and funding, and being a part of
cancer research, which I do every day and have meetings
about every week, and helping people to connect their daily
energy with new purposes, especially as the nature of jobs change.
It led to a complete realignment of my time and
(22:33):
my work and what I invest my resources and my
time in over the last few years, and it's been
a lot more fun to kind of be open and
honest with myself and with my friends and family about
how some of those social expectations have shaped me and
how now I kind of get a new do over
to restart and do things because it's what I want
(22:54):
to be working on.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Excellent. Well, I always ask my guests, what is some
thing you have done recently to take a day from
great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know, the number one thing that I do when
I need to take a day from great to awesome
is on a day of the day basis I go
out for a long walk with my wife or one
of my kids, or a friend or a family member.
And I've found personally that that's kind of like the
(23:28):
trifecta of what makes a day better and well being,
because I mean, if I've eaten something, if I've had
a heavy meal, and I mean it lowers your glucose
and gets things going biologically. And when I'm out on
a walk with someone, we always have uplifting, productive conversations
that are night and day different from if we're sitting
in the kitchen or rushing around the house or whatever
it might be. And I think there's just something about
(23:51):
being out in nature that makes a big difference there too.
And then the other thing is I spend almost all
of my discretionary financial resources on experiences with the people
I care about most, with taking a quick trip over weekend,
one on one with one of my kids, doing that,
my wife, doing that with friends, going out to dinner
with family members. The older I get and the more
(24:12):
I realize this stuff, I feel like it's a travesty
to waste money on something material when it could be
an experience with other people.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I love that well. I like to spend money on
experiences as well. So, Tom, where can.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
We get a find information on all the books and
some tools and new resources at Tom Wrath dot org.
And so that's the best starting point. Excellent.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback on
this or any other episode, you can always reach me
at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening. Before Breakfast.
(25:01):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:23):
listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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