Start With A Win - How to Make More Meaningful Contributions at Work and in Life

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam sits down with Tom Rath, an author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and well-being. His 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies and made hundreds of appearances on global bestseller lists. Tom’s first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and led to a series of books that are used in classrooms around the world. His book StrengthsFinder 2.0 is Amazon’s top selling non-fiction book of all time. His newest book, Life's Great Question: Discover How You Contribute to the World, released last year.During his 13 years at Gallup, Tom led the organization’s strengths, employee engagement, wellbeing, and leadership consulting worldwide. Tom has served for the past five years as an external advisor and Gallup Senior Scientist.The conversation begins around the idea of making more meaningful contributions and work and in life. Tom shares that he typically starts each day by asking the question: What could I do today that will continue to grow and contribute to the people I know and love, and my community, that will continue when I’m gone? What am I going to do today that makes someone else’s life better? These contributions can be big picture, but they can also be daily tasks or interactions that improve the lives of others in the long term. He believes that if we are spending a little time in our day making a contribution like that, we can accumulate those over time, and make our work more meaningful and more effective.Tom also shares about a rare condition that causes him to be more susceptible to many cancers, but for him, having the reminder of mortality is a very powerful force for good. It’s something we’ve seen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—a sense of urgency to evaluate our daily routines, how we impact people around us in the immediate and the long-term, and our relationship with our work. Prior to the pandemic, the way we worked on a daily basis was a relic of an industrial era when work was just plain bad for our well-being. Tom believes that most people have had a dysfunctional relationship with work for too long.Organizations have been so structured around profits and productivity. So each individual needs to ask themselves: Are my relationships, family, community and life better off because I joined this organization?We went into pandemic with horribly low expectations of what we get out of our work. But it is possible to have a job where you feel like you help people every day and not just enrich the pockets of your employer. Tom would love to see a great restructuring of how we work, and explains how companies can play a part.Well-being in a job is key. Tom shares about his experience with big employers who spend tens of millions of dollars on employee wellness programs, but their leaders are the ones working around the clock and expecting their employees to always be on. But then they ask why the programs are not working; “When employees see the people they look to us leaders eating over their keyboard every day and not taking time to move around…and not talking about these things, no one in the organization even feels like they have the permission to take care of themselves or their own health.”Episode Links:https://www.tomrath.orgTwitter: https://twitter.com/TomCRath/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authortomrathLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trath/Order your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from Top of the 12th floor, REMAX World Headquarters in Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Kato, CEO of REMAX with Start With a Win. How you doing, producer? I'm doing so good. I like being here in person, you know?

Like, it's nice. I know. And we even have, like, social media manager Kayla in the house. She's in the house. She's sitting across the table from me. Get your camera back here. There you go. Cool. So we're in studio. We're in studio. And we have an awesome guest today. We do, yeah. We have Tom Rath with us. Tom, welcome to Start With a Win. Thanks so much. It's fun to be with

you today. Yeah, we have a good time. I like the vibe. We got a good vibe going here. So if you don't know who Tom Rath is, he is an author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and well-being. I mean, I like working and I always feel better when I'm working. So I don't know if that's good or bad. He's got 10 books and he's sold more than 10 million copies, something to reach for, Adam. Yeah, no kidding.

And made hundreds of appearances on global bestseller lists. Tom's first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was an instant number one New York Times bestseller and led to a series of books that are used in classrooms around the world. His book, Strength Finders 2.0, is Amazon's top-selling nonfiction book of all time. Let's go. Oh, right on, Tom.

Thanks for being here. I mean, to have a legend in the personal development and business development space on the show is a complete honor. So thank you for being here, and we really appreciate all that you do to help people perform at a higher level. So thank you. So I want to jump right into books, though. So you have a new book, Life's Great Question, shares how people can redirect their efforts toward meaningful contributions over a lifetime. And this is really, I think, an important thing for a lot of people, especially in today's society. We want to make a difference. So why was it that important for you to write, and why was now the right time? You know, let me start with a little bit of background here, from a kind of personal

background, which introduces why I was so passionate about this topic. I talk a little bit in the book about how, you know, I've spent most of my, uh, time in my career kind of trying to pack a whole lifetime of contribution to the world into as short a span as possible because of a real rare genetic mutation I've battled that causes cancer in the brain and spine and kidneys and pancreas. And so I've battled cancers in all those areas, but, and I found out about that when I was 16 and I'm now 45. So I've kind of beat the over-under on that, which is great. And along the way, I've woken up each day and asked myself a kind of simple question about

what could I do today that will continue to grow and contribute to people I care about in my community in my absence? And that's something that can be really practical. So it might be as simple as last night helping my son who's 10 work on a math problem that he can grasp and develop on a month from now or a couple months from now. Or it could be working on a book or a more substantive long-term project as well. But what I've learned over the years is that as long as I'm spending a little bit of time in my day, it doesn't have to be the whole day because we all have to do stuff we're not thrilled with. But if I can spend a little bit of time making a contribution like

that, you can essentially accumulate those over time and it makes your work a lot more meaningful and it helps you to do more of that work. And while I was thinking about this and trying to put together kind of a template in a way that people could build on that over time, I was struck by one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said that life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others? And I used to see that question go around every MLK day and kind of say, oh, that's a beautiful quote. I should put it up. And at some point I realized

it's just a really good question to ask yourself when you're on your way to work each day, whether that's making your daily commute or nowadays walking down your stairs to your basement for work and say, what am I going to do today that makes another person's life better? And what I've learned in the process of asking myself that question every day is that it's a good daily reminder to essentially prioritize what you do so you don't get caught in that vacuum of just responding to all the stuff flying at you in a given day instead of doing something that matters for another person. And so that's where my original work on this book and project started three or four years ago.

And then, you know, as the pandemic hit, I realized that all of a sudden almost everyone was taking a look in the mirror and saying, is what I do really important? And am I doing the right things for the long term for society? And so it's been remarkable to have, I don't know, maybe five, 10 times as many conversations with others who have all of a sudden honed in on that question. I think this is digging deeper than a lot of people in society are used to digging into their heart and into their intentions. And you're 100% correct on everything. It's unfortunate that we only hear a lot of times that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote

once a year. I mean, it's sad, really. But we've also kind of had this awakening with COVID when it comes to how much am I caring for other people and in turn myself with, you know, well-being. So let me ask you this, Tom, you know, all those things coming together here, we got into this pre-COVID, let's just face it, we got into this grind mentality in society of results, results, results, results, people stepping on each other, people crushing each other, things like that. And then we had kind of a feeling of mortality and, oh my gosh. And I mean, you talk about you've lived your entire life this way based upon your awareness when you're 16. So why did we flip that switch in society to become more aware of caring for others and how caring for others creates a greater purpose for us. And still we get results in society.

Why did that happen? You know, it's a great question. I think it would have been harder for me to say this before the pandemic, but from my vantage point, having that reminder of mortality closer to the front of your dashboard is a very powerful force for good. There are even studies that I dug into as I got into the research with this book where, you know, kids who have faced childhood cancers and battled life-threatening illnesses before the age of 15, in most cases, come out more resilient. And it's called post-traumatic growth in a lot of the literature where, for some reason, it gets you focused on the

things that are really important. And, you know, I've seen time and time again, people who have packed more life into the first 10 years of their career than some people managed to in 50 or 60 years of a career when they just kind of sat back and let everything fly at them and responded. So I think the pandemic has given us a little sense of urgency that could be really good. It's also helped a lot of us to step back and evaluate just our functional daily routine where the way we worked on a daily basis was mostly a relic of an industrial era where work was, on average, work's just really bad for people's well-being. I've spent the last 10 years studying well-being all around the world, and most people just have a dysfunctional relationship with their work. I mean, a lot of us get to do things we enjoy every day, but most people don't. And I think we're in the process of a big upheaval in fixing that,

at least from what I've seen here in the States. It's interesting you say that. I mean, that really leads me into my next question of how do we make the changes we need to make in our daily lives when it comes to going from this damage that, you know, traditional that you talk about that, you know, the relic of kind of, you know, the bygone, you know, industrial era, things of that nature of how it was, you know, and I picture a steel worker or a coal miner or somebody who's just absolutely punishing themselves to death in their business. And then the day it comes to retire, they're dead. And it's sad when you think about that, because you've got, you know, your learning, your earning, and also live a more fruitful life going forward where we enjoy ourselves, where we're happy and we're accomplished. Yeah, I think that's the crux of the matter. So if you have this relationship between a person and an organization that is on average

kind of broken, and it's really had been tilted towards the employer. I mean, I spent 10 years working on employee engagement projects when I was at Gallup. And I mean, we helped organizations get down to a fine science, how much they're extracting out of the person when the person shows up at work. So that directionality of the relationship, companies are quite adept at measuring that and they're good at it. What no one ever really cared to answer, tried to answer, forced themselves to ask is, is my life better off because I decided to join this organization? And so I think people have now started to ask that question. To be really

candid, for a while, I was hopeful that organizations would start measuring and get real excited about, can we prove to our employees that their lives are better off because they joined this organization? But it's just taken a lot of time, and I don't know if that will ever happen, frankly, because organizations have been so structured around shareholder returns and profits and productivity and the like. And so I would challenge each individual to step back and say,

in their own lives, are they better husbands? Are they better parents? Are they better friends? Are they more involved in their community? Is their physical health better because of the organization that they work for today? And if not, would it be better off if you were doing something else? And there are kind of these central elements of well-being you need to keep in balance. And so, yes, you do need the paycheck. And if you're not making enough money to pay for food and rent and shelter, then it's hard to move past that and think about these higher level needs of well-being and health and community contribution alike. But once you get to a point where you can pay your bills, I think we need to quickly pivot and ask the question of, now that I have what I need to pay rent, is my life and are my relationships and health really

better off because I'm a part of this group or this organization and to kind of fundamentally rethink the value proposition from an individual standpoint and then make better decisions about what you're going to do today and how you might chart a course to a better future by changing that up a bit. Wow, that's a lot of reflection going on, Tom. And I mean, do you see a lot of that reflection going on in today's society? I mean, we've got this thing going on called the Great Resignation occurring. We're recording this in October of 2021 for anybody who's listening in the future. And there are a lot of people, even though they're prosperous in their current careers,

they're walking out the door and saying, I need to hit the reset button. Do you see, I mean, is that what's causing this? Is that what's all playing together here? Are people hitting, they're holding up the mirror and going, I'm not happy in those other things. I'm just productive in my work, or maybe I'm sort of productive in my work, but I'm not happy in those other things. Do you see that as a cause of this? And I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I'm curious about your perspective on that. I think you're onto something. I mean, from my vantage point, we went into this pandemic with just horribly low expectations about what we were going to get out of our work. And

there was almost kind of this default, at least the way I grew up, where work is something that you do to pay the bills and you didn't expect to come home healthier with more energy than when you showed up at work in the morning. And from all the well-being research I've seen, what I realized real quickly is it's absolutely possible to have a job where you do feel like you help people every day, not just you achieve something to enrich the pockets of your employer. And you do have more energy when you come home. And I mean, I think there are a lot of people I've spent time with who when they made a shift either within their current work as an independent contractor or when you come home. And I mean, I think there are a lot of people I've spent time with who, when they made a shift, either within their current work as an independent contractor or within an organization or by changing what organization they're a part of, they realized that they can come home and infuse more well-being and energy into their friends and family networks

as well because they structured their work in a much better way. And so what I'd love to see is a kind of great restructuring of how we work and the relationship between people and organizations so that, I mean, you see this in the four-day workweek stuff where I don't know if anybody's ever coming back on a Friday, right? And maybe that's better because we can have more concentrated time with our loved ones and with our friends and out in nature and thinking about our health, because we really need to work on our physical health and be in a deeper part of our communities over time as well. Totally agree. All right. So let me put a bow on that thought here with this question. We have a lot of leaders that listen to this. They may run a small business or they may run a large organization.

And there are a lot of business coaches and different mentors and things like that, that listen to this podcast. And they work with a lot of leaders. How important is it for people in positions of leadership to take care of themselves so that everybody else can see that and, you know, obviously influence those around them, but also ensure that their employees are doing the same. I mean, it's, you know, before it was, you don't talk about that stuff at work because people are like, that's my personal life. Don't bother me with it. But I, frankly,

I think that when my people walk in and they're happy, healthy, engaged in their personal lives, they're going to be awesome at the office. So, I mean, what do you think? It's a perfect question because it's the whole ball of wax in my difficult experience. I mean, I've spent 10 years literally hitting my head against walls with big employers because they have these, you know, these companies have tens of millions of dollars in their budgets, in their HR departments for employee wellness programs. And they're spending all this money saying, go to our benefits program and do X, Y, and Z, and we want you to be healthier. And then the leaders of those same organizations that are spending tens of millions of dollars sit there and work around the clock. They're the ones sending emails at 10 p.m. They're the ones expecting people to be always on. And then they sit there and say, why are these programs not working? And

what I've realized the hard way is if leaders are not good role models and examples, they may do more harm than good spending millions of dollars on health and well-being programs. I would just scrap them all because when employees or managers see the people they look to as leaders who are eating over their keyboard every day and not taking time to get out and not moving around and not valuing sleep and not talking about these things, no one in the organization even feels like they have the permission to take care of themselves or their own health. And so let's flip that around a little bit. If I were an employee looking at new organizations or prospective organizations, I would take

a very hard look at the very top leadership team and do they exhibit and live these values? Because if they don't, it's never happening. So I can't think of a more important topic for any organization or any leader because you simply have to be a role model for health and well-being and energy. Otherwise, I would argue you're actually a detriment to your employees' lives and health and well-being. Wow. Mic drop on that one. I mean, that was, there are some people that need to listen to this. I mean, and I, you and I both probably know

at least, you know, a handful to a dozen CEOs, business leaders, even if, even if they're divisional leaders, they're managers, things like that. I mean, this has to exist holistically in the organization. So thank you for saying that. It's something we as leaders in society have to preach. Myself, you, Tom, you know, producer Mark has his own business. I mean, it's just, we all need to worry about our health, well-being, wellness. And it's fascinating because if you look across society, I mean, you know, let's go back to Sparta and Spartan times. I mean, that was you're either focusing on your health and well-being or you're off the island type situation. So anyhow, that's fantastic.

And thank you for sharing that wisdom with us, Tom. I have another question here. Your book, Life's Great Question. So when someone purchases the book, they get access to an online course called Contribify. And what can people expect when they take this course? Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that because one of the things I've learned from all these books I've worked on is you've got to give people something to do as a product of reading the book so it's something they can implement in one of their relationships or as a product of reading the book. So it's something they can implement in one of their relationships or on a team and in their life. So with this book,

we created an online kind of inventory where people go through some open-ended questions that ask them about what have been the most influential life experiences or miles in your life. They also go through some multiple choice questions to prioritize. How do you want to contribute to this specific team? And then it gives everyone kind of a one-page baseball card that talks about who they are, how they want to contribute to a team, what their strengths are, all these elements. And so the goal was that whether it's you and I or five people sitting around a team, we can all go through that activity and sit around and say, here's exactly how I want to make a unique contribution to this team so that we're moving in sync instead of, I mean, just as

a quick example, I'm always guilty of bringing teams together with a bunch of creative people and we never have anyone opt in to operationalize and get things done or to help us build better relationships and the like. So this forced us to take a step back and say, who's going to take responsibility for that? Or do we need to add people to the team? So we have a more well-rounded team unit and we all feel good about how we're contributing. So I would encourage people to check that out. We also wanted to make it kind of more of a human version of a resume because I was joking with a CEO of a big software company a few months ago that, you know, you couldn't invent a more cold and sterile and inhuman way to summarize a person's life than the modern resume, right? So it's kind of more of a human way to get to know one another and have some fun conversations when you're joining new

teams or reconnecting with people who have been away for the pandemic here. That, I mean, such a great thing. Where can we find the book, uh, you, things like that online? Where, where can our listeners go? Yeah, the hub for all of it's at tomrath.org. And that'll give you links to the Contribify website we were just talking about and everything else. Awesome. And Tom, I have one more question that I ask every one of our guests on the show. And we, we hear some amazing things and you're just an incredible man. You've done so much and helped educate so many

on how to be better human beings and better business leaders. So thank you for that. But Tom, how do you start your day with a win? You know, it's a good, well-timed question because it ties back to what we were just talking about, where as a leader of some teams and client projects right now, one of my colleagues asked me if I could jump on a call at 6 a.m. this morning with one of our biggest clients because he's working through something.

And I had to pause and think about it for a minute because it's a challenge for all of us. And I said, no, I'm getting up to walk my kids to school because that's such an important part of my daily routine to get my day started and clear my head and give me a little bit of physical energy and give him a boost because kids don't get enough recess time right now. So I challenged him to reschedule it for the next day and later on. And so that walk to school and back, to school with my kids and having those conversations, then my wife and I walk back

about an hour. It's about a mile each way. So probably 30 minutes in total. And that's a perfect way to get my day off to the right start because it gives me the energy I need as a boost in the morning, gets some good social time where I'm not connected and checking my devices and the like. And then, you know, the other thing I've really challenged myself on as I got into all this research is to help my whole family value sleep

instead of sleep being kind of a punishment and something that stigmatizes it. I was really happy this morning because my daughter said, you know, I didn't get enough sleep last night. I was up really late. She said, I think it's because I had almost no physical activity the day before. And I did a little dance in my head because I knew that was something I'd been talking

about for a long time. And she made those connections on her own and knew that today she's got to get out more and do more stuff so that she can fix that to kind of start the cycle off on a better point. So I've really learned to value those pieces and even force myself to be an example of pushing other things aside so that I can do better work throughout the day if I started off that way, to your question. Wow. Amazing answer. Thank you, Tom, for all of that. Everybody, I encourage you to go listen to this podcast a couple more times.

Tom has some incredible, incredible leadership principles and personal principles to maintain a happier, healthier, more productive lifestyle and in our job environment, of course, as well. So anyhow, Tom Rath, speaker, consultant, amazing author. Thank you for being on Start With A Win. Everybody make sure you check out Tom and Life's Great Question at TomRath.org. And we'll catch you next time. If you're ready to create personal and business success, subscribe to this podcast and head over to wherever you get your books and order Start With A Win, the book. Not only will you be helping yourself, but all author proceeds go to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Thanks again for listening. And for more great content, head over to startwithawin.com. Until next time, start with a win.