How to Build a Life of Contribution with Tom Rath

I think it's really interesting whenever people reflect on their journey and the things that are the goalposts for them.

And, you know, people could, you could have said, like, I achieved all these things, you know, I won whatever awards or, you know, those types of things.

But what you focused on was the challenges you had to overcome, the relationship with your grandfather and how that relationship has helped you contribute to the world, right? And that's just a really interesting way of framing where you are today.

Yeah, part of what I've learned through all these programs and from a lot of good thinkers is that life's just a bunch of relationships.

And at the end of the day, I live across from a sprawling cemetery here in Arlington, and I walk through there sometimes for peace of mind, but nobody's talking about awards or bestseller lists or how many followers you had or how much money you made or anything.

I mean, what we kind of all get to leave behind is the influence we've had on and with other people.

And so I spend most of my time waking up in the morning and saying, if I really want to serve a big purpose, how can I make sure that I'm injecting as much as I can in a positive way into my closest work relationships, relationships in my community, relationships with readers, and mostly with my kids, my spouse, my friends, and community around here in particular, because it's It's those things that I think not only will matter in the end, but they're also the things that can continue to grow in our absence when we're not working on it and laboring through it on a day-to-day basis.

So I think there's some, it's fun to think about how those things can scale well after we're gone.

I want to tell you a little bit about the research I did for my, I did a thesis for MAP.

And there's going to be a lot of overlap with your book.

And then I want to dive into your book.

So I noticed that a lot of people will achieve big things, especially my population was perfectionists who chronically don't ever feel like what they did is good enough.

They say, I achieved whatever thing, and it's not good enough.

They find all the reasons that it's wrong.

And instead of looking at how that achievement helped other people, they're focusing on themselves and how they could just continue to get better to prove themselves.

And so my thesis was that if people could look at their achievements as a way of how it contributed, even if it was a self-focused thing, as a way of how it contributed in some way, then they would be able to articulate and feel more of a sense of purpose and get out of this narrow hallway of trying to prove themselves.

In your book, you talk about the cost of self-focused forms of striving and you also talk about purpose.

So I just want to hand you the reins and I want to hear what you have to say if we take it from here.

Yeah, I think your theory is spot on in terms of if you're on the hamster wheel of achievement and success for the sake of hitting the next benchmark, hitting the next doubling in salary, hitting X number of followers, whatever it might be, that's kind of a race that just continues and continues and continues.

you eventually kind of burn yourself into the ground before you come up and realize that in many cases, you're not taking care of yourself.

Maybe you're not taking care of paying enough attention to the people that matter around you and investing in the things that will matter most when you kind of look back on a life.

So I do think it's important for even those of us that, I mean, I grew up in a hardest working kind of culture and family in Nebraska where a lot of people kind of come out of farm communities and there's kind of that work ethic of bragging about 80-hour weeks and not needing much sleep and traveling 300 days a year and all these things that I saw as ideals growing up.

But I quickly realized as I got into the work world, and especially as I started to build a family when I was younger, how unhealthy that is in the context of a real sustainable life and sustainable relationships overall.

So that's where I think I know some people push back on this, but the more we can connect what we're doing with the person it serves and the person that it's helping just in the day, in the moment, it doesn't have to be some grand thing.

That's where it makes it a lot easier to do things regularly and you feel better about it at the end of the day and you're more likely to build some of those upward spirals and do more of it the next day.