Tom Rath

Kind of researching and studying what leads to great careers in particular and how work intersects with our individual well-being and health for the last 25 or 30 years and kind of got pulled into the

book writing accidentally, but I've always been a researcher at heart.

And I've spent most of my time just waking up and trying to figure out each morning, how can I pull together 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.

Find your passion is purpose.

relatively misleading advice because it assumes that these things you're really passionate about.

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 are passionate about golf, passionate about causes, but that's starting with you 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 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 5, 10, 20 years down the road.

Can you explore that a little bit for us?

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 today, 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 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 more of it.

So you mentioned in the introduction that

I know the book's kind of about purpose, but I think when a lot of people, myself included, hear the word purpose, originally it just kind of gave me anxiety.