Tom Rath

I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to find this big hairy thing that descends 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 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.

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 15 plus years ago, we always ask was, do you have the opportunity to use your strengths every day?

And

The wording of that was pretty important because it's just meaning you get a chance somewhere in a day to use your strengths.

None of us get to run around and spend 80% of our day using our strengths and living in that fantasy world.

But almost anyone can carve out strengths.

20, 30 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, you're putting together content that really is of a quality level that you think can help people, whatever it might be.

And a

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 the things that are more boring, monotonous, routinized tasks, such as doing your expenses, financials, catching up on email, and all those pieces that honestly are easier to start with in the day because it's kind of low-hanging fruit, but that's the wrong order in most cases.

Yeah, I mean, just 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 devices away and having a really good conversation with my 17-year-old daughter, my 15-year-old son when they get home in the evening and asking some good questions, keeping my device stowed 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 to prioritize those moments as well throughout the day.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

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 800 number or you're in a retail store or you're at a Starbucks and they're irate and they're really frustrated about something and you take them from a negative eight on a

negative 10 through 10 scale, if you take them from a negative eight to a negative three, that's a really meaningful victory.