Tom Rath

whatever it might be, so that you're actually building something that other people can benefit from a week from now, a month from now, maybe even 10 years from now.

And I do worry, 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 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.

Yeah, you know, 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 what I realized is that I would estimate 80 to 90 percent of people end up at the very end of their career, at the very end of their life, and they never even had a preview of it.

They never even saw it, 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 out there from a job standpoint in the United States, you would need to understand about 50 jobs just to get half of the U.S.

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, or maybe they're pulled by financial or societal expectations into something.

But they have about a 5% to 10% 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?

If you want to be known for being a good dad, for me it 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, 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 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.