Your Ambitions Might Not Be Yours | Tom Rath
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What unsettling realization do many people face in midlife?
Purpose is manufactured in the lab of our daily choices. It's about what you decide to prioritize because it is something that will be meaningful a year from now or 10 years from now. And asking why and asking what the point of spending two hours on this activity is or an hour investing in this relationship was. or this effort, or this company, or this product. Just ask what's the point all the time during the day. If you do that well, that is how you turn purpose into your daily superpower.
So Tom Rath was diagnosed with a fatal illness at 16, average life expectancy 34. When we spoke, he was 50 years old already. But it was his 40th birthday that became the real turning point when he asked himself, did I choose this life or just go along with the current that's already running? Tom has spent decades studying how careers shape well-being, authoring 12 books with over 10 million copies sold. His latest is What's the Point? Turning Purpose into Your Superpower. In this conversation... We explore the inherited ambitions that we carry without even realizing it, why the latter is the wrong model for a life well-lived, and what purpose looks like when you stop waiting to find it. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Goodbye Project.
And I want to start at the very beginning with Tom. We'll jump in there right after this short break. I have been following your work for quite a while. I'm always fascinated to hear your take your lens on how to investigate big transitional moments in life. I want to take a step back in time, though, because you have lived with an awareness of your own mortality since your mid-teens. So, you know, this is probably a longer term exploration for you than it is for so many others. Can you take us back there and share a bit of the story about how this awareness dropped into your life?
Yeah, it is a good place to start because it's been almost 35 years now since I had that initial challenge and diagnosis when I was 16 years old. And it continues to shape the first hours of every single day and what I do and what I read about and what I learn in a way that was originally really beneficial to kind of keep myself alive a little bit longer, but has since transformed into something very different in terms of the intent and orientation around it. So To go back to that, I...
How does Tom Rath's personal health journey influence his perspective?
was diagnosed when I was 16 years old. I was living a real active, normal life and realized I was having trouble seeing out of my left eye in some dark spots and couldn't make sense of it. Went to an eye doctor after a lot of rounds of testing and trying to figure out what was going on. They said, well, you know, you have several large tumors on the back of your left eye. And that's not the worst news. The bad news is we think it means you might have a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors to show up everywhere. And it essentially just shuts off the body's most powerful tumor-suppressing gene. So within a year of that initial diagnosis, I had lost my left eye and all sight in that permanently, which changed my day-to-day life quite a bit.
And I also realized that I was going to need to go through MRIs and CT scans every six months for the rest of whatever my life might look like at that point. So, I mean, you might think it's a real challenging diagnosis at that point and something that rattles a 16-year-old kid. But when I look back on it, I'm kind of amazed by how little it did to take me off that course. I still kind of hung out with friends, partied more than I should have, played sports, did all the normal things. And I had the people around me that kind of kept me focused on what was going right and what worked. And so a lot of that was kind of testimony to that. Real good parenting and friends and family and being surrounded by the right people.
And it also taught me by the time I was 20 years old and the Internet and all this information was starting to emerge that I realized, even though the initial over-under on my life was 37 years when I started to read about it,
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What unsettling realization do many people face in midlife?
0:00–2:25
2
How does Tom Rath's personal health journey influence his perspective?
2:25–5:36
3
What is the difference between a ladder and a garden in life frameworks?
5:36–11:31
4
What does the headstone test reveal about our true priorities?
11:31–13:32
5
How can we redefine purpose in our daily lives?
13:32–18:16
6
What is the legacy question that most people answer incorrectly?
18:16–21:40
7
How do inherited ambitions affect our life choices?
21:40–26:59
8
What steps can we take to live more intentionally each day?
26:59–46:10
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Good Life Project
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