Stop Trying to Find Your Purpose. Ask This Question Instead | Tom Rath | Ep. 578
The ONE Thing
In this episode of The One Thing, host Jay Papasan interviews author Tom Rath about his new book, What's the Point?, which challenges the modern obsession with finding a singular, grand life purpose. Rath explains how the
Key takeaways
- Tom Rath changed his book's working title from Purpose Unlocked to What's the Point? after research revealed that the word 'purpose' intimidated potential readers and triggered anxiety.
- A Yale/Michigan study on radiologists showed that appending a patient photo to medical records increased diagnostic accuracy by 42% and report length by 30%, proving human connection boosts professional output.
Main topics
- Redefining purpose as a daily compass
- Contribution confidence and impact measurement
Notable quotes
"Purpose doesn't need to be something that's that intimidating or that heavy."
Conclusion
Listeners leave with a actionable shift from purpose anxiety to daily intent
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey gang, this week I'm interviewing my friend Tom Rath. If you recognize that name, maybe you've read a book called How Full Is My Bucket or Strength Finders. He is one of the great thinkers and great authors of our time and his most recent book is called What's the Point? And what I love about this book, it's like a good parent tricking their kids into eating broccoli by putting melted cheese on it. He is making the idea, the heavy idea of what's my purpose. He makes it practical, manageable, and easy. And he talks about the benefits it can have to every single day at work. And by the end of the book, we'll also talk about how you can bring that wisdom, not just to your own work, but how we can help the young people in our lives, our children, make better career choices and design the jobs we have to bring more fulfillment. It's a super practical episode about a very important topic. purpose, but we're just going to whisper that, and we're just going to ask the question, what's the point? Enjoy this episode with my friend, Tom Rath. Speaker 2 (1:12) I'm Jay Papasan and this is The One Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results. Speaker 2 (1:22) Tom, welcome to the One Thing Podcast. Speaker 3 (1:24) It's good to talk to you, Jay. Speaker 2 (1:26) I know. It was really great catching up when we did our pre-call as well. I really enjoyed your book, What's the Point? And you're tackling a topic that so many of our listeners have struggled with. My coach, our head coach at The One Thing, Jordan Freed, he asserted, he was the first person I say, this is not a productivity book. This is a purpose book. And when we figure out kind of bringing meaning to our work, our purpose. It can feel really heavy when you say, what's your purpose? What's your purpose, Tom? But it's so liberating when we figure it out. So why don't we start off with how do you define that and why you think it's important? Speaker 3 (2:05) You know, it's a good place to start, Jay, because I'd always had this, I guess I'd idealized the word purpose and thought I'm finally going to write a book about purpose. And sat down, put together all this research, digging through everything I could find, like my normal process. And then about five months before we were going to launch a book that was tentatively titled Purpose Unlocked, I got so deep in the research, I realized that when most of us hear the word purpose, we kind of clench up a little bit, tighten up, and we think of this something that needs to descend from the heavens on a sunny day every 10 years. And the word purpose itself kind of stresses us out. I realized and I called my publisher and said, we got to rethink this. If we put purpose as the main title of the book, I'm worried that we're not going to get people into it because they'll be too intimidated to read a book called Purpose instead of something fun like One Thing or What's the Point? So how do we kind of ease people into it? Because the good news is the research, I think, proves out that purpose doesn't need to be something that's that intimidating or that heavy. And purpose can be something that's a lot lighter and it's fun and it's more like a daily compass for how we prioritize our day in its very best form. And the more I learned about it, honestly, just at a personal level, it took a lot of the pressure off on me thinking that purpose was something I had to try and find every few years and it involves some big quest. And once you demystify it, I think it makes it a lot more practical to plug it into your daily life. Speaker 2 (3:41) I love that. 100 % agree with everything you said. That was my discovery on the road teaching the one thing is that people's response to the idea of discovering their purpose, they felt like they had to have a road to Damascus moment, like it was something that was going to be given to them versus something they could actively discover. And it felt heavy. That would be the word I use. It felt like a heavy journey that would take lots of wisdom and time to figure out. Since then, we found some practical ways to get people closer to it faster. And I love, I want people's purpose, whatever they call it, core values, however we want to define that, to be a compass. Like the whole point of it is it should help us make better decisions with where we spend our time. Speaker 3 (4:27) Yeah. And that's what I realized as I got into it. I, midway through, I was trying to figure out, well, how do we help people apply this concept of purpose in what they do on a daily basis when they wake up in the morning and how they think about their daily routine. And what I found is that if I just ask myself, not what's the point of a big project I'm working on, but what's the point of what I'm about to do for the next 30 minutes? If I'm going to sit down first thing in the morning and respond to 10 emails from people who I may not even know or have any connection with, that... Not only does it not serve a great purpose when I scrutinize my own routine, but it's also 30 minutes less that I have to spend in a meaningful conversation with one of my kids at the end of the day as well. And so as I started to ask, what's the point of this meeting? What's the point of this hour reading a book someone asked me to blurb? It changed the way I prioritized my daily routine in a pretty good way. Speaker 2 (5:24) I love that. You're using it to such a practical end. What's the point of this? Is this impactful at all? Or am I doing busy work? It's impactful or it feels important just because it's the last thing that showed up in my inbox from an important person. There's lots of ways we can answer that question. But when we bring our own answer to it, I think it becomes a great compass. So one of the things that I paused over and reread is that you shared some research. That shows that people who figure this out, they don't only enjoy their work more, they earn more, all of those things. Can you share that with us? Speaker 3 (6:00) Yeah, you know, it's been interesting. One of the challenges I've seen in the modern workplace over the last 10, 20 years of working with companies and leaders and workers on this is the fact that most of us are doing pretty meaningful work and some meaningful work almost every single day. And I don't know, unless you're manufacturing cigarettes or something. It's hard to think of professions where you're not serving another person, internal customer, external customer at a Starbucks, whatever it might be. But most of us do a pretty lousy job of reflecting and connecting back and saying, here's what I did three or four times in a day that made a difference for another human being. And when you fail to do that, you are less motivated at the end of the day and you're less likely to do more of that work the next day and so on. Speaker 3 (6:50) Being able to connect a customer who walks into a retail store or a coffee shop and they're really frustrated. And if you bring them from a negative five to neutral, even that's a big win in a day that made a difference for another person. And if you acknowledge that or your manager can acknowledge that, or you can be the manager who acknowledges that and helps people to see what they're doing, that makes a difference. I think most of the. purpose that's created in life is really created in our lab of these daily choices and these little interactions with people. And so we all need to do a better job of doing that for ourselves and then helping others to do that as well. And, you know, when you talk about the research around it, I would have thought from my own personal experiences in our health care system that if you're a nurse or you're a teacher or you're a radiologist. you just kind of know that you do important, meaningful work all the time. But even in those professions, if you take one group of radiologists and have them keep plowing through their day, reading MRI scans and CTs and writing reports, and you take another experimental group, and all you do is append a photo of the patient to the radiographic record, Speaker 2 (7:59) they Speaker 3 (7:59) write 30 % longer reports with 42 % better diagnostic accuracy because someone's just bringing the... humanity of another person in with a picture and a face, right? And we just so often fail to do stuff like that. So when I talk about making purpose practical, I think that's a big piece of it is how do you build that reflection into your day as well? Speaker 2 (8:22) You put it into a very simple question and we love questions because that's our book is all about asking the right questions. Like if you don't know the answer to that question. then with each task or with each big project, just ask the question, who am I helping? And I just studied, you know, that for so long. And if you don't know how to help yourself, helping others is a great start. That there is something intrinsic that when we feel like we're doing a service for others, we feel better about the work and about ourselves as well. My father's motto. It was like when he passed away, someone gave us a pillow with an embroidered on it. And he just said, happiness is being useful to God, useful to family and being useful to other human beings. And he must have said that enough times to make us roll our eyes as teenagers, right? But it was still a great lesson to learn at a fairly young age that if you want to be more fulfilled, you want to be more happy. then focus your work on how it helps other people. And that's where so much of the reward comes from. So like as a simple practical tool, like I don't know what impact my work does, who do you help, right? That could be a sign. And I