Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Interview with #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Tom Rath

I recently interviewed Tom Rath on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today has written six New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers over the course of the past decade, including the number one New York Times bestseller, How Full is Your Bucket? His book StrengthsFinder 2.0 was the top selling book for two years on Amazon and his books have sold more than 10 million copies. Tom Rath is the author of the new book Life's Great Question which tackles the question everyone should be asking themselves, what are the most meaningful contributions we can make? Tom, thank you for joining us.

Tom: Thanks so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be talking to you today.

Adam: Tom, before I ask you directly about Life's Great Question, I want to ask you about your own life and journey. When you were 16, you were diagnosed with a rare and catastrophic genetic mutation that would ultimately lead to cancers and multiple organs. You were given a finite number of years to live yet, you not only beat the doctors predictions, but went on to become one of the most successful writers in the country.

Tom: You know, it's interesting, you mentioned that experience I faced when I was 16 years old, and doctors essentially told me that I lost all my vision in my lifetime when I was 16. And they told me that I may have this rare mutation which essentially just shuts off one of the body's most powerful tumor suppressor genes. So they told me at that point, they said, you know, you will face cancer in your kidneys and your pancreas, in your brain, your spine, your adrenal glands, a host of major areas. And, you know, when I heard that news, what it did pretty quickly thereafter was it got me focused over the years that would follow on the things and one thing that we focused on was kind of a survival instinct of what are all the little things I can learn about and do and apply, from MRI and CT scans every six months to diet and exercise and sleep habits and so forth, that may give me a better chance of living longer in good health. So that was one big focus. But the second thing that I turned my attention to at a probably younger age than most people do was what are all the things that I can work on and contribute to that will continue to grow when I'm gone? And so I can really, I mean, essentially to oversimplify it, I knew the doctors told me I had until about age 35 or 40 most likely so I figured I was going to pack as much life into those 35 or 40 years as I possibly could. So I knew I needed to get a lot done career wise by the time I was 30. So I could hopefully have a family and spend some good time with my kids and try and put some things together that people could benefit from for quite a while. And so I think it really did give me a little bit earlier sense of urgency in life. And it also got me focused outward pretty quickly on what I could do that could continue to make a difference whether I'm there working on it a week from now, a month from now, or a decade.

Adam: What advice do you have for listeners who are facing moments of adversity? I mean, you faced adversity that hopefully none of us have to experience ourselves at a level that magnitude, but we all go through different challenges, big and small. What advice do you have?

Tom: You know, originally I wouldn't have said this even three or four years ago, but the more I studied some of this research on the topic, it turns out when people face real life threatening challenges that remind them of their mortality a little bit, on average, they have what researchers are now calling post traumatic growth in many cases, where they actually experience more resilience and get more done, as long as they're older than the age of about 12 or 13, I believe. And so now I do think it's kind of important for people to remember that, I mean, the one thing that we all have in common is that we do have a number or a limited number of days on this earth. I think for most people, it's pretty easy to say, “Well, I'm not going to mess with that today, because I always have tomorrow”. Okay, I think my first piece of advice would be to just take it from me that you don't always have tomorrow. And if you keep putting things off until tomorrow, you know, spend that much time in life on some of the most meaningful things that really make you feel good about your contribution and most importantly, make a difference for your family members, your loved ones, your customers, your clients and the communities around you.

Adam: So along those lines, those are the focus of your book. What is the answer to the question you pose? How can we live the most meaningful lives possible? What can we do? What's the roadmap?

Tom: The title lightweight question was really inspired for the most part from one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?” And that may sound like a big, grand, overarching philosophical question. But the more I started to read that and reread that and think about it two or three years ago, I realized that it's a pretty good way to anchor something as practical and tactical as how you structure your time every single day. So I started asking myself that question. Each morning, I brought my kids to school and on the way back, or if I was buying or driving somewhere, I'd try to anchor my day by saying, “What am I going to say?” And even a little bit of time in a day- it doesn't have to be the whole day, it can be 30 minutes, it can be an hour. That is where I can truly see it's making a contribution to the growth of other people. And the more I started to use that as an anchor, for how I distribute my time in the day, it made it a lot easier to let go of some of the trivial things that are more response oriented, like all of the emails flying at me in a given day and my to do list and at least remind myself to spend an hour or two each day, whether it's on a writing project, whether it's a conversation with someone who looks to me for guidance, or whether it's helping one of my kids to learn some new words for school or learning some new math, or science problems or any of those efforts where you're contributing to the growth of another human being or if you're in customer service, and there's one customer that comes into your store is really irate, and you get that person back to neutral. That's a bigger victory than a lot of us realize. Sometimes, in addition to focusing time on that, what I've found is we need to take more time to acknowledge those little victories throughout the day, because that's what helps us to go home at the end of the day and feel even better than we did when we showed up on some days.

Adam: Tom, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think your example of trying to, in your words, make an irate customer less irate- I wrote an article, I think it was published in Forbes, Inc. And it was titled, “How to Flip an Unhappy Customer,” and one of the things that I take great pride in as an entrepreneur is, anytime we have a customer who's anything less than fully satisfied, we try to, at all levels of our organization, make sure that they're happy because at the end of the day, the more happy someone is, in their day, whether it's a small win or a big one, the happier everyone around them is going to be and it just leads to a happier and healthy society and happier, healthier world. So I really enjoy and appreciate your message.

Tom: You know, I like the way you talk about that, by the way, in terms of turning someone around, because I shared one quick story in the book, how, because I'm completely blind, and on my left side, anytime I go into a crowded grocery store, or a coffee shop, or a social setting where people are close to one another, I inevitably bump into people on accident because I just don't see them coming. I can't see past my nose. And so it's been that way for me for, oh, probably 25 years now at least. And what I've learned is every time that occurs, it's like a little psychological experiment, because in some cases, it really gives me a window into what's going on in the other person's life because sometimes they'll be quick to apologize and defuse the situation. Try and pick me up a little bit, which is great, but other times they're really frustrated. And so I've realized that in that moment, I always have a choice about how I respond and if I respond to someone who handles it poorly by escalating it, and kind of hitting back in return, that's bad for my well being. And it's even worse for that other person's well being. So you can see in those little moments how that kind of sets a chain of events in motion, where if I pylon and compound someone who's having a bad day and is frustrated and responds poorly, that's going to have reciprocal effects on down the road for that person and for me, and so I think, you know, we've got to think about even those small moments in a day where if you get someone back to neutral, and they don't carry a lot of hostility forward, that is a meaningful MC.

Adam: Very well said, Tom. And I really find it very interesting in terms of your real life social experiment of people bumping into you and your ability to observe how in real time they're feeling. So I think that's really interesting. You've written quite a bit about how to make the most of your day and how to really optimize your daily routine around diet, exercise, and sleep. And this sort of ties into how to live a happier and healthier life physically, mentally, psychologically. What are your best tips on those topics?

Tom: You know, the first tip on that topic of kind of eating, moving, and sleeping is that you have, even if you're the most selfless person, and your whole goal is to do as much as you can for other people, which I talk about a lot in this new book, that's admirable, you need to put your own health and energy first, for the sake of other people. So I see this all the time with the leaders I admire; with nurses, teachers, and they're in these positions where they say, “Oh, I'm going to sacrifice my own health and well being, even though they're encouraging everyone else to take care of themselves and so on.” And what happens when they do that is especially at two o'clock in the afternoon, four o'clock in the afternoon, they have meetings and they need to be sharp. They just don't have the capacity to be as effective and helpful for other people as they otherwise would have been. And so I think the first step is to be a good example for others and a role model by putting your own health and well being first because, especially in organizations and social networks, when leaders do that, it gives everyone else permission to do the same and that permission doesn't exist. If a leader is saying, “I'm going to be the one on email in the morning, I never sleep. I have a bar for lunch, every day, no real meal, and I sit in the chair all day, I'm not actively moving around.” So that's the first point I'd make. The second tip I would share is you've got to think about the way eating, moving, and sleeping well all work together and build on one another in a kind of a cumulative way where no matter how bad of a day you have today. What I've learned from the research I've done is that if you get a good one good night's sleep, seven or eight hours a good quality sleep tonight that essentially functions like the reset button on a video game or the power button in your smartphone where you get to start the next day from scratch with a clean slate and you're more likely to be active and move around throughout the day. You're more likely to eat foods that have lower sugar, less sugar in it., fewer fried foods, and that starts these couple of spirals free of progressively better days. But you've kind of got to do all three of those things in combination because one really bad night of sleep, one day of splurging and eating a bunch of fried and sugary foods and one day where you're stuck sitting down all day and you're no getting a thousand steps or moving around every half hour to an hour, that can really derail the whole cycle.

Adam: Interesting. A lot of listeners are probably already doing a lot of the things that you're talking about doing and so far as optimizing their workout routines, eating and sleep. A lot of listeners probably are not. Maybe there's one leg of the stool that's a little bit weak. And it can be challenging as you've researched to get that one area of weakness, right. What is your best advice? And what have you learned that you can share with listeners on how to most effectively overcome that challenge? If you're struggling with sleep, how can you get that good night's sleep? If you're having a hard time managing your diet, how can you overcome that? What's your advice?

Tom: You know, I think the most simple and sustainable strategy that applies to all three of those areas that I've found is to figure out how you can connect short term incentives with healthier decisions that also happen to be in your own long term interests. And let me give you a specific example to bring that to life a little bit. So the parents I mentioned have these chronic health risks where it's, of course, bad for me to eat really unhealthy foods and I’m very sedentary given my condition. Just like there are a lot of people I know have a risk of heart disease or diabetes, and that often isn't a really good motivator to or a better meal lunch today, right? So what I learned is I was working on the bookkeeping of sleep several years ago, my mother invited my kids and my wife out to lunch to a trendy restaurant in downtown Washington DC near where we live. And there were only four things on the menu. So I thought I was being good by getting the eggs benedict instead of the chocolate covered donut. But the eggs benedict comes out it's covered in Hollandaise sauce and it comes with a side of fried potatoes and a biscuit with gravy all over it. So I just clear out everything on my plate because I have no more willpower than the next person and my mom did order this chocolate covered donut. So I didn't know because that afternoon my daughter, who was seven at the time, and two hours after that meal I was laying on the Barcalounger in my living room and she's tugging on my sleeve saying, “Dad, will you take me and brother out to the park?” And I did not have anywhere near the energy I needed to be a good dad that afternoon because of that one bloating meal. And you see the same thing play out when we're just sitting around on the couch all day and around moving around, you see the same thing where we're traveling and you don't prioritize getting an extra buffer to get enough sleep to be effective the next day. But what I've learned is when you think about what are the things, what are the decisions you need to make in the next hour or two, in order to have more energy three or four hours from now? Those are far more powerful psychological motivators than my risk of cancer 10 years down the road, or risk of heart disease 25 years from now for a lot of people. So the more you can connect those short term incentives which if you are active in the morning and go out for a walk, get a lot of activity, you know that you're mentally fresher and more creative for a meeting or you're better off for a presentation you have what's important at two o'clock in the afternoon. I think that connecting those short term dots when it's also working with your long term interests, makes it a lot easier to make good decisions today.

Adam: Tom, one of the things that you cover pretty extensively in your book is the topic of the need to deliberately push the boundaries of our personalities. And, you know, kind of along the lines of what we're talking about, what advice do you have for listeners on how we can best challenge our comfort zones?

Tom: Yeah, you know, it's a good question because it's something that I've learned a lot about just in the last couple of years here. I think there's been a little bit of conventional wisdom and dogma in the field of psychology and other social sciences as well that people just don't change that much over time. And, you know, I did a lot of early work on Strengthsfinder and Gallup. And there, for the most part, big pieces of our personality are pretty stable over months, and even over years, and in many cases over decades. But that certainly doesn't mean that people should try and change for good, especially around the margins. And so, you know, with every personality assessment, I've been through kind of the big five ones and the Myers Briggs types and Strengthsfinder all of them, they usually put me more further on the introversion side of the curve on the introvert, extrovert continuum. And I think because I kind of assumed too, too much of a degree that I wasn't going to be able to change that much. I've used that as a crutch, to avoid a lot of social gatherings in situations where I'm like, no, I'll feel uncomfortable. That'll be awkward. I'm just going to opt out when, in reality, when my wife or one of my friends is successful in dragging me along to an event I originally went to, I ended up having more fun than I would have thought. And I ended up making new connections and relationships. Because if you ask any expert on these topics, there's pretty good consensus and all of the well being research that social relationships are the single best predictor and driver of our overall well being, so why not? Try and push your personality a bit around the edges so that you opt into more of those situations. So I think what I'm learning is that there are a lot of gradual changes in personality that occur as we age that can be very helpful for the sake of our own well being, and also for the sake of creating wellbeing for other people.

Adam: A lot of your work focuses on studying the qualities of what makes a great leader, what, in your experience, are the key characteristics of a great leader, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Tom: Yeah, you know, I worked on a book, Strengths Based Leadership several years ago. I had read about everything I could get my hands on, on the topic of leadership that was out there from a kind of theory standpoint, and honestly, I wasn't sure some of that made sense. Some of it didn't. I certainly didn't trust my own subjective instincts on it. So what I did was I worked with a team at Gallup and we surveyed 10,000 followers is a complicated study. But we called out to 10,000 randomly selected people, Gallup did. And asked them an open ended question. He said, “Who's been the most influential leader in your life?” And we asked them to list the person's initials, so we knew they had a real person in mind. Now, he said, “Please list three words that best describe what this leader has contributed to your life.” And it took a long time to soar code and categorize all these open ended responses. He had 30,000 open ended responses. And it turned out that there were four really common themes of what followers say they need from us as leaders. And the four things were first, one was trust, they need to know they can trust. They need stability. So I mean, it's especially during challenging times, like we've all been through lately. People need to know that there are some things they can count on, even if a lot of things are changing, what can they count on? And then they need confidence. They need someone who will boost their confidence and help them feel good about it kind of have compassion for where they are. It's that confidence, compassion was the third factor. And then the fourth one, which is, which is really hard for leaders to balance with stability is, they need hope for the future. So I think one of the fundamental challenges of leadership from what I've studied, what people responded to those studies is that leaders need to think every day about how they help people to see what's going to stay constant and stable in the moment, but also to give them some hope about how the future can and will be better. And the way I've seen leaders do that, especially during challenging times is, boy, it's to a large degree is a game of communication. And they have to communicate and communicate and communicate a lot more because, especially during uncertain times, when followers don't hear anything at all, they have a tendency to assume the worst. And so the more leaders can communicate about stability and hope; that seems to make quite a difference.

Adam: I couldn't agree with you more. Tom, something you write about that I find particularly interesting as an entrepreneur and as a leader, is your view that when someone isn't in love with their work, instead of trying to find a new job, they should try to redesign the job that they have into the job that they want. Can you elaborate on that for listeners?

Tom: Yeah. And I think, you know, I think it's important to where a lot of us, it's almost easier cognitively, to write off the job that you have in your mind and say, “Well, I just need to jump to a different company, I need to jump to different industries, maybe I need to move.” And I think you see a lot of people doing that. Maybe even too early where most of the research that I've said on this topic suggests that it's more likely that you should start by trying to make the job that you have into one that you can love over time and to exalt some of those options before you just hop from one job to the next, which may yield a greater return. And when I talk about shaping the job, you have no one. What I mean really specifically, is to start by looking at what's expected of you. So what does your company or your boss expect you to do? From an outcome standpoint, in terms of serving the clients and customers, you're putting together the products that you create. And then to step back and say, what's the best way that you can do that based on who you are, what your talents are, what your skills are, what are they? What's the knowledge you've acquired over the years, and most good leaders and managers really just want people to achieve those outcomes. And they're far more open to how you get from point A to point B, then I think we traditionally tend to think and so if you can restructure the way you do your job so that it better fits you, better fits your schedule, better fits how you want to align your working life- I think most good managers will be very open to that conversation. Then the second piece to it, if I would just isolate two factors that are important. The second one is that you get kind of diagnostic about how the job that you have serves another person and how can you literally create some connections so that you can see the positive influence your work is having on the people you serve every day. So if you're in food service, for example, instead of if you're sequestered in a back room with no windows and you can't even see people eating the food that you cook each day, you end up making poor quality food. It has lower nutritional value and you feel crappier about your job at the end of the day, compared to people who have an opportunity to see customer's consuming the food they create each day. And you know that exact same thing applies. I've seen it. In the research with radiologists, it applies with people in manufacturing environments, that applies for software developers. We've got to find ways to bring the faces and interactions with customers and clients into our daily routine because that's what motivates us to get more engaged in the job that we have.

Adam: How can anyone become a better writer and how can those interested become more commercially successful writers?

Tom: Oh, boy, I mean, it's, you know, it's interesting. It's a tough question for me because I, when I first got into writing, I was just 100% convinced that I was the worst writer that ever attempted to do this. I actually had an AP English teacher when I was a senior in high school tell me that I was really good at math and statistics and I should stick with that. And then I have my first book I wrote was How Full is You Bucket? I wrote it with my grandfather in his last couple months of life when he was fighting cancer. He asked me to write a book with him and it was because I'd written him a really nice letter about all that he'd done for my life. And I was struggling with my challenges and he said to me, Tony, I think you have a real talent for bringing things to life with words. And I want you to write a book within the next two months. And so I was literally just kind of thrown into the fire by that experience. I never would have written a word for public consumption my entire life. So one thing I learned from that- there was a big valuable life lesson- is just how important it is that we all spend time trying to spot a little trace of talent like that in someone else. Because if my grandfather had not called that out and challenged me with very specific praise and a very specific challenge, I, to this day, I'm 44- now I never would have attempted to write and so if you can do that for another person, that's really valuable thing, but kind of going back to the writing. The good thing for me was I had so little identity of being even a semi competent writer that I just, I admitted to everybody around me, I'm a horrible writer. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to put a book together. And I shared my earliest roughest versions with anyone and everyone who would listen. And it's now been, geez, almost almost two decades since that first book. And I continue to do that to this day, right, sharing the earliest roughest book ideas, title ideas before even starting writing. And I share the earliest drafts with anyone and everyone because I don't have an ego as a good writer. And I don't ever want to have an ego as a great writer who kind of thinks he can go do something in isolation in a vacuum before I share it with anyone. I know better than to do that. So that would be my first tip for people. I think it's a great life experience for anyone even if you don't end up sharing widely, to put your thoughts and your stories on paper. I mean, just for the therapeutic value. It's worth it even if it doesn't go anywhere, commercially. And then if you do have the courage to share with some people and get it out there and they think it might resonate with a wider audience, I would encourage people to keep sharing that with wider and wider circles organically until it continues, until it gets to one which reaches the audience that you hope it does.

Adam: My last question is going to be about your grandfather and your relationship with your grandfather and how it really relates to the theme of the show, which is mentorship. What advice do you have on the topics of finding a great mentor, and most effectively giving back through mentorship?

Tom: You know, that, I think to dig into a topic I touched on there in terms of let's start with being a great mentor. You know, in this day and age and environment that we find ourselves in now with just amazing technology and amazing communication means but a million things that are fighting for our attention in a given day right now. I mean, it's so much easier in terms of cognitive load, it's easier to just show up in the morning and kind of check through your email and answer your calls and feel like you got things done. You feel like you got a little bit more done that day. But what's hard to do is to dedicate time every single week, ideally every day, and say, here's someone that I'm consciously planning to invest in the growth of, and to reach out to them and have some dedicated time where your device is stowed away, nothing banging or buzzing, and you genuinely ask that person, some good questions. And you keep your mouth closed. And you listen to those responses as intently as you possibly can. And then, ideally, as you listen and listen and listen more, you eventually spot some things that person does really well, that they've never even noticed themselves. And if, boy, if you can do that well, and then give them some ideas and challenges about how to apply those things you've noticed, I think that's more valuable as a mentor than all the assessments and development courses and books that that person is going to read over the next few years. So I, you know, because I wrote the book StrengthsFinder, I always have people come up to me and say, “Well, what's the most valuable of all those 34 strengths? What's the best strength app?” And my clear answer now after reflecting on some of those experiences with Dawn, is that the single most valuable strength is spotting the talent and another human being that they had not yet noticed. So that's my best advice from a mentoring standpoint, I think, from a finding mentor standpoint, going back to that study that I did on leadership, I mentioned that we ask people to give us the initials of the person who had had the most valuable or the most profound influence in their life from a leadership standpoint and then later on after they answer questions. We went back and said, oh, by the way, how long have you known that person, you gave us the initials for? And the average, the median duration of the relationship with the most influential leader in their life was 10 years. So what I learned that kind of blew me away when I first looked at that, and so what that told me is that having that kind of most powerful leader mentor relationship with someone, it takes time, and it takes patience, but most importantly, it takes a very powerful relationship. So when you think about people who can be real influential leaders, mentors in your life, don't miss the ones that are really close to the source, because it's probably someone that you've known for a really long time and you really trust and respect. I can attest to that personally. 

Adam: Tom, thank you so much for joining us. And thanks for all the tremendous advice.

Tom: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.