Your Ambitions Might Not Be Yours | Tom Rath

Most of us reach our 40s and discover something unsettling: the ambitions we've been chasing weren't entirely ours. They came from parents, from culture, from the two or three careers we happened to see up close. Tom Rath calls this looking through a pinhole, and he thinks it explains more midlife restlessness than most of us are willing to admit. Tom is one of the most widely-read researchers on how careers shape health and wellbeing. His books, including the instant number one New York Times bestseller How Full Is Your Bucket? and StrengthsFinder 2.0, have sold more than 10 million copies. His latest book is What's the Point?: Turning Purpose into Your Daily Superpower https://amzn.to/42y2uLK. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why only 50 jobs represent half the entire labor market, and what that means for the choices you made at 18The difference between a ladder and a garden as frameworks for a life and why one of them is making you miserableWhat headstones actually say (and never say) about what we thought matteredThe legacy question that most people answer wrong and what Tom's grandfather's final hours taught him about the purest form of givingWhy purpose is less about finding your calling and more about something entirely different There's a particular kind of grief that comes from realizing your striving belonged to someone else. This conversation is for anyone in midlife who's starting to ask whether the ladder they've been climbing was theirs to begin with. You can find Tom at: Website https://tomrath.org/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tomrath_author | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/purpose-career-midlife-tom-rath Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Bela Gandhi to talk about why midlife is actually the moment most people become more ready for a real relationship — and what's quietly getting in the way. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes! Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 0:26Jonathan Fields?

  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.

• 1:09Jonathan Fields?

  I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. And I want to start at the very beginning with Tom. We'll jump in there right after this short break.

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• 2:55Jonathan Fields?

  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 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?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  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 intent and orientation around it. So to go back to that, I 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 and some dark spots and couldn't make sense of it.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  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 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...

• 4:52Speaker 00

  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 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

• 5:33Speaker 00

  on my life was 37 years when I started to read about it, that that did two things. One is that it got me focused on, I need to live as much of a life as I can in about 37 years professionally, family wise and everything else. And it also helped me to see that the more I learned about this condition, the more I could stay ahead of it and the more I could stay on top of it. And so that's when I mentioned the way it still orients my days today. I still wake up every morning and do at least, well, usually two hours of reading on medical journals that are about health and cancer and my condition, because it gives me the knowledge and the psychological confidence to know that I can

• 6:15Speaker 00

  get out ahead of this thing and do everything I possibly can. And so I think when I, when you ask that question, I don't, I probably haven't given that enough thought, but it really has been helpful to focus my energy. And then something interesting happened when the pandemic hit five, six years ago now, where it was fascinating to me how all of a sudden, all these Zoom conversations I was having with leaders and friends and people, I kind of got this taste of it. They were jumping into my world for a little bit and they had this taste of their mortality and You know, as I'm looking at what's happening right now, I think I can see some of the residual of that where more people are asking questions about, why am I even doing this? What's the point of it?

• 7:00Speaker 00

  How do I focus on what matters most? And that might be a good byproduct of that kind of wake-up call that a lot of people had during the pandemic.

• 7:08Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting. Like, this thing that was set in motion for you at 16 years old, getting you to look at the world a little bit differently, but also ask a different set of questions, and also just be very acquainted with your own mortality from the earliest days, even in your mind saying, okay, I'm doing a bit of research. The over-under, as you described it, or the potential, like the, quote, "average endpoint" is 37 years old. So like, you're almost like you're working towards, it's almost like somebody has told you, like, this is one, and I'm going to work backwards from there. And then we fast forward to the pandemic, when now millions of people are becoming, you know, like, just deeply, viscerally acquainted with their own mortality.

• 7:51Jonathan Fields?

  It's almost like, well, you've had decades of training in living in that space already.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's interesting, because psychologists have studied in recent years what they've called post-traumatic growth, where a lot of people who go through experiences that actually come out the back end more resilient and stronger, and they have a deeper ability, in my observation, to focus on what matters most. I mean, it's, it's, when you have that frame of mind, it's a lot easier to say, all these emails, or this, all this stuff flying at me, does it really deserve my attention today when you've got limited time? Right? And so, it's, for me, it's been kind of a good way to prioritize my effort in a given, within a day.

• 8:35Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, at the same time... Again, sort of just bring us back to that, those teen years. You know, like, it sounds like you're living almost like these, these two different trajectories. Like, on the one hand, you have this knowledge about what's going on in your body. And, you know, what the science says is, quote, you know, like, likely or out there in the horizon. And that also motivates you to just really deepen into research, to stay on top of this. So it sounds like, while one script was saying, okay, it is what it is. Let me accept this and live the best of my life now. There's, there was another curiosity, a seed that was planted in you that said,

• 9:17Jonathan Fields?

  but maybe as I close the gap between now and that date, things will change. And I want to make sure that I'm on top of that.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, that was the, I mean, the only, I think the thing that gave me hope in the midst of that initial diagnosis was that doctors and specialists said to me, you know, as long as you are getting full body MRIs and CTs of your brain and spine and abdomen every six months, as arduous as that is, because, I mean, I just go, I call it tubing every six months. I just go to the National Institutes of Health and sit in tubes for a whole week and get my blood drawn all week and meet with doctors. And that's, I mean, there's some burden to that and you get stressed during that week. But at the same time, I knew that as long as I did that, I could probably keep myself alive, even if it meant a lot of surgeries and so forth, and maybe hope to live a pretty normal life.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And now I'm 50 and in relatively good health and hoping that I'm kind of at the midpoint of life right now in an ideal scenario still. So it's the little seeds of hope that some doctors and family members and people planted back then has, has really worked out pretty well for me after several decades of this.

• 10:28Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. Have, do you feel like being so connected to this and also then being so devout in terms of really examining what's happening on the inside as well as on the outside on, as you described, every six months?

• 10:44Jonathan Fields?

  That that has put you in a stance where you're so much better informed than often the typical person is about what is truly going on and in a state where you're actually accepting that rather than trying to deny it or push it off. That it's almost led you to be able to be more proactive in making decisions about what you say yes or no to, both in larger life, but in terms of your health from the earliest days in a way where a lot of people don't get to that place unless and until something really major happens with their health, often decades later in life.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I really, the more I've learned about medicine and genetics and how one drug affects somebody so much differently than another and lifestyle and everything else, I think everyone, in my opinion, should be as open as they possibly can challenge themselves to be, to understand what's going on inside their body and with their genes and everything else, because it essentially gives you a roadmap to know what you can stay ahead of. And I've learned more and more from that and it gives me more hope and confidence for the future because I have that knowledge. And I mean, one of the things I learned many years ago when I worked on a book about this

• 12:01Speaker 00

  called Eat, Move, Sleep, I discovered in my own kind of search about this when I was in my twenties probably, that knowing you have big genetic threats like that, it's still not a great way to avoid having the cheeseburger and french fries or just laying around for a whole day, to be really honest. But what is, is now that I've got kids who are 15, 17 now, but when I was younger, I realized I need to do the right things in terms of being active and getting sleep and eating the right foods, so I can be a good dad at four o'clock or five o'clock, or I can be effective in a meeting at two or three in the afternoon or when I'm presenting. And connecting those short-term dots, even for somebody like me with those big threats,

• 12:42Speaker 00

  in terms of your day-to-day health and wellbeing, I think all of us need to do more of that short-term incentive, connecting things in order to make the right decisions that lead to the long-term outcomes we care about. Because, I mean, just thinking abstractly about losing weight or staying alive another 10 years, even in my case, is just a crappy motivator.

• 13:04Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Tell me if this is too personal, but I'm curious. You, as you shared, like you have kids now who are sort of like a similar age as you were when you were first diagnosed. When you go back to the moment where you're making a decision about, do I have kids or not? I'm curious what that that moment is like for you.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  You know, that's interesting because my mom kind of was real close with and parents and grandparents. The thing that they'd said to me really early on, when I was probably 17 years old and people kind of ask about that, and I was trying to figure out where where life went and if I could live a relatively normal life and have a family and all that. I think, I mean, maybe within a month of my initial diagnosis, I I still remember my mom saying something to me about, you know, of course, that doesn't preclude anything in the future because, I mean, the life I'd already had to that point was spectacular. And I was because it could have been, and I knew that I'd probably get to live another three, four, five, six decades, whatever it might be.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  And so it didn't, it didn't really cross my mind that that was something precluding having a family and doing all those things in the future. And then, of course, as I got to learn more about the condition was and was really involved with the national organization and getting the depth and trenches of it and seeing so many people who did live good, long lives with the condition and with a lot of monitoring and scanning and testing, I didn't really think twice about that. And neither of my kids have the condition, but it, I feel like we're, we're at a point right now with genetic testing and monitoring. And now there's a, there's an FDA approved medicine for the condition that I have, which

• 14:55Speaker 00

  was approved in 2021, and nobody saw that coming, which kind of prevents and stops growth of tumors as long as they've been testing it here. So the

• 15:06Speaker 00

  And all the things I've seen recently, to be very honest with the way that AI will change the speed of medicine, that's the one place where AI is going to rattle things in a good way, in a revolutionary way that no one really sees coming right now. But I spend so much time reading about it, I'm really confident about it. So I've got a whole, I feel like I have a whole new lease on life in the last 12 months, just because of what I've learned about that. Even if you have people who are the top minds on rare cancer research in the world, you get them together and so forth. As human beings, we're not capable of looking at all of the permutations of what's going on genetically, what's going on biologically, and the combinations of different drugs and the new compounds that

• 15:51Speaker 00

  can be developed. It's, it's just astounding what I'm seeing happen right now. I mean, it makes me very hopeful for everyone in our generation that's dealing with life-threatening diseases or debilitating diseases and how we can hopefully, I mean, you already see this with some cancers in the last five years where we're turning them into more manageable chronic conditions like diabetes and the like. And I think that's going to happen much more rapidly than people are anticipating right now. And so that is, that's something for all of us to be hopeful about. And one of the things I would say to people based on all of this experience I've had is that you've got to, and you hinted at this, knowledge

• 16:31Speaker 00

  and information can be powerful and help you to stay ahead of those things, as long as you don't kind of put your head in your, in the sand when it comes to your own health and medical treatment and so forth.

• 16:44Jonathan Fields?

  I think often, especially as we enter midlife, as we sort of like, you know, get a bit older, we start to get concerned, like we're entering the season where, quote, things happen. We see it happening to friends, to family members, maybe we feel something that's just a little bit off inside of ourselves, and it engenders fear. And understandably, we're human. And part of that response so often is, well, I don't want to actually acknowledge this. I don't, if there's something going on, you know, like I'm in that age window where there's probably something, let me just put this off for as long as I can, rather than saying, well,

• 17:20Jonathan Fields?

  Let's just get honest, like information is better than ignorance in every situation in my mind, you know, like, let's find out what is the truth, like, what do the, what do the numbers say? And then we can make more informed decisions from there, rather than just hoping and praying, um, and trying to say, like, there's, there's nothing going on, I'm fine, um, maybe there is nothing going on, but information is better than ignorance. It's just something I just keep going back to.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think in my experience, openness to new experiences and especially, I think, intellectual curiosity may be the most underrated health strategy.

• 18:00Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm, tell me more.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  In terms of understanding how, the, the right answer for one person's health is night and day different from the person next to them, right? And so, we, we read these diet books where, and even if you're reading a good diet book, let's say, weight loss itself isn't the goal, if you really think about it, we're saying, what's the point here? The point of a diet is not just to lose five pounds, the point of what you're doing is to build a sustainable lifestyle that leads to more energy in a day, to be a better friend, to be a better spouse, to be a better parent, and to live longer in good health, I would argue, right? And so, if you want to do that, and you presume that

• 18:42Speaker 00

  that's a desired outcome, then the more information you have about yourself, about your genetics, about how your body responds to different foods, about what activity does for your routine, about your sleep patterns and how to master that, getting more knowledge and awareness around that, and learning more about it for yourself, and really, I've found taking ownership and saying, hey, you know what, a physician has, I don't know if it's three minutes or 15 minutes to learn about you in a given year, so there's, and I've learned this the hard way, there's no doctor on this planet that's ever going to know a tenth as much about me as I have the ability to do, and that's not just someone in a condition like I have, that applies to all of us, so, to take ownership, to be

• 19:26Speaker 00

  kind of the guardian or CEO of your own health, and then to learn as much as you can about that, and be open minded and learn more, I think that's kind of, especially with all the information at our fingertips right now, if you don't do that, it's on you.

• 19:41Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm, yeah, I agree with that.

• 19:44Jonathan Fields?

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• 20:29Jonathan Fields?

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• 21:13Jonathan Fields?

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• 22:03Jonathan Fields?

  Good Life Project is sponsored by Bombas. So there's this moment every fall here in Boulder. The morning air is crisp, the light goes golden against the mountains, and something in you just wants to slow down, like soft layers and long walks and a warm mug and a good book. You know, the cozy feeling has just arrived. And cozy really does start at your feet. Bombas just launched new suede moccasins, cushy soles, a shearling lining and water-resistant suede. So a little frost on the grass isn't a problem. Our whole family's sock drawers are basically shrines to Bombas, have been for years. Marina wool for chilly mornings, sports socks for when we get out and move, and compression socks for long travel days, which I'm actually about to have. Opening that drawer, they're just a ripe pair for whatever the day holds.

• 22:48Jonathan Fields?

  But the other thing that has kept me a Bombas fan for all of these years, for every item you buy, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchased, one donated. Over 200 million donations and counting. So head over to Bombas.com/goodlife and use the code GOODLIFE for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash goodlife, code GOODLIFE at checkout. Let's broaden the conversation out a bit. You know, we're talking about being wise and getting information about our, our health. But part of what gets set in motion with everybody, with you and much earlier than, than a lot of folks, is this question of like, what am I doing with my life?

• 23:30Jonathan Fields?

  You know, like, what, what is a good use of my time on this planet? No matter how long or short it is. And, and so often we're, we're fed a series of questions and a series of expectations that we try and live into. And then we, we find ourselves, you know, at a certain moment in life, saying to ourselves, I, I, I feel like I checked most of those boxes and I don't feel the way I thought I would feel. One of the words that so often comes up in this part of the conversation is, is purpose. And there's so much around, and it's to a certain extent, I feel it's almost like a loaded word these days. You have an interesting take on purpose. Tell me more about your lens.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think I learned the hard way as I was working on this book, that purpose is too loaded of a word to even have in the book's title, so we'll come back to that. And so we changed it at the last minute. But so I'm going, so as we talked about, I go all the way through life and I accomplish, I feel like I accomplish things I want to accomplish, have a family, my kids are in good health, everything's going good with my family. And then I hit the age of 40, where, I mean, that's past the over/under on the lifespan, right? And I kind of look back and say to myself, so what have I been doing and what's next? Because I got there, right? And I look back and really try to think about it critically. And I had spent the first 40 years of my life essentially

• 24:55Speaker 00

  following in footsteps and expectations like all most of us do of what our parents did, worked for the same company and startup as my family, and kind of felt like I checked the boxes and followed all those societal and familial expectations. But I was asking myself, what was the point of that? And is it really what I want to be doing and how I want to be allocating my time and what I feel like I should do in the next half of my life? Right? And so that's what led to this book that's now called What's the Point here that's coming out. And originally, I thought that book was supposed to be about purpose and career. And so it was titled Purpose Unlocked. And the more I got into the research on it and talked to friends and family members about it, I realized

• 25:40Speaker 00

  that when most of us, and I'm in this boat too, you hear the word purpose, your heart clenches up a little bit and you're thinking, oh, that's a, that's a big thing that people feel like they're supposed to find on a really sunny day or descends from the heavens. And it's, it's, it's just too much and it's heavy, like you talked about. So as I got into the work on it, I was kind of refreshed to learn that Really, all the purpose in life is built within the day. And purpose is about what you do in a given hour and prioritizing what you should be doing and asking why and asking what the point of spending two hours on this activity is or an hour investing in this relationship or this effort or this company or this product or whatever it might be.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  And so that's where we evolved to saying, just ask what's the point all the time during the day? And then if you do that well, that is how you turn purpose into your daily superpower, which was the subtitle of the book we kind of got to. But just sorting that through took me several years and a lot of introspection because I realized that in the last years of my life, I mean, I say, well, you're supposed to do these purposeful things and focus on your strengths and all this stuff. But yet, when I really looked honestly and clinically at what I was doing throughout the day, I'd kind of followed in my family footsteps for one. And then I also spent an extraordinary amount of time in my day just kind of responding to clients and customers and emails and studying social feeds.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  And the thing I was most guilty of in the last five or 10 years is I spent too much time watching stock tickers and finances, to be honest, and watching CNBC and following business stuff. And I acted on and did nothing based on that, but I just let it consume time and distract me, right? So when I thought about it clinically, I'm like, tune out those distractions, see what you can get done, invest in a conversation with a colleague that matters, invest in an hour of writing, invest in an hour of having a good discussion with my kids, asking them questions, and realize that that's where all the meaning and purpose is really built and that you just have to build more of that into your day. And so that's where a lot of it started.

• 27:50Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I love that. I mean, that simple question, what's the point of this? Like, if you stop at any given moment during your day and just take a beat, look at what you're doing or where your mind is or what you're not doing, say, what's the point of this? I'm guessing for a lot of us, and I'm raising my hand here, solid chunk of my day, I'm going to be a little bit jarred by the way I answer that question. Or maybe I actually, I'm not even going to be able to come up with, I don't know what the purpose, like, I literally, there's, there's no reason, like, I don't know what the point of what I'm doing right now is, which, which is information right there, too. You touched on something else that I don't want to gloss over, which is this notion that

• 28:31Jonathan Fields?

  so often we hear some version of, you know, you've got to figure out, quote, like, your purpose, like, there is a singular, like, unifying one grand purpose. And part of our work is, you know, we, we need to actually show up and do the work and investigate to define or divine that singular purpose. And then we can finally live into it. What I love about what you're saying is, like, maybe some people actually do have that moment. Maybe some people actually can find a singular thing where they're just like, I want to pour everything I have into it. But in my experience, that is very much the outlier, not the rule. And for everybody else, you're, you're giving them a way to say, you can still move through your days.

• 29:15Jonathan Fields?

  And in all of these tiny little moments along the way, find a sense of purpose that is also deeply nourishing.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, in my experience, I've studied this. Now, I think, purpose is kind of manufactured in the lab of our daily choices. So it's, 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, or maybe when you're gone, if you're working on a, a big project, or whatever it might be. And so, when you bring purpose down to that level and say, I mean, I could, I, I, right now, I could go respond to five cold emails from people that I don't have any relationship with, that I don't know, and that's 10 fewer minutes I have to have a meaningful conversation with my daughter after school today, right? And so, when you put it in that frame, I can just ignore those emails forever, and it doesn't matter, because I'm doing something that's more purposeful, right?

• 30:05Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, that makes sense. So there's another P word that tends to enter the conversation when we talk about purpose, that is probably equally, if not more loaded, and that word is passion. And again, this is one of those words where so often the guidance is that you've got to, quote, "find your passion," or "follow your passion." Good advice, bad advice?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Maybe the worst advice.

• 30:26Jonathan Fields?

  Nah.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  I, I think- I mean, I think when I, when a guidance counselor asked me that when I was coming out of college and I'd already had to deal with all this stuff, it, at the time, I remember that it sounded so hollow to me, but now that I've studied it, it's even rings more hollow because when you tell someone that they just need to go out in the world and find what they're passionate about, and so I think passion by definition is kind of self-oriented, and I would argue, whereas purpose is by nature other-oriented. It's about what you do that makes a difference for another person.

• 31:03Jonathan Fields?

  So, you know, I think the conversation around purpose and passion is something that so many of us explore and, and sort of like refocusing on, on the external part, on how can I help others is a really powerful moment. There is also this sort of like really interesting, but also somewhat uncomfortable idea that you share. We touched on it a little bit earlier in our conversation. It's this notion that many of us, we have these ambitions that are, for lack of a better word, they're inherited, you know, from, from culture, from parents, from local community, or maybe they're just dreams of ours that we had at an earlier

• 31:45Jonathan Fields?

  part of our life that are no longer really relevant to now. How much in your mind, how much of a sort of like, you know, present day adult striving is really ours and how much of it is kind of borrowed?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it is an uncomfortable question that I had to wrestle with myself. I kind of looked back and said, you know, I felt like, or the story I told myself when I graduated from college was, you know, I had my own ambitions and wanted to do something new and different and all of that. And then by the time I hit 40, I kind of looked back and said, you know what, I grew up around researchers and teachers and entrepreneurs, and not only did I fall into that same kind of default track, but I went to work for the exact same company and doing the same things with family. And that's, that's really the default track over the last hundred, 200 years. And some of it came about because of the best of intentions where you have a laborer transferring a skill, whether it's being

• 32:42Speaker 00

  a cobbler or work in a field or being a dentist, whatever it might be, to the next generation. And so you have parents who kind of want to pass that along and see their kids, quote, "following their footsteps" and all that. So some of it comes about with good intentions. Other spots or places where maybe the parents didn't succeed but wanted to and push the kids into that, and that's its own psychological thing. But when you look at this across the labor force, what it leads to that is deeply concerning to me is kids get funneled into these paths when they're maybe 14 or 15 years old. And it hit me like a brick when I asked my daughter when she was 14 years old. I said, you know, what are you thinking about? What sounds fun to you when you think about the future? And I'd been working on careers and some of this work.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  And she said, well, you know, I think maybe I could be a writer. That's a novel thought. She said, or maybe a teacher. And my wife's a second grade teacher. So those were her two thoughts. So she's exactly two for two and didn't mention anything outside of that. So I realized in that moment that most of us get all the way to the end of our life, and if we're lucky, we've seen two, three, four careers in a good amount of depth. Yet, when I did, when I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and looked at all the jobs out there, it turns out that you would need to know about 50 jobs to see 50% of what's out there in the labor force. So most of us are forced right now to make big life choices. Where do you spend four years of your life studying, or maybe more, or go into a job?

• 34:08Speaker 00

  When we're essentially looking out of a pinhole, if you think about a camera lens, and the aperture is at about 2% or 3%. And so even if we were to be able to see 10 or 20 jobs, you're still just getting a pretty small field of view of what's out there. So I think as we move to more of an information economy where people are doing different things, it could be pretty liberating for a lot of us to look back and say, hey, you know what? I might have been in this job because I kind of fell into some parental defaults or some societal or financial defaults. And the result of that isn't that you've wasted time in life. The result of that might be that you have a lot more opportunity to get into and do

• 34:50Speaker 00

  other things than you ever would have imagined if you explore a bit more. So that's the optimistic side of it to me. There are a lot of pressures forcing kids to try and narrow and specialize, even when they're 15 and 16 years old right now, which it seems like that's the default thing for schools and parents to do, and they just do it without realizing it in many cases.

• 35:10Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I really do think, I agree with you. I think that that pressure just starts coming earlier and earlier. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 35:22Jonathan Fields?

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• 36:07Jonathan Fields?

  City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Good Life Project is sponsored by TinCan. So if you grew up in the 70s or 80s, you probably still remember your best friend's phone number and stretching the kitchen phone cord around the corner for privacy. Our executive producer, Lindsay, wanted that same freedom for her kids, eight and 10. So in January, she got them a TinCan. Now, friends call the house to chat, make plans, and check in without borrowing her phone. They even keep a handwritten phone book next to it. I kind of love that. TinCan is the new school way for kids to talk with their friends. It's a secure landline that lets them call all their favorite people, but with parental controls to keep them protected.

• 36:50Jonathan Fields?

  No screens, no algorithms, no texting, just a phone being a phone. Kids can only call or be called by people on your approved list. Calls to other TinCans and 911 are always free. And there's even an answering machine for messages that are, I'm told, gloriously ridiculous. Go to tincan.com/goodlife to get $10 off your first order, exclusive for our listeners. That's tincan.com/goodlife for $10 off. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Tincan.com/goodlife.

• 37:24Speaker 02

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• 37:58Jonathan Fields?

  It ties into this other topic which you explore as well, which is this notion of what are we actually working towards? And this notion of enough or enoughness. You know, like, what is there? And, you know, what does... We are all working towards that moment where we kind of feel like we've accomplished enough, we have saved enough, there's enough of... However, you know, you're measuring this thing. What do we get wrong about this notion of enough?

• 38:26Speaker 00

  You know, one of the things that got my attention on that topic is when I started into well-being research and we were looking at global well-being metrics when I worked at Gallup more than a decade ago. And the one question academics we brought in had used for 50 years to measure well-being is a question developed by a researcher named Hadley Cantrell, and it's called the ladder of life. And it's, if you imagine a ladder with steps numbered one through 10, where do you stand today? Where do you think you'll stand a year from now? And that's kind of the gold standard default for how people have measured this well-being thing. But the more I got into that, it dawned on me that if you ask someone to imagine a ladder, that's the exact wrong way to think about life.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Because if you're looking at life like it's a ladder, you're always trying to climb and assuming that each rung adds a little bit more. And if you climb 10 steps higher, you might double your income or double your happiness or whatever. And...

• 39:23Speaker 00

  In an ideal scenario, that's not how life works. Life is not zero sum. If I get a lot happier and do a lot more, that means that my wife or one of my best friends is likely to be happier, not less happy. It's not a zero sum thing. And so the more we get wrapped up in social comparison, whether that's comparison of titles, whether that's comparison on social media, or whether that's comparison of salary, that's actually a big detriment to our happiness. And once you get to a certain point, it's important to note that, once you get to a point in income where it's not causing stress every day, so you feel like you can pay your bills, you can pay your mortgage, you can put food on the table, and the things that you need to do, once you get to that point, I think it is important to try and disconnect

• 40:08Speaker 00

  as much as you can from chasing especially financial status, because that's a game that nobody's ever going to win, even when you get to the billionaire level.

• 40:17Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, and yet so many of us aspire. And like you said, when you're playing the comparison game, which we're all kind of wired for, you know, it's almost like if you look at the 10 people you surround yourself with, and you feel like you're constantly the one who's in a state of lack, that affects us, you know? So there's this really interesting and powerful dynamic of, you know, our sense of enoughness is in no small way determined by the choices we make about who we surround ourselves with also.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  It is, and I think one of the things that I learned while I was working on this book is that I live across the street from a big sprawling cemetery here in Arlington, Virginia, and I walk through there and I need some peace of mind sometimes. If you look at just what's written on the headstones, I mean, it's all just like a husband, a father, and a mentor, and all these things, a leader in the community, and I mean, there is not a thing on those headstones about status, or titles, or how much money you made, or how many followers you have, just nothing at all. And so if you can try to deliberately orient your day towards the things that will be useful and helpful, whether that's putting time into a relationship, or helping your community, that will be remembered, and knowing that those are going to be the anchors

• 41:32Speaker 00

  in the end, and the money just passes on, or expires, or goes to the taxman, or whatever. The sooner you can get to that and have the way you think about the importance of what you're doing in your life be non comparative and non-financial as possible, it takes a lot of the edge off, at least in my experience.

• 41:51Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, which I think also brings us to the notion of legacy. You know, and it's funny, I've been asked the question, you know, like, what do you want your legacy to be? I'm sure you've been asked that, I'm sure so many of us have been asked it. I'm sure like a lot of people, I think, once we get to the middle season of life, we start to think about it. And so many of us are wondering, like, what is the thing we'll leave behind? You know, it's almost like when you think about legacy, like tied up in that is, how strong is our quest for immortality? And, and, you know, like, what do we really want to represent us when we're no longer here? And then the deeper question is, do you actually care about it at all? Take me into your take on legacy.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. And I, I think for me, I've realized more and more as I get to the second half of my life here, that the things that I do today that continue to grow a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, are the most important. And that's not just a creative project, or a book, or something that scales like that, or a product. Most of it will be the product of what I've invested in other people and those relationships. And it will be when my daughter is 50 years old, and she's got kids of her own, and she's doing things, and she makes a decision that, and she won't even have realized it or think about it, right? So I don't, I don't know if that's a legacy.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I think it's, I've started to think about my days as just, I get to show up in the morning and plant a bunch of seeds that will continue to grow, ideally 10 years from now, maybe when I'm gone, and maybe people won't even notice, but will have, I mean, I wrote, my first book I wrote was called How Full Is Your Bucket? When I was 25 years old. And they still use that in K-12 schools all over the country. And my kids started at the local elementary school here, and that's kind of like the default curriculum, and it's how the kids have their conversations and do drops for their buckets every day and stuff. And so. Knowing that that's going on, I don't have to see it. I don't need any recognition from it. I don't need anybody to give me credit for it now or when I'm gone, but just knowing that there are some residual seeds that are growing there, for me, that's

• 43:59Speaker 00

  the whole ballgame essentially.

• 44:01Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I feel so much the same way. I think so often we're looking for, you know, what is the big dent in the universe that we hope to make and then leave behind? And in my mind, and I'm right there beside you, like for me, it's always like, you know, what's this small, this seed, using your language, that I can plant in the hardened minds of the people that are closest to me, just on everyday basis, that carries on in some tiny meaningful way. That is literally all I care about. Like, I could care less if anyone knows of me or my work beyond those people. There's no monument that needs to get built, there's no entity that needs to be left behind, no body of work. I mean, I love the fact

• 44:46Jonathan Fields?

  that there's things that I create that make a difference from, you know, beyond that, but it's really the people closest to me. You know, it's my family and my chosen family, where I focus all of my energy now and where if I hope to have something that's left behind, like that is where it lands. And yet, we often spend so much time trying to create something beyond that, thinking that that somehow will be important. And I just never bought into that.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  And that's really well put. And I mean, the more I got into this, like, I mean, I think of purpose is more like just gardening throughout the day than it is finding some grand thing or having some big accomplishment in life, right? I mean, I think that's when I did my 40-year-old look back at how much striving I'd done and was that really the right anchor, I realized that that's, I mean, all those things will disappear and be gone, the kind of individual accomplishments and things that people might think of in a traditional legacy mindset, but yet the influence on others and I mean, I've done a lot in the last years, like a good friend of mine who's, one of his parents had an aggressive form of cancer and just helping him out and doing that behind the scenes that nobody even knows

• 45:57Speaker 00

  about, that's got more meaning to me than the last book I worked on, to be honest, or whatever.

• 46:02Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, there's, there's a sort of, I guess you'd call it a model. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Ron Baum's ladder. It's sort of a

• 46:13Jonathan Fields?

  And it comes out of Judaism. It's this notion of like the ladder of giving. And what is sort of like, I don't know if the word pure is right, but like you're sort of like rising up the ladder of like, what is the cleanness, the purest, the highest level of giving? And if I remember correctly, that the highest is giving where the recipient doesn't know who you're in front of. In fact, nobody knows that you are the person behind anything that lands in another being's life in a good way. And oftentimes, we do the exact opposite. You know, we're waiting for the naming rights rather than just saying, that's actually not what it's about. Like, it's a beautiful thing just to know that in some way, shape, or form, somebody's been touched by the fact that you were here for a heartbeat.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  That's, you know, I actually close this book out with a personal story where my grandfather, who I wrote How Full Is Your Bucket? We wrote it while he was in his last couple of months of life with advanced gastroesophageal cancer. And one night, I was staying at his house and he was already, he still couldn't communicate with us his last hours of life. And I walked in the hallway to go see if he was still with us. And there was a hospice nurse who was reading aloud to him. And with just emotional cadence, like I haven't heard, with all the emotion, everything else. And I'm like, oh, wow, is he awake or alert? And I kind of peeked around the corner. And he was completely out of it, non-responsive. But she was doing that with just no recognition. She didn't know I was there, just nothing.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  And to me, that was kind of the purest form of what you're talking about that I'd ever seen. And I'm not going to pretend that I get to that level even on my best days. But I think that's something amazing to aspire to, because the more you get to that mindset, it takes away a lot of the things that get in our way and cause stress in the course of a normal day and a life.

• 48:02Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. So for somebody who's been joining us in this conversation, they're kind of listening and nodding along, saying, yeah, a lot of this makes sense. And maybe there are moments in their life where they're really thinking how they're spending their days and their time and how they want to spend. What's a first step in, in your mind, to, to having this day and then the next day and then the next unfold more intentionally?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  You know, the biggest challenge I see right now is that, and I think we all see this every time we go out to dinner or walk through an airport or whatever, is that I'm concerned that a vast majority of us are kind of sleepwalking through our lives and days right now because it's remarkably easy and maybe even somewhat enjoyable just to respond to all the stuff flying at us in a given day. I mean, it's, it's easy and it's fun and it's light for me to say, hey, I got through all my emails today, or I read my entire social feed, or I got, I got some project done I'd been working on. And it's also really easy and enjoyable to just let the next episode play on Netflix, right?

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Because TV is better now than it's been in my entire lifetime. So there, there's all this stuff where it's, the, the path of least resistance is just to be a consumer and a responder. But yet, when you look at where the future is headed from a work and a purpose and a career standpoint, I don't think that any of us can afford to get totally caught up in that mode because if you're just responding to things and doing things that are kind of routineized and mechanized, that will be the easiest thing to replace in six months or 18 months and definitely by 36 months from now. And so I think we've got to kind of challenge ourselves and challenge our friends and challenge

• 49:54Speaker 00

  our kids and everyone and our parents to say, how do you, how do you kind of shake yourself out of this and make sure that you're doing some of that gardening and doing work with purpose on a day-to-day basis, even if it's just asking good questions and investing in relationships or whatever that might be, so that we're doing some things with intent that make a difference each day? Because that's, that'll probably be the one big emotional competitive differentiator that we poor humans have over machines in a few years here.

• 50:24Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I'm right there with you. Feels like a place for us to come full circle. So in this Container of Good Life project, if I offer up the phrase, "to live a good life," what comes up?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  What comes up for me is to...

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend. And to have as much of my time in a given day oriented towards efforts that improve the wellbeing or lot in life of other people. And I feel like if I do that well, my health and wellbeing and everything will take care of itself.

• 51:00Jonathan Fields?

  Thank you.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 51:03Jonathan Fields?

  So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from today's conversation. The thing that I'm sitting with is something that Tom said about purpose being more like gardening than finding. We spend so much of our lives looking for the grand thing, the calling, the accomplishment that kind of justifies everything that came before it. And what he kept coming back to is that the most meaningful stuff rarely looks like that. It's the seed you plant without needing to see them grow. It's helping a friend through something hard. It's the conversation that you have with your kid that you only remember having, but that lands in them anyway. So three things in particular I carry from this one. First, the concept of the pinhole.

• 51:47Jonathan Fields?

  Most of us make enormous bets on what we want our lives to be while seeing less than 5% of what's actually available. That's worth sitting with, especially if you're at a moment of transition. Second, the idea of the ladder versus the garden. Life isn't zero sum. Someone else's flourishing doesn't subtract from yours. And the sooner you stop climbing and just start tending, the more of it actually just sticks. And third, the headstone test. Tom walks through a cemetery near his house when he needs a kind of a reset. Nothing on these stones mentions status, or titles, or salaries, or followers, just

• 52:29Jonathan Fields?

  relationships, just the people someone showed up for. If you can orient your gaze towards the things that would end up there, you're probably pointed in the right direction. So this week, maybe notice one moment where you're reacting to something, an email, a feed reflex, versus one moment where you're actually choosing.

• 52:50Jonathan Fields?

  Just noticing is enough to get started. Hey, before you leave, next week, we're sitting down with Bela Gandhi to talk about why midlife is actually the moment most people become more ready for a real relationship, and what's quietly getting in the way of finding love later in life. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. And do me a favor, a seven-second favor. Share this episode with just one person who's been quietly wondering whether the life that they've been working toward is really theirs. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Chris Carter crafted our theme music.

• 53:32Jonathan Fields?

  And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/Bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 54:28Speaker 07

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• 54:35Jonathan Fields?

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