Episode Details

What if the thing you spend the most time on at work won't matter at all when you're gone? 

It's a confronting question, but it's the kind Tom Rath lives with deliberately. He walks past a 10,000-headstone cemetery near his home in Washington DC and has never once seen a grave mention social media followers, email response times, or job titles. Yet these are the things most of us spend our days chasing. 

In this episode, I sit down with Tom Rath, one of the most widely read authors in the world of work and wellbeing and the man behind StrengthsFinder 2.0, How Full Is Your Bucket?, and his just-released book What's the Point? Tom challenges the "follow your passion" narrative head-on and makes the case that purpose isn't a grand discovery waiting for you someday. It's what you do for other people, hour by hour, throughout the day. 

We get into the single question Tom uses every morning to reprioritise his time, how to escape the comparison trap that platforms like LinkedIn are designed to pull you into, and why he believes the so-called initiators are the ones who will thrive in the age of AI. 

Tom and I discuss: 

• Why "follow your passion" is misguided advice, and what Tom recommends doing instead when thinking about work and career 

• The statistics on how much of our career path we unconsciously inherit from our parents, and what to do about it 

• How strengths only really come to life when they're turned outward in service of another person 

• Tom's "what's the point?" question and how to use it daily to reprioritise your time and cut through distraction 

• Why resume virtues and eulogy virtues are so different, and how walking through cemeteries has sharpened Tom's thinking on what matters 

• Social comparison as the single biggest tax on your sense of progress at work, and how to reduce its grip