Episode 20 - Friendship At Work: Tom Rath On The Most Underused Leadership Tool That Makes The Biggest Difference
People with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs – and yet friendship remains almost entirely absent from most organizations' leadership strategy, budget, and culture design. Tom Rath, author of a dozen books about work, life, and leadership, including Vital Friends, argues that social wellbeing is the single strongest predictor of overall life satisfaction, that high-achievers are chronically the worst at investing in it, and that the fix is less complicated than most leaders assume – but it does require actually treating relationships as a priority rather than a byproduct.
Why do friendships at work actually matter and what should leaders do to effectively support them?
On the first day of Tom Rath's graduate program in positive psychology at UPenn, his advisor Chris Peterson put up a single slide. It read: “Other people matter.” That was it. The whole program defined in just three words.
Following twenty years of workplace research at Gallup, a pandemic, a Surgeon General's loneliness advisory, and witnessing a measurable collapse in close friendships, Tom says those three words have only gotten more empirically defensible – as well as more routinely ignored.
Tom’s book Vital Friends, which was published in 2006 and based on research with 14 million Gallup participants, traced back to a single question in Gallup's Q12 employee engagement survey: “I have a best friend at work.” Not a good friend, not a close friend – a best friend.
“That question was selected because if you ask people, 'I have a good friend at work,' or 'I have a friend at work,' those didn't sort outcomes and productivity and turnover. You need a relationship that close in order to have fun, in order to be engaged, in order to be productive.”
– Tom Rath, workplace researcher and 12x bestselling author
The predictive power is striking: employees with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. And yet, Tom says, the first thing most executives do when they see the question is ask for it to be removed from the survey. It’s not that they're against friendship. They just don't think it's their problem to solve.
That instinct is the crux of the issue. The organizations that do this well don't install friendship as a program; they create the conditions for it to happen naturally. Tom's grandfather, Don Clifton – aka the father of strengths-based psychology and a longtime leader at Gallup – kept only one coffee pot in the entire building, so that everyone had to trek across departments and stories to get it, crossing paths and building friendships in the process. The one coffee pot rule demonstrated that Tom’s grandpa understood something most workplace consultants charge a lot of money to explain.
Why are men losing their close friends and what does it mean for workplace dynamics?
The male friendship recession is one of the sharper trend lines in the social wellbeing data landscape. The share of American men reporting at least six close friends fell from 55% in 1990 to 27% in 2021. The share reporting no close friends at all rose from 3% to 15% over the same period. Loneliness now carries roughly the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The barrier, Tom argues, isn't a lack of desire for more friendships, it's the psychological weight of initiating them. Men who haven't spoken to a college friend in a year tend to assume that reaching out would be unwelcome, that they'd be intruding, that the other person has moved on. In reality, almost everyone in that circle feels exactly the same way and is waiting for someone else to go first. The silence is mutual, and so is the longing to break it.
There's also a neurological frame at work. Research on gender and stress response suggests that while men tend toward fight-or-flight under pressure, women tend to "tend and befriend" instead, by building social bonds as a stress response. Men, in other words, may be wired to pull inward at precisely the moments when reaching out would help them most. Truly impeccable timing, fellas.
The fix isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable. Reach out. Send the text. Accept the invitation even when staying home is easier.
“Once they actually do that, everybody else has the same want and need and is kind of unplugged in the same regard.”
– Tom Rath
For leaders, this has a specific implication. The men on your team, especially the senior ones and the high-achievers, are arguably among the loneliest people in your organization. They're not going to tell you that and they're not going to ask for help building connections. And the engagement survey question they most need you to act on is the one they'd be most embarrassed to admit applies to them.
How many close friends do you actually need and why is it critical to stop expecting one person to be everything?
According to Tom’s research for Vital Friends, having even one person who expects you to be someone significantly raises your odds of recovering from difficulty, unemployment, or crisis. That's just the floor. The next meaningful jump comes between three and four close relationships. Beyond that, the right number depends on your wiring: introverts may be well-served by four to six, while extroverts may need closer to ten to feel genuinely connected.
The corollary insight – and the one that most directly challenges how people think about friendship – is that different relationships serve different functions. Some friends challenge and push you. Some connect you to broader networks. Some deepen existing bonds. Some show up when things fall apart without being asked.
“Instead of expecting each person to be everything for you, figure out which friends challenge you and push you, and which ones help you stay connected.”
– Tom Rath
You don't need one perfect friend. You need a few kinds of good friends – and the self-awareness to recognize which roles are currently unfilled in your life. Think of it less like finding a soulmate and more like assembling a very small, extremely loyal board of directors.
The same logic applies to how leaders think about their teams. The question isn't “do my people have friends at work?” It's more specific: does each person have at least one relationship here that functions at that threshold level? If not, what's getting in the way, and what's one thing you could do this week to create the conditions for it?
What to do this week:
Tom's challenge is simple and uncomfortable in equal measure: ask yourself, who in your life needs you?
Then do one thing about it today. A text. A voice note. A handwritten card if you're feeling ambitious. It’s not just a nice-to-have – it may be the highest-return investment you make all week, both for the other person and for yourself.
Related Episodes
– Adam Tanaka on Designing Third Spaces That Actually Create Connection
– What Leaders Can Learn From Children's Play with Ginny McCormick
– Religion at Work: From Passive Tolerance to Active Inclusion with Rev. Mark Fowler
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Full Transcript
Read the full transcript
Tom Rath: If you can just kinda send a quick, kind note to someone or check in and ask a question, it sounds trivial, but it might be the most valuable thing you do in a week.
Ben: Welcome to The Lift, the show about leadership, growth, and getting what we want. I'm your host, Ben Brooks. For over a decade, I've worked with CEOs, their executive teams, HR departments, and entrepreneurs to identify what drives their success and what holds them back. And now I'm excited to share those insights with you. On The Lift, we pull up to see the bigger picture from accomplished leaders who know how to get things done in a rapidly changing world. We've got all of that and a lot more coming up next on The Lift.
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I heard a pretty shocking fact the other day. People who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Seven times. So why aren't we talking about this? Why do leaders spend enormous energy on strategy and structure, technology, performance, even offices, and almost none of it on friendship? Today's guest has spent his career trying to answer that very question with data. Tom Rath is one of the most widely read workplace researchers of the last few decades. His books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and he also has a new one coming out called What's the Point?: Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower. The one we're here to talk about today, though, is called Vital Friends, a book that I read a long time ago and absolutely loved. In fact, it was published 20 years ago and is long overdue for a revisit, 'cause a lot's changed since then. We've had a pandemic, a great resignation, a shift to remote work, and a loneliness epidemic that now quietly affects one in five employees. So today we're asking, what does friendship actually mean in the modern workplace? Let's get into it. Tom Rath, I am honored to have you on The Lift, and welcome.
Tom Rath: Thanks so much for inviting me. Good to be with you.
Ben: Tom, I wanted to start out with a question that I know you've written about, which is, who expects you to be someone?
Tom Rath: That's one of the things I've learned from a very young age — the power of expectations from other people, starting out with parents and grandparents and mentors early on in life, and now kind of turning that another direction and looking at my family and my kids expecting me to be someone and what they expect me to do. Those are very powerful expectations that can do an extraordinary amount of good and be extremely motivational. At the same time, in this most recent book I've been working on, I've kind of looked back retrospectively and also learned how those expectations can kind of inadvertently pull you in less authentic directions at the same time. So that's a great question to kick off with.
Ben: And is there anyone that comes to mind in your career or life that in the past or now expects you to be someone?
Tom Rath: I started off in this whole line of work when I was working with my grandfather, Don Clifton, who always had real high expectations of me and kind of was a mentor and father figure to me, and I went to work with him right out of college, working on the very first iterations of StrengthsFinder when the internet was coming out. And then when he got ill with stage four gastroesophageal cancer, I'd already kinda had my personal PhD in cancer research, and so I traveled all over with him, trying to keep him alive as long as we could. In the middle of that, he asked me to write a book with him — I was told by an English teacher to stick with math and statistics because I was not good at writing. So that was kind of an overwhelming "what does he expect of me," because I wrote him a letter about everything he'd meant in my life, and he's like, "I see some real talent here. Can we write a book together, and can we do it in the next two months?" Whoa. I was like, "Holy crap, I can't write for a public audience for a page, let alone a book." That was a good test for me in terms of an almost unreasonable, unrealistic expectation that took me out of my comfort zone, and that book turned into How Full Is Your Bucket?, which was a big business book and now kind of a franchise in schools around the country, which is still one of the coolest things I've been a part of. So I think being able to see something unique in a person that they don't see themselves, and then to have some expectations of them, which is what Don did — gosh, that might be the most powerful thing you can do as a leader or for another person.
Ben: I get goosebumps thinking about your grandfather and that point in life, and there's so much, obviously, from a professional perspective, there's so much wisdom. He was called the father of strengths-based leadership, right? That was part of the American Psychological Association. And his firm wound up acquiring Gallup, I believe, in 1988, and so when you think of the Gallup opinion polls and surveys and very rigorous quantitative things that have affected culture, politics, economics, and workplaces, that was him. So there's a lot that was codified, but on this personal side, sitting down with him was so meaningful. What did you learn in the process?
Tom Rath: It was quite an experience for me because we were both researchers at heart trying to figure out what's the most important information from his whole lifetime of work and how do we get it out there to people in the most straightforward and simplistic way possible so that people can apply it. And that method has really stuck with me throughout all of the research and books that I've worked on, now 12 of them all the way into it. So that was not only the most powerful personal experience maybe in my lifetime, but also just a real good professional learning about how to do things that can continue to make a difference for other people even after I'm gone.
Ben: And from your personal experience in terms of expectations, early on, you had illness and clinical diagnosis in your teens, and there was an expectation put on you on your life expectancy.
Tom Rath: Yeah, when I was 16, I was diagnosed with a rare cancer hereditary syndrome that essentially shuts off one of the body's most powerful tumor suppressors. I lost an eye to cancer when I was 16, and doctors said, "Well, you're going to have cancer in your kidneys, your pancreas, your adrenal glands, in your spine, and probably your brain over whatever course of a lifetime might be." And when I was 20, as the internet emerged, I looked it up, and the over-under was 37 years old. So I kinda knew I had a compressed period of time to do stuff. But the thing that's fascinated me with this most recent research project and book on turning purpose into your daily superpower is that even with all of that on my mind, what I learned is that thinking about purpose in that big scheme of things is not a great day-to-day motivator. And really, purpose comes to life in how you structure and rebuild your priorities and your tasks and the people you spend time with in a given day. With this most recent book, I wanted to write about purpose at first, but then I realized — we ended up calling the book What's the Point?: Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower. It's more about, how do you think about what you're doing each day? Because just hearing the word purpose causes people to have anxiety and kinda get stressed out and freaked out about things. So how can you make something more practical so that that's a part of your career, it's a part of your daily routine, and it leads you to show up at home with even more energy than when you took off in the morning because you were able to act on purposeful things and see that feedback loop during the day, basically.
Ben: I wanted to talk today around this idea of social wellbeing. There's a lot of focus on career wellbeing, but social wellbeing is a really important part of long-term happiness, success, and wellbeing. Can you explain from a psychological perspective what social wellbeing is and how it differs from other kinds of wellbeing?
Tom Rath: Yeah, it's a great question because it is the single most important aspect or element of total global wellbeing. I was fortunate enough, because of my relationship with my grandfather, to be around the early days of the emergence of positive psychology — my graduate degree at Penn was in positive psychology. And the one thing that you could get all these old famous psychologists, from Marty Seligman and Ed Diener and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the only thing those guys agreed on, is that social wellbeing is the single best predictor of overall life satisfaction and how you do over the course of a lifetime. And my grad advisor, Chris Peterson, on day one of our graduate program, put up a single slide and said, "Here's the whole program in one slide." And the slide just read, "Other people matter." That was it. That's probably the single best one slide I've seen on everything you need to know about life, right?
But yet we work on careers, we work on our finances, we work on our health, we work on being involved in our communities and giving back. But a lot of us, especially men my age, for goodness' sake, are horrible at working on relationships. Just almost inept at it. So I think it's probably the one area where we have the most room for improvement, but it's difficult to dig into it in a kind of a systematic way like you would with fixing your finances or your physical health.
Ben: From the psychological research perspective, humans can be very self-sufficient. We've evolved over time. We can manage a lot of needs. But this connection thing, we can't just take a pill for connection and be a closed loop system, 'cause all the research says you gotta be connected with others. Why is that?
Tom Rath: In my experience at least, I think almost all of the energy in the world is created at the intersection between two people or between multiple people. And yet we kinda think of ourselves as isolated chambers in what we're doing, but there's absolutely nothing I've ever created or done or worked on worth anything that wasn't the product of a deep collaboration with usually more than one other person. And even when I start something I'm thinking about in my own mind, that's all built on the work of not only my mentors and my grandfather we've talked about, but the great minds he studied and learned so much about and read over 50 to 100 years before that. So the more we get over this kind of "it's all about me" and self-made, and we get to the fact that everything's other-made, and that almost all of our energy in the day needs to be focused on creating wellbeing for other people, not just focusing on our own happiness or our own strengths — the more you turn those things outward, the better it gets for everybody. That kinda has a cumulative uplift overall.
Ben: That requires a sense of sort of citizenship, though, to think beyond just oneself, 'cause you might do something you don't get an immediate personal return on, and I think as a society, we're getting more isolated, whether it's devices or it's affordability or segregation. Are you seeing that this is a bigger challenge to have those connections?
Tom Rath: I think it's a much bigger challenge, and it's a much bigger challenge to have the kind of deeper connections that we had when we were growing up because we've got a lot of superficial connections, and there are so many distractions and notifications. And from what I've seen and studied psychologically, it's easier to scroll through a feed. It's easier to let the next episode play on Netflix. It's easier to respond to some emails than it is to actually write something new on a blank page, right? And it's easier to do those things than it is to reach out to one of my friends from college who I haven't talked to for six months or whatever. That seems heavier psychologically, and so we fall into these defaults of responding to things that are easier. And the product of that is that our relationships are weaker, as we've talked about, but also if we always have things flying in at us, we're not ever bored as much to where we come up with new ideas, and we go reach out to people and collaborate and do some things together. So I think we need to find more ways for those types of things to happen in a kind of a natural person-to-person sense in the future.
Ben: Tom, you mentioned people help create amazing things in connection. I mean, we would not be talking today if it wasn't for Victoria and Ali, my great producers here, 'cause I said, "I wanna talk to Tom," because of Vital Friends in particular. It's a book you've written over a decade ago, and I think it was based on something like 14 million participants in Gallup studies around friendship. Can you tell us a little bit about what you learned, the big insights in writing Vital Friends? Because there was an insight around the workplace that really surprised me.
Tom Rath: Yeah. The reason that I decided to tackle that topic with a team when I was at Gallup many years ago was because the question that always shocked people and was kind of jarring in Gallup's Q12 employee engagement survey — many, 25 years ago it was probably created — was the question, "I have a best friend at work." And that question was selected because if you ask people, "I have a good friend at work," or "I have a friend at work," or "I have a close friend at work," those didn't sort outcomes and productivity and turnover and the like.
Ben: Too blurry versus the really high bar, the sort of binary of a best friend.
Tom Rath: And so people, executives always say, "Oh, take that question off the survey, we can't tell people they need best friends at work and all that." But they're kind of missing the point of the extreme — that you need a relationship that close at work in order to have fun, in order to be engaged, in order to be productive. And so because of that one question, we did a very deep dive on, what are all the components of these relationships at work, and what are the dynamics? And you already mentioned one, and that was kind of the key takeaway for me. I was doing a study of people who were unhoused probably 35 years ago. It was before I started full-time at Gallup. I was in college and doing an internship, and I went along with my grandpa to interview people, and the best question out of 40 or 50 that we asked them in this person-to-person interview was, "Who expects you to be somebody?" And the whole trick to it was, if they could give me one name, just one name, their likelihood of recovering and getting back to a place where they were housed and doing better was significantly higher than any of the other questions that we asked. So there's something about the dynamic of, is there one person that you can really count on? Is there one person you can go to? So there's kind of a threshold at one, and then there's another big jump between three and four, if I'm remembering all this research correctly. It's been a long time. And then after that, once you get to the point of three or four really good close relationships, if you're an introvert, you might be good at four, five, six, and if you're really extroverted, you need at least 10. So in retrospect — and I think I write about this in the new book, What's the Point? — that book, Vital Friends, I'm so glad to hear you're talking about reading it, but it was by a mile the poorest selling book I've ever worked on. By a mile.
Ben: Wow.
Tom Rath: It got the most attention in the media. I've done more interviews on that than StrengthsFinder 2.0 or How Full Is Your Bucket or anything else. So it was kind of like a fun media question thing, but it sold, I don't know, 1% of the copies of all the other books. Disappointing to me retrospectively, and I've seen other books on relationships at work have the same problem — people are not that interested in buying books about friendships, even in their personal lives, even though they know that matters, and almost no one has much interest in buying a book about how to have closer relationships at work. I think when you kinda get into it, it might be some of the most substantive and important things that you can do for a career and for your overall well-being. But yet we don't realize that need, even though it seems obvious on the surface.
Ben: When I was in corporate America, I got involved with diversity and inclusion efforts. I'm LGBTQ and ended up co-founding an employee resource group, which is how I made a lot of friends. And it was a horizontal, not a vertical. We were in different departments, different countries and cities, et cetera, but I still have some really great friends from that. And that was one of the only things I could look back at, other than some retreats or off-sites, where there was anything company-supported or structural to foster social relationships. I've been in HR and consulted a lot on this. It's generally not really on the agenda. There's not a budget line. It's not really on the radar. Do you see companies adopt anything after that research to help affect — if a best friend is the ultimate hedge against unwanted attrition, wouldn't you wanna foster friendships at work?
Tom Rath: There is such a direct line and case to do it, even if it's just for boosts in engagement and productivity and for better customer outcomes. Because there are a few people I've talked to and done interviews with recently where they describe being in a culture where everyone's friends and it's kind of a big group, or you're friends with your colleagues and with certain customers and all this, and it's just a whole different dynamic, and it's more fun to go to work, and you're less likely to leave, and you can make it into a career. And that's probably the secret sauce of many or most of the best workplaces that I've seen and studied. But it's something that leaders and managers and cultures kind of do as a fabric of what the organization is. I mean, it's not like an employee engagement program that you install, per se, right? I've seen some organizations try and work on it more structured and more formally, but I'm not sure that anyone's done it in a way where you could just take it and put it in pockets within an organization systemically.
Ben: I was less evolved on relationships earlier in my career 'cause I'm fairly type A, high achiever. Part of my way of navigating in the world was just working really hard and getting accoutrements and recognition for working hard. And I resisted this idea of investing. It was like, "We gotta get stuff done. We're not gonna have time to have a segue in the meeting. I don't wanna hear about the weather or the weekend or your kids. We gotta do these things. We gotta get this done. We gotta perform." What would your counsel be to the high achievers listening to this that might think, "I don't got time for relationships. I'm overwhelmed"? What's the pep talk to kinda cut through for them? Because I had the same resistance.
Tom Rath: To be really candid, I'm under-qualified to answer that question because I'm the type A person who is probably the worst one on my whole kind of leadership team of remembering to do that. And especially right now with everything we've got going on, I'm just jumping right into things and running that over. So yeah, I'll just confess to not being the right person to answer that question, but I need to work on that myself.
Ben: Well, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and from the PayPal Mafia, he wrote the book called The Start-Up of You. It kinda speaks to this idea of you gotta think of yourself as sort of an entity. And he said, everybody's looking for opportunities, but opportunities are a red balloon tied to a red string, and the red string is tied around someone's wrist. So when you're thinking you're looking for an opportunity, you're actually looking for a person, 'cause all opportunities exist through people and relationships. And I think so many people in their career, they wanna learn something, or they wanna make more money, or they wanna try something new, or they wanna be in a different environment, but they're so focused on them — working on my LinkedIn and my resume and my website and my performance and my KPIs. And a lot of our leader and manager development is very focused on developing the individual for the individual. And when you have a book like Vital Friends, people are not interested in it. How do we get people interested in getting good at developing and fostering relationships?
Tom Rath: Well, I think we all need to own it as if it's a priority for us. But the thing that's helped me most over the course of the last 30 years is that my business partner is 10 times better at that than I am. Like, we get in an Uber, and he knows the driver's life story. And he has a perfect rating, and I'm so quiet, I don't say a word the whole trip, right? And I just watch him do it with ease, and I admire that. And my wife's the same way. So I've formed some good complimentary partnerships and relationships that fill in those gaps really well for me. And so my big takeaway from that book is that instead of expecting each person to kinda be everything for you, you figure out which friends challenge you and push you and which friends are the ones that kinda help you to stay connected. And I really have a great network of people who are good at connecting me with broader groups and audiences that I've gotten to know, and that's worked really well, and some other friends who help me to deepen those relationships, and other people that really challenge and push me to achieve. So acknowledging that circle and then thanking those people for what they do and figuring out how you can compliment them so you're boosting their wellbeing and helping their lives as well — that's one big piece and takeaway from some of that research.
Ben: Well, y'all, when you go buy What's the Point, you can add Vital Friends to the shopping cart, and we'll boost some of that book sales. And there's eight archetypes in that book around different types of friends, and that was a real thing. It's like, a friend is a friend — and it's like, no, there's different kinds of friends for different purposes. You mentioned men. And loneliness is now a top five killer of men, and it's tied to opioids and overdoses and obesity and all sorts of different things. What do you think is going on with men?
Tom Rath: I've had several long conversations with a really good friend of mine, Peter Sims, who wrote the book True North and Little Bets. He's been thinking about this a lot lately and sharing some of his early findings. And I think men especially kind of as they get into their middle age and they've got ten, 20-plus years of distance from their high school, college circles, get to a point where the biggest barrier is that everyone seems to be afraid to reach out. They think that if they reach out, other people won't want to reconnect or hang around with them or go do something, when in reality, once they actually do that, everybody else has the same want and need and is kind of unplugged in the same regard. So there's a piece of that to it where men are naturally not as good at doing that. And some of the earlier sort of 20 years I looked at — everyone's heard of the fight or flight thing, but there was a psychologist, Shelley Taylor, whose theory was about how women tend and befriend, where men do the fight or flight thing. So men probably need to work at it more, and they need to just go ahead and reach out more frequently and maybe be more open and vulnerable. Most of the friends that I have who I've talked to — I just turned 50. I'm at an age where people are going through losing parents and friends, and it can be a challenging age, and there's a tendency to kinda shut down and not talk about it when you're going through really difficult things, and doing the exact opposite is much, much better for overall psychological health and well-being. So there's a kind of a combination of things, and then of course, devices and distance don't make that much easier, and we don't have the same work circles where you go out. And I was reading a piece about it — nobody goes out to the bar, and they don't go out and have a few drinks after work like you used to see when I was young and entering the workforce. And so I'm a great example because I'm super introverted and rely on my wife and a few friends to invite me to almost everything I go to around here. But when it comes to my high school and college circles, I'm the one that's most likely to reach out and bring people together, which no one would guess that knows me. So we've all gotta kinda try and pitch in, and I need to get out of my comfort zone and not just say that my business partner or my wife are a crutch in my case.
Ben: Yeah, I think that idea of sort of initiating, right? And being a host, inviting someone over, just even adding someone to the group — "Hey, we're going to a comedy show. We're doing a thing." It really makes a tremendous difference. Some employers I know will give employees even money to spend if they're spending time with colleagues. You can go out and expense something. Do you see a role for managers and executives in helping foster this belonging connection on their teams beyond just what they would do for themselves?
Tom Rath: I think employers who I've seen over the years be most successful at that, they create opportunities and venues for those connections to occur versus trying to script or force or program the relationship-building per se. So it's kinda like, let's create an environment where that stuff happens naturally. When I first went to work at Gallup right out of college, my grandfather had always been adamant about it, as the kind of CEO at the time, about only having the coffee pot on one floor. So we all had to trek through five stories and down to the other building in another wing to go get a cup of coffee or whatever, instead of having them in every little nook and cranny on every floor, and he just did that because of the social interaction, right? And so it's little hacks like that that just naturally bring people together that make a difference from what I've seen.
Ben: Well, your grandfather may have inspired Steve Jobs. My friend Duncan Ramsey gave me a rare tour a decade ago at Pixar, where he worked, and the mail rooms and the bathrooms were centrally located, and people had to walk a third of a mile sometimes. Bloomberg LP here in New York City, there's the seventh floor you go in, and everyone has to go through that floor, and there's snacks and coffee and things, and you create these forced ways structurally. Even cafeterias can be that way, right?
Tom Rath: Right. So I did the Pixar tour a few years ago, you were talking about. The way they have their producers work up in tree houses they have to climb ladders to, and stuff — that's a great example we were talking about earlier, where with kids, instead of having them focused on devices, we really learned coming out of the pandemic that to tell our kids, "Just go run around the neighborhood," pretty free range, play, have fun, do whatever you want. Sure, there are risks and dangers of being here in an urban environment like this, but the potential benefits of just being outside and playing around and doing whatever you want and the freedom dramatically outweigh any of those risks, in my opinion. And we kinda need to build workplaces like that too, so people feel like they can have fun, they can play, they can socialize, they can be a little more childlike because they'll be more creative. That's what builds really special workplaces.
Ben: Any last advice about maybe being a better friend that you might think about? 'Cause I know there's different archetypes of friends. Everyone wants better friends or their friends to be better, but if we take responsibility for ourselves, how might people think about how they could kinda up their friendship game in terms of what they're giving to others?
Tom Rath: It's a really good question. There's an inventory on my website for the new book that kinda takes people through what's going on in their lives, and one of the best questions that when I went back through it asked me was about who are the people that need you now, and what are you not doing that you maybe know or think you should be? And it kinda took me back through a friend of mine who's just going through a big work transition and making sure that I'm checking in with him, and another friend who lost his mom and seeing how he's doing. And so I noted all that down and have kinda taken action to just proactively reach out and do things. My favorite quote of all time is from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where he said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?" And I think if we ask ourselves that question, not as some existential thing, but just ask it each morning and say, "What are the things you need to be doing for others?" — whether that's a customer, a colleague, or one of your friends from high school or college or your neighborhood — and then make sure ideally once a day, at a minimum once a week, you're reaching out. You're pinging them on text or sending them a quick note or a handwritten letter ideally. It's those little things, that you're making a proactive investment in a relationship just to check in and see how people are doing. And if you can just kinda send a quick, kind note to someone or check in and ask a question, it sounds trivial, but it might be the most valuable thing you do in a week.
Ben: Our listeners guard their time fiercely, so if they're gonna pick a book, what's the point of What's the Point?
Tom Rath: It's probably the most provocative and edgy thing I've written. I tried to get myself in a mode where, realizing that people have so much going on right now, I wanted to throw some provocative fastballs at their forehead about why they even do what they do and why they're in the career that they're in, because in most cases, some of those childhood dreams weren't even really theirs. So it's kind of a way to rethink what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you can orient even more of your daily routine around things that serve a purpose and increase the wellbeing of other people. I actually don't want people to read that book and be inspired or think, "Oh, it was nicely written." I want them to read it and be challenged and do something differently the day after they read it.
Ben: Out of curiosity, given it doesn't fit the pattern of so many of your other books that have been so successful — what's the bigger purpose for you?
Tom Rath: I live across from a cemetery right here, and kind of walk through there a lot and think about this. And I think 90% of people end up in the cemetery without ever discovering what they could've been great at in life. And so what I was trying to do is to challenge people to get out of the darn sleepwalking mode and say, "Hey, wait, what could I do that might make an even bigger contribution to the world?" Because even what I'm doing today, to be really blunt, I just kinda fell into the default of what my family did in a family business. Nothing else. And I think I might've been really good in medicine, but I didn't see any doctors growing up. So how can we get people to open their aperture a little bit and see where they might have even more potential as early on in life as possible? Because my wife's a teacher, I'm obviously a writer, and I asked my daughter when she was 14, "What do you wanna be?" And she's like, "Oh, maybe a writer or teacher." And that really hit me emotionally about — okay, those are the only two answers that are probably not great. And I think we all kinda say, "Oh, it'd be great if the kids follow in our footsteps." No, it wouldn't be great. It would be the default and what happens to most of us. So I'm trying to turn that upside down a bit and say, "How can we help people as early on in life as possible, whether they're 15 or 35 or 50, to really see what's out there?" Because you would need to see 50 different jobs just to see 50% of the US workforce and what's out there.
Ben: So even someone as accomplished and successful as you — and if we Google your name, there's a lot, and you've had a big impact and done meaningful work and I think made good money, hopefully, and all those things — even you would advocate for people to just consider what else might be, even if you're successful, because I think what you're really talking about is satisfaction.
Tom Rath: It's satisfaction, but I think most people never see where they could have made the biggest contribution to other people and to society. So it's that piece in particular where — I mean, it's kinda like if your dad was a dentist, you become a dentist. If your mom was military, obviously you end up doing that. Like, you're 300 times as likely. It's not just like you're 2.5 times as likely. We get into this in the book, but there's a striking New York Times article showing that you're hundreds of times more likely to be in certain occupations if your mom or your dad did these things. And I've interviewed hundreds of people, and I've met one who actually had kind of a real evaluation of a lot of steps instead of just following what their parents did or following the money or the societal expectations. So it almost never occurs. And I'm in that box, and almost everyone I've interviewed since working on this is in that box. So I do think it's a good time right now, especially as more and more things are getting automated, to say, "Where can each of us make the biggest contribution to society and leave the most lasting impact that continues to make a difference when we're gone?"
Ben: Welcome to The Uplift, a segment where we ask guests to promote something that they have been obsessed with recently. And you know what? That thing may just be perfect for you, too. So let's hear what our guest wants to share and uplift this week. We wanna give you a chance to give a shout-out to something that's not you, that's not your company or your works or anything like that, which are all fantastic. But is there anything that you've been hearing about — someone else's work, a non-profit, a trend, a product, anything that sort of you wish had more attention in the world?
Tom Rath: That's an interesting question. I've been a lifelong student of health and technology in particular, and the thing I'm most wound up about now, if I was talking to a loved one or a friend, is I think we all have the ability to be at least 10 times if not 50 times as smart and adaptive around our health with all of the tools emerging with artificial intelligence. And of course there are gonna be bigger medical discoveries and cures and all those things that are going to happen whether we get involved with it or not. But I would advocate for anyone and everyone to at least attempt to dig into all the things that they do, whether it's their watch and biometrics, if you're into that, which I am, or your activity, or what prescriptions you're on, what supplements you take, what you eat. Try and put all these into some of these engines in personal and private spaces, and figure out some of the combinations and things that you might have missed. I've personally gleaned more insights about what I can do to be healthier and have more energy in the last six months from putting more information into those tools than I have in the last decade, and I'm someone that's been studying this stuff for two hours a day for 30 years. My mind is blown. As someone who's got cancer everywhere and have for 35 years, I've never been more excited and optimistic about what my health will look like 10 years from now, and it's because of the convergence of technology and health right now.
Ben: Amen to that. And last year, my theme for my personal year was the year of vitality, and I used AI tremendously, and I saw more doctors and had surgeries and got different medications and all sorts of things, but I was such a better patient — being empowered and informed, and there was a lot of obvious things that I had wrong or didn't know about, and even putting blood work in or other things like that was just fascinating for me to see what's possible. So great shout-out, and manage your privacy settings and all that. You wanna be thoughtful about all that, but it gets back to your kind of core theme of, you gotta be responsible for you. Well, Tom Rath, thank you for joining, talking about a life of meaning, a life of purpose. We'll put in the show notes your website, the book, everything else. Any last words you'd like to leave our audience with?
Tom Rath: I would just leave people with: ask yourself today what are the things that you're doing that improve the lot in life and well-being of others.
Ben: Well said. Thanks, Tom Rath.
Tom Rath: Thank you.
Ben: All right, everyone. Let's turn today's episode into action. Tom taught us how important friendship is both for our emotional well-being and our work lives. Here are some ways you can improve your friendships this week. First, ask yourself daily, "What am I doing for others?" Each morning, run a quick mental scan of who in your life needs you right now, then do something small about it. Like Tom said, even a text or a brief check-in might be the most valuable thing you do all week. Second, stop expecting one person to be everything. Remember, different friends hold different functions. Some challenge you, others may help you network. Some you can let loose with, and some show up for you when you need it most without you even asking. Do a brief exercise to identify who in your circle plays these different roles. This will help you see your network as a whole ecosystem. You'll see you don't need a perfect friend, you just need a few kinds of friends. And finally, think about how you can create the conditions for connection and closeness. Whether you're a manager or just someone who wants more belonging in your life, think about those small moments, those interactions, nudges, and habits that can bring you closer to the people around you. Thanks for joining me this week on The Lift. For more info on what you heard in today's episode, visit our show notes. You can find out more about the show at theliftpod.com. If listening to The Lift today was a good use of your time, please share it with a colleague, a friend, I don't know, your ex, your mother, anyone. Don't let good advice die with you. And for those of you who like to earn a little bit of extra credit, leave a comment on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. The Lift is produced and edited by the team at editaudio. This episode was produced by Victoria Marin and edited by Ali Sirois. Our production manager is Kathleen Speckert. Our executive producer is Steph Colbourn. A special thanks to Korey Rich and Beth Gatsik. Is that a fire alarm I hear? 'Cause I'm smoking it.
