Kelly welcomes author and researcher Tom Rath back to the podcast. At an early age, doctors told Tom he wouldn’t live past forty. As that date came and went, he began examining what it means to live a life well lived. We talk about that and his new book “What’s the Point: Turing Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower.” 

You write in the book that for kids, they often just take on the jobs their parents had because that’s the only schema they have for what work they could pursue. 

“Most of us are essentially entering the workforce with such a limited aperture of what’s out there that we’re kind of looking through a pinhole. And then we wonder why we get midway through our career and realize we weren’t in the right thing. So, as I went deeper and deeper on that, what I discovered is that there’s a pretty good chance 80 to 90% of us are making it all the way to the end of our careers without ever discovering where we could have had the most enjoyment and satisfaction, and most importantly, where we could have made the greatest contribution to our communities and to society.” 

You got a cancer diagnoses early in your life and the doctors told you that you would only live until the age of 40, which you have since passed. 

“It’s been an ongoing battle there, but one that got me focused even at a young age on how can I have an impact? What can I do that makes a difference? And trying to build as much life as I could into the 40 years that I thought I’d get at that point. So, that had a big influence on me. But what’s kind of crazy is that even with that big influence and that deadline and no feeling like I needed to get a lot done, when I finally did hit age 40 after all that the over under, I looked back and said, ‘Wait, I’ve been living everybody else’s life that raised me and not my own.’ Which is wild.” 

You write in the book that all of us are ‘other-made.’ Can you explain what you mean by that? 

“I was fortunate enough to grow up around some of the world’s leading psychologists. My grandfather was one of them, and a lot of his friends and colleagues. And Marty Seligman, I was his first student in his graduate program at Penn and knew all these great old psychologists, and they all had their own thing and they disagreed on stuff all the time. And it was rare they had consensus on anything, but the one thing that every single one of them would agree on, and it was not even a debate, is that social relationships are the single biggest determinant of our overall satisfaction and well-being in life. And so, the thing I learned from all that work and research is that we are a hundred percent other made. And I’ve got a whole chapter in this new book that’s about what I call shoulder hunting, where your job is to go out and find some shoulders to stand on because nobody and nothing is really created just out of thin air.”