32: How to Live a Good Life

excited to have Tom Wrath on the show. Tom is an author, researcher, and speaker whose books have sold more than five million copies and have been translated into sixteen languages. His books, all of which become bestsellers, include How Full Was Your Bucket, Strengths Finder two point Zero, Well Being, Eat, Move, Sleep, and his latest book is Are You Fully Charged? The Three Keys to Energizing your work and life. Thanks Tom for being on here today. Thanks so much. I've been

looking forward to talking with you me too. I've been a long time admirer of your work and the path that you've gone on, which has been a bit of a different path than the path of the development of field of positive psychology. I thought we could actually talk about these two different paths. One, you know, the great work that your grandfather, Donald Clifton did many call him the father of strength based psychology and kind of talk a little bit about how that relates now to the

latest science of human flourishing. So maybe you could just start off by telling me a little bit about your grandfather and his great work. Yeah, you know, I've got a kind of an interesting personal backstory as it applies to positive psychology. I was at the EPO event earlier this year and I was joking with a you people, I kind of feel like Forrest Gump walking through all these things as an observed in the history of that.

And I think it's when I had started at Gallop way back in ninety eight ninety nine, and after college, I went to Michigan and went to join my grandfather Don Clifton to help him figure out He was trying to determine whate of the best ways to use this new Internet thing that was the rage at the time to help people to learn a little bit more about

their strengths and who they are. And Don had been doing a lot of that with telephone interviews and face to face interviews for thirty forty years at these strength assessments that we'd interview people and figure out do they have the right talents that match a job in teaching, or a job in sales, or a job driving a truck a variety of professions. We were essentially trying to answer the question, can you aggregate a lot of these themes of human personality and bring that to the surface

in one web based tool. And so we went through a lot of iterations of that and started the conversation. At about the same time, Don had reached out to Marty Seligman, who had been working with at Deaner and me I Cheeks, me High and a host of other top psychologists who I admired growing up with that as my major and when I was in my undergrad and he was saying, what can I do to help because there was this burgeoning thought about positive psychology and what

it was called at the time. There was this well Springs assessment that I think evolved into via that Don was trying to help and contribute with. And then eventually, after those conversations advanced, I was at the first kind of positive psychology summit that we hosted in Lincoln, Nebraska. I think it was somewhere around ninety nine or two thousand, and that's really when I saw the energy around positive psychology coalescing and it started to create an important mainstream

conversation there. So anyhow, then Don and I continued to work on Strengths Finder and trying he wanted to. He kind of had this thought, do you think we can get this out to one hundred thousand people someday? And that was a big dream at the time, and that since gone on to I think reached maybe fifteen million people to give them some initial clue about their strength.

So it was successful beyond his dreams back when he was around and so Don and then Don and I worked on my first book, Helpful as Your Bucket together when I was traveling around with him to as a

part of his cancer treatment. He kind of had stage four gas orsovagio cancer and we were moving around to different parts around the country because I've had a lot of personal background with cancer, and he challenged me to help him work on this book about this different bucket, which was kind of a real basic idea in metaphor

related to positive psychology. So we had a chance to pull together a lot of the best high level research from that emerging field in that first book we worked on together and then Don we finished that first draft before Don passed away, and I think it was around three we did in the book came out four, and then my connection to positive psychology really kind of kept going after that point because as soon as Marty decided to start the first applied positive psychology degree program at PAN,

I dropped out of the graduate program I was in mid stream at Hopkins and jumped into that program right away because I was so excited about it and got to be a part of the first class there, which was a great experience, and since spent a lot of time teaching that class and meeting a lot of the great thinkers both teaching the program and professionals coming out of it now, which is even more fun to watch. So it's it's been a really unique way to kind of have a front row seat from a lot of

the people I've admired most over the years. Absolutely, and I you know, I want to emphasize the field of positive psychology owes major debt or not to gratitude. I should say to Donald Clifton and and his his thinking that we need to learn and study what is right with people, And that's a sentiment that's echoed over and over again in falls of psychology. You know, some people will say, you know, the field of pop psychology is about what's best within us, right, So a lot of

those roots were there with Donald. So you know, I think there's it's kind of fun. There's a fundamental concept that I think your listeners might enjoy that. You know, it's an icy it with My kids are four and six right now, where there's a natural disposition that I've observed and studied over the years, where it's kind of our nature when we're raising kids or managing people in the workplace to focus on that. You know, you've got someone who's had a negative seven, how do you get

them back to negative three or maybe zero? And it is important to do that. It's important to address big, glaring weaknesses for kids and for people in the workplace

and everything else. But I also have a lot of fear that Don talked about NonStop, and I've heard many others in posits ichology talk about, which is that we're ignoring the ability to take someone who's already a plus four to a plus eight or a plus nine where there may be even more room for growth in that area of the curve where someone does have a little bit more natural talent than the next person in that

specific area. Oh well, that's a very interesting point. I mean, that's that that does tells nicely with some of my interests in gifted education and gifted talented education, and what do you do with an education system where we have this kind of one size fits all approach and people are able to self actualize at different rates through you know, the learning program, you know, and our school system is not set up very well at all for for that.

So I'm glad you brought that up. Actually, yeah, I'd be interested to hear some of your thoughts on the I mean, just have you what are the best ways to individualize not only based on just general intelligence levels, but at more of a personality level as well in schools.

I think because there's, in addition to the well studied dynamics of kind of emotional intelligences and general malability and so forth, I think there's a much broader range of human personality that really gets tailored to perhaps even less across some of those spectrums in the educational system today.

I coulpully agree. I wonder how much you've worked with education, because I think a very worthy project, and something I would definitely be interested in working on is to see how we can bring the strengths finder, bring the character strength survey, because I was going to ask you later in the show, you know, what's what are the similarities and differences because I know you did your your thesis on that topic, but maybe we don't have No, we don't need to, We don't need to choose one or

the other, right, I mean as holistic an assessment as possible I think would be really valuable to educators. And then you know, something I would be very interested in working on is to to to see how when we just like you've done in the business world, you found the you know, really important findings like managers who focus on the strengths of their employees uh, significantly significally reduce

their their disengagement at work for instance. These are really important findings and and I would love to show this in the education world as well. So this is a conversation I wasn't even expecting to have it right now with you, but it's uh, I'm glad that I'm glad we went there because I think that there's a great untapped potential to use lots of these current assessments that go beyond, go beyond standardized test scores and IQ tests scores and h and identify character strengths as well as

themes of talent. We can we can assess, we can use both skills and more. Right, yeah, I think so. I think we need a lot more than we have now. One of the one of the fun things that Don and I were doing a long time ago, we were trying to figure out how low can you go in terms of assessing or observing more natural tendencies and talents of young children and school systems with how far can you go with an assessment? And then when do you

need to get into observation? And then when I was at the program in at Penn, Chris Peterson was my advisor, and I know he and Nansuk has been a lot of time looking at how how far can you go with kind of early self reports to get at some of the dynamics of personality and value at those ages. And then when do you need to rely on the observations of outsiders and teachers and parents, which takes even more time and effort, but may be worth it at

some of those young ages. For no other reason than the big boost and self efficacy you get out of it or kids. So I know, I'm at Gallup and others. We've kind of tried to get down to those ages of anywhere between eight to thirteen and then Strengths Finder we've used as people older than that with very basic

self assessments. But I'm just as interested in how do you help kids to build on some early victories and help parents and teachers to see that well before you can do reliable self assessments with pictures and words and

stuff like that. So it's interesting where a lot of the work that you've done with studying natural content that's produced from people and online networks, I think my hunch is that maybe you start to get there in terms of I mean just looking at some of the coding of words kids are using at a young age to figure it out or something like that. Anyhow, Yeah, and that's and you're referencing the great work work that the Well Wellbeing Project are doing and Johannes and others, Yeah,

that could be one potential tool. I you know, I uh, I'm very interested like creativity and intelligence and imagination and do those are those included as part of the Is

that a theme of talent imagination? Yeah, it's there's a whole set of I mean what we looked at originally, this was kind of in the factor structure when we were developing strength randing from the outset is there are these large clusters of themes that naturally hold together and for the business world, you know, in the leadership book I or what we called that strategic thinking, but most of those themes are really the Those are the people on a team who are have maybe a more natural

disposition to spend time alone musing, and they enjoy that and think more about where things are going in the future in that vision versus is some of the more relationship or operation oriented or selling influence oriented talent. So a strengthmander kind of clusters out into four meta categories instead of it being kind of an individual theme in isolation because that's such a big part of any successful

team more live that makes sense. I wonder what the relationship What is conceptually the difference between a character strength, a talent and a personality treat Boy, that's a question, right, I guess, I mean we can discuss it. It's I you know, I'm wondering too. Yeah, what do you think.

I think that the talent in I mean, in the work that I've done at Gallup in the past, talent has been kind of a narrow band in that definition of what are some of the least malleable personality traits that you can count on consistently over years, real specific, which is different, very different from the way a lot of other books talk about the concept of talent real broadly.

And then so really what's interesting is that, you know, GalF of course I was a part of this maybe not so great decision, but we called it Strengths Finder, And really what that thing measures is talent, not strength, which is more the product of bringing in a lot of knowledge and practice and skill and all those other things that are important. So that's talent and personality traits in the work I've been a part of are pretty

closely aligned. When I study the not only the origins which I followed being close to it of the via the Values and Action assessment, it seems to me that that was based on more of a review of experts over time and current thoughts and leadership thought leaders about

what are some of the most universal values. And then this has been a long time but in one of my classes, Chris Peterson was showing us how within the VIA having a lot of strength across many of the domains is an asset in terms of predicting positive outcomes, whereas a little bit different than a lot of the work that we've done around talent that is measured by StrengthsFinder, where you'd essentially want to spend a maximum amount of time investing in the top three or five themes in

your sequence instead of trying to balance out a round out the entire continuum of thirty four. So that was one of the key distinctions I could see on the surface plast And have you mapped on your strengths your

talent areas to the Big five framework? Yes, very early on we did a lot of mapping back then with a couple of researchers at UCLA and at Harvard, Chip Anderson, phil Stone through not only we started with kind of Big five is conceptual routes, but then also looking at a lot of the very popular assessments are out at the Myers Briggs and discs and some of those other

tests to look at where the conceptual overlaps are. And there are more papers out there available on the Internet that I can kind of keep track of in terms of specific mapping, and that, honestly, the one that I'm most interested in studying for the future is how do you how do you help people to make better decisions about their work and careers in those foundational years, in

particular based on where they have some natural talent. I don't know that anyone's done enough to connect those dots yet, No, they haven't. And you know, the archers who study talent are I think stuck in so many of these academic debates that that they're not really even they're missing some of the most important questions in a way, you know, so you'll see back and forth, is it nature or nurture? You know, these kinds of you know, and it's it's

obviously both. But then you know, behavioral geneticis will use twin studies and show, look, all these talents have a heritability coefficient, and then you know, like researchers investigating child development will say, look at the environment matters. And then but but but in a way like once we just agree, okay, it's nature and nurture, fine, and let's move on. You know, I think I think there are bigger questions to answer.

I'm absolutely with that. I mean, I you know, it's kind of the people say, well, should just focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. I'm like, that sounds pretty reckless to me based on everything I've looked at.

It's gotta you mean, there's always a balance there. And another big I think misnomer on some of the talent personality research is that, you know, we think that these are things that you can just change anything and you want to be be anything you want to be, And obviously that's very hard to do on the other end of the continuum as well. So I'd like to figure out smarter ways to help people map some of those

things back. And along those lines, I was wondering, based on the some of the most recent work you've been doing, Kin, what what do you see as some of the most interesting or innovative ways to help people have more self awareness about what they're naturally good at without it being as without it taking a lot of their time to

provide some of those insights. I mean, I even step back sometimes and think that, you know, asking people to go through a thirty sixty minute questionnaire to yield that kind of self awareness and insight has proven to be very effective in some cases. It's kind of the other end of the spectrum from a quick little quizy take on the internet with no reliability at all. But have you seen some other means to give people pretty useful

insights there? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that in addition to being interested in what people are good at, I'm also interested in learning what makes people, what inspires people, And that's kind of a different question. You can be like inspired by someone's great like Michael Jordan's Great Dunk or humanitarians wonderful without actually being good at it yet, and that inspiration in itself can be a driving force to excellence in that. So what I'm

really interested is whole literature on inspiration. And you know, I don't know if you're familiar with Todd Thrash's work, I'm not. Yeah, And he's done this great work and inspiration showing that it has these specific qualities that when people encounter a stimulus, it's a very spontaneous thing. So when you're really inspired, it's not usually a willed thing. It's usually something you've come and you've come in contact with a stimulus that inspires you and it makes you

see greater possibilities for yourself. It's it and and that does change everything. They they've they've they've had like they've had, they've they've measured the creative creativity of writing samples. For instance, they had it rated for the creativity and they found and they had people keep track all along the process

how inspired they were to while they were writing. They found that after the moment of inspiration, there was much greater efficiency of word choice, the creativity was there's much greater creativity in what they were doing. It's almost like the person took on a whole different persona a whole different being. So what I what I found increases this sort of inspiration is is really just giving people opportunity to, you know, expose them to as many different potential identities

as possible. Like you need to like really expand the breath of possible points of inspiration that you could you can do and you you put them in uh contact with lots of inspiring role models, lots of different subjects. So you just expose lots of different subjects without knowing beforehand what what what is going to be there there? You know, what what might be calling them or what might be inspiring them. And also project based learning is

another big one that I found is important. Usually when people start working on personally meaningful projects, even if they're not good at it, it's it almost is like it builds on each other that every time they make progress towards the goal, it slowly transforms their whole being, you know, not just one aspect of themselves, but their whole being. So I think what I'm saying, you know, it relates a lot to the work you've done, even the work

you've done on well being. Right, Yeah, and it's interesting. I think you're getting into suns in there that's been It's very important in terms of exposure to these kind of potential inspirations and identities because I kind of grew up through the lens of looking at assessments and personality through an iopsychology lens where for many, many years the field of iopsychology least have been pretty dismissive of interests and passions because unlike general mental ability or personality traits,

it didn't predict job performance, especially in entry level roles, very well. So just because you're interested in being a pharmaceutical salesperson, doesn't you're gonna be good at us? Right. However, the more recent research i've still when you look through the lens of well being, it matters a lot for the individual's well being. It's just the companies who were paying the bills for these tasks. Before I didn't care

about that as much. So I think that's a whole new perspective that we kind of need to bring into this science of how do you help people find optimal track and career there? And I'm also really interested in your thought about how, in this day and age, what are some new ways to expose people to new possibilities of their identities, because you know, as I was doing

some of the research for the Are You Fully Charged? Book, I think I was going back and if you look at the number of people over kind of twenty thirty year lounge JUNI studies who are still in the same job or career as their mother or father, it's just frightening how hard it is for people to see out of a narrow band of a lens, just in terms of what's possible. Right, So there's got to be better

ways to do that nowadays. There's got to be better ways there's got to be better ways that that that you as as an individual can is from like a self determination point of view without the help of others, can figure out how to do that. And then there's also got to be a way for for people in a position to be able to do that to help support that, like if you're a manager or a teacher's

so there's like both ways, right, both perspectives. Right, So you write a lot of really terrific and in preparation for this interview, I like have all your books on myself right now that i've and uh, I've been going through them. It helps that they're they're they're they're concise, So thank you for that. A lot of books can be really jargony and can really convolute the message, but

you get right right to the point. But your your books are doing great service for both perspectives because the individual interested in in gaining great insight in themselves can pick up one of your books and take one of your tests and can gain insight without even if they're in an environment where they're managers or other people around them just have no clue how to how to inspire

or to do that. But also, you know people like managers et cetera, can read your books and gain great insights how to bring out the best in their workers. So your books do a great service of that. But the you know, the question is even going beyond these books. You know, how can we change UH structures so that

people are always seeing greater possibilities? And and if you don't mind, I'd like to bring in maybe an elephant in the room here, maybe, which is I think a valid criticism of the field of positive psychology, and that's that you know, in very very poor, poor, you know, low socio economic status areas a lot of a lot of racial and ethnic minority groups, they don't have the

luxury of of that level. Yet you know, from a maslow perspect of, they can't shoot right to the self actualization stage right they're trying to like, So the question also is how can they see greater possibilities even though they're in an environment whether there doesn't seem like there's

much hope. Is that a fair question? I think it's a fair question, and I think it's an important point for people who have interest in psychology and positive psychology because I think I think it was Adam Grant who was writing recently about how you know if you say you're doing something with behavioral economics, that sounds so different than if you say you're coming in and talking about positive psychology just on the surface, right, And the problem

I've talked to many classes and people in positive psychologizers are sometimes it's easy to assume that because you put the word positive in front of psychology, that that throws people in a different direction with they're thinking, oh, it's only a luxury or whatever. But it's really easy. I have my both my undergrad and graduate degrees are in psychology, and it's and I've grown up in a household psychologist.

It's really easy for me to see that the word psychology is a much bigger problem than the word positive in that equation, because the average American who here's the word psychology, they barely delineate it from psychiatry and think of it as something that people use when they're in need of counsel. And so it's the stigmas there with a label are very different in some cases from the actual science of the influence it has on people across

socioeconomic groups. So I want to delineate that a little bit because I think the tools that I've seen coming out of teams at PAN and elsewhere, and the things that I've been a part of a gallop where we're working in inner city school districts to help kids uncover their talents and share that with teachers and parents. That does as much for post outcomes like self confidence and

direction and altruism across that spectrum. And I would argue that in some of my own personal experiences my wife's taught in several schools around the DC are I hear that the kids who are often in more need of time and attention because they don't have as much time with parents who are working real hard and who are in more need of that confidence boost that you get from some of these interventions are in the schools that

are less advantage. So I when I look at the interventions, I don't see the ones that I've been close to or studied at least is having any more or less benefit for kids who grow up in a high socioeconomic

status area, for example. Well, that's really good news. That is good news because and again I think I see great, great potential for adapting a lot of the work you've done into gifted and talented identification practices as well as just general education for all students, because you do the reality of the matter is that ninety eight percent of students and gift and talented programs in this country are white, middle class, so we're obviously missing out on a whole

lot of talent and as well as the whole diversity of of of humankind. So I just see great, great, great potential for adapting these kinds of things. And you know, it's interesting on that thought that one of the I've spent most of the last year working on this documentary around Fully Charged, and one of the groups featured in there is the KIP Schools in Dave Levin who's been a big part of that. He was one of the co founders. And I mean they have a they use

a lot of the concepts. I spend time with their teachers on some of the emove sleep elements from this, and they use a lot of the general constructs from positive Psychology, but they put it into their own programs, they put into their own words, they put it into their own language, and I've seen it have real powerful, uh messaging and mission and efficacy there over the years. So let's move on to this topic of well being, So just cultivating your strengths from a talent perspective, even

that will not necessarily give you high well being in life. Right, There's more too well being than just a talent and then just developing a talent. So let's let's talk about some of the things you've discovered. Going back to your book on Wellbeing, which I just read, really liked it, you make a statement in there that much of what we think will prove well being is either misguided or

just plain wrong. Would you say that that's still the case since that book came out that you see in the media or you see in the public a lot a misguided notion of what it means to have well being. Yes. When we worked on that book well Being, it was interesting because we were looking at what are the core dimensions when people look at, think about, and evaluate their

lives in a very general sense. And that's how we kind of define well being for their Gallop research, and it divided into these five areas overall that were kind of your career well being, social wellbeing, financial wellbeing, physical

well being, and community well being. And after we did that research, I said to one of my colleagues on our research team, you know, we see the pretty even waiting across those five factors in terms of how they contribute to both daily experience and overall life SAT life satisfaction. And I said, what if we ask people to make their own waiting? And I said, we should we allow people to just kind of shift the weighting themselves for

these domains. And so we put that question out on a national survey and said, here are these dimensions of your well being. How would you assign the points overall? If you had one hundred points, how would you break them out? And I don't know if we have a publisher piece, but the people who most people assign disproportional points to physical health, physical well being, and financial well being far more than social well being or their career

or purpose anything like that, or their community. And that's not consistent with the best way to get there. Based on what we saw, and it was almost kind of paradoxical where we found overall, we found that the people who assigned the highest waiting to their financial well being had the lowest overall well being, and the people who assigned the highest waiting to their community well being had

the highest overall well being. So I think for people to step back and say, what is that I'm really trying to do here in terms of a meaningful impact on others in a community versus building up a file of cash that gets taxed and expires when you die. I mean, it's a very very different things. Yeah, And this individual difference is thing I don't think is really

discussed enough in the field of positive psychology. You know, like this perma model, that are these that that Martin Seligman has, that these are these are important things, but some people might really really really care about more like achievement more than the others for instance. And not only that, but I find, like you know, in the business world, are entrepreneurs. I mean, there are people legitimately like like

Donald Trump really loves money. Do you think he was well being would be higher if he if he suddenly woke up tomorrow, if you like, went through an addiction program and like discovered that he cares more about his community than he does about winning. Do you think he actually would do Do you think positi psychology applies to Donald Trump? People? Like I think if he did that, I think it would really freak people out right now.

And you know, and in seriousness. I think there's a huge there's such a continuum of individual differences in terms of what we want and need and how we want to get there that you know, the first project I worked on at Gallup, we were trying to put together a StrengthsFinder based programs just for all the other books and stuff for college freshmen because they go to these orientation programs where it's usually one credit and you don't really get a lot out of it, and we're trying

to say, is there's something that they can go through that helps them figure out how to pick classes based on their individual personality traits. It helps them figure out how to build relationships based on whether they're more achievement oriented or whether they're more empathetic. And it was called Strength Quest and has kind of caught on with colleges

since then. But I think it's that kind of mapping where there were were telling kids, if you have let's say you have the theme of intellectual We're always thinking what are the right extracurriculars you might want to get involved with. We need to help people have better maps of what to do to create meaning and well being that are more personalized. And I still just I don't see much of that at all in the workplace today. It's more common general guidelines exactly exactly good. So I

think we're definitely on the same page in that. But regardless of what your your emphasis is in life, you make a really good point in your book that that the single biggest threat to our world being tends to be ourselves. So we tend to get in our own way. Can you unpack how we how we do that in a in a instut in terms of our time perspective? Yeah, you know, That's what's been most interesting to me in the most recent work that I've done, is that to a large degree. Uh I. I would now argue that

I think daily experiences Masseurder call it daily experience. I call it daily well being is a more important element to focus on than long term life satisfaction that people usually measure with kind of that Cantrall Ladder of live question that's reflective over many years and has more of

a financial dependency. For no, even if you even if someone disagrees with me and they think, well, I want to really I want to think I did really well when I reflect when I'm seventy five, Still the way to get there is through the daily well being metrics.

So what I've seen there is that there are certain things that we need to think about and build into our days on more of a momentary basis that contribute to not only a sense of well being, but a sense that you're chipping away at something bigger than yourself from a meaning context, and that it's the sum of

those days that leads to very different outcomes. And it's been You probably find this interesting that you know, I've had this impression studying well being for well over a decade now that you know you always have these countries in Western Europe. You get the Switzerland's, the Denmark, spinlans of the world that have these huge well being scores

when you ask people reflective life satisfaction questions. But in some data that Gallop put out just in the last year, if you look at daily experience measures of positive affect and stress and feel whether people feel blue throughout the day and positive experiences. The countries at the top of those lists, they're all in Central to South America. You get you get the Panama, Paraguay, and and several other

countries in that region. Four of the top five on that daily experience measure are in the bottom half of the I M, S, G d P per capita rankings of national wealth. So it's a it's kind of a telling me a very different picture about overall well being. I think that a lot of what's going in there is also the community aspect, right the the in some of these particular nations that that that's course uh high will.

When you examine and go to the nations, you see that there's a there's a lot of support even even if they live in very poor environments. There's a lot of value pleased on social relationships. Would you say that

that's right? Yeah, And when I get into these kind of elements of the daily experience and well being, if you go back to Teresa Momba Blay and Steven Kramer's work studying journal entries of workers across professions, it's these little moments throughout the day where you realize that you made something a little bit better than otherwise would have been.

So if someone calls me because they're really frustrated about a product or a book or something I've worked on, and I kind of get them back to neutral, I need to step back and acknowledge that's a little win throughout the day. And if I'm reading a book to my son tonight and last night we recognized a new word, that's a real victory. That's got to count towards my

experience that I'm doing that day. And so when you think about our forward progress we make it work, or just our brief interactions with the loved ones, do we smile and laugh a lot throughout the day? And then the thing that I'd spent time on a few years ago with even more intensities, how do we make sure people have enough physical energy each day just to be their best? But I forget about all the long term health outcome stuff for a minute, because that doesn't really

motivate people to make different choices today. How do I move around enough so that I can keep up with four year holds in a six year old at five o'clock today? And then that gets me moving along. So the more I study the science and more, it all comes back to these moments, And how do you help people to make slightly better decisions today that lead to

wood Barb Frederickson would call kind of that word spirals. Absolutely, that's a great, great question, And your latest book fully Charged goes beyond your book and the well Being identifies these three factors really important in the workplace and in your daily life. But I bet that people in the workforce have really embraced this book because of these things. You can just see how they're lacking all across corporate America.

One is meaning, where you talk about the importance of again going beyond what you mentioned this also in well being, going beyond just the pursuit of happiness to find it sort of a higher calling. And second is interactions. And then the third is energy, and energy can include eating right, sleeping longer, and these sorts of things. How do you identify, by the way, I know how you identified those five factors and well being, tell me how you came up

with these three factors and fully Charged. Coming up with the three factors in Fully Charged was mostly going through a lot of research that I had been accumulating on those topics more qualitatively. But then it also did involve we did some outbound surveys looking at what were the keys to people reporting that they had days where not only they had the highest levels of daily experience daily well being, but also that they were engaged in their work.

So that's and it's rooted in the biggest concern that I have from a especially from a workplace standpoint, But it extends beyond that, which is that I mean, most people have enough basic energy or their charge enough to make it to work today. But the vast majority of people, somewhere between eighty and ninety percent by my estimates, are going to show up to work today or tomorrow and be running at nowhere near their real capacity for a

majority of their waking day. And that's what seems immediately fixable to me for people in most circumstances in life, where there are some things you can do to start

to move that curve backwards. And I think out of the ten thousand people we surveyed for that work on fully charged, there were just it was tanner twelve percent a pound samples we look at who said they had a great deal of physical energy yesterday, and roughly I think it was in the range of twenty percent said they had really positive interactions or did a lot of meaningful work yesterday when you ask him to think about

the whole day. So it's we've got to help people to work on those kind of one to time and figure out how do you build those three elements more into your daily routine. It's it's funny. So we've worked on this documentary about the book Fully Charged for quite a while and one of the people who's interviewed in it and featured prominently is Brian Wensenk, who originally wrote the book mindle was Eating and does all the fascinating experiments with how our choices and structural set up determines

what we'll eat throughout the day. But if you take his little tips, so if you've got a glass jar that has candy in it sitting down and people can see it, they'll far more than they would if the jar wasn't glass, or if it was hidden our away from arm's reach. And so that what that tells you

to do or to have. At our house, we have jars of mixed nuts sitting out, and apples and fruits and vegetables all over because we eat what we see and what's convenient and easy, right And when I travel, I keep those little packs with me everywhere I go, so I'm not tempted in the airport to make a

bad choice, which is a lot easier. But what I've learned from Brian Wansink and his work is that we can do some of the same things with our interactions, where you can structure your day where you see more of and spend more time with the people who always pick you up a little bit, instead of spending as much time around the relative who passes along her second hand stress every time you interact, right, and when we do the same thing with our work and our structure

our work, we can make sure that we do little things to bring the humanity back into our work. Whether it's a having a thumbnail of someone in a contact file so that you can see the person you're serving instead of an anonymous Google letter next to their name, or whatever. They are these little tricks that just make it a little bit easier, less resistance to make good choices that boost daily well being. I love that, and it contributes to this adding up all of these moments,

all these moments of our life matter. I really like that. What does it mean to build a cumulative advantage in terms of interactions? I wanted to ask you that. Yeah, it was, you know, that's a word combination that struck me. Maybe ten years ago, I was reading a academic paper from Tim Judge, who was at Florida at the time, I think and he looked at that National Launch gueneral study of youth over many years and essentially found that each year you gained more I believe it was self

efficacy or confidence. He was studying that each year you gained a little edge. So you did between sixteen and eighteen that continued to amplify the game in the next time period interval. So you kind of build this advantage where it's not just a little bit better would have been expected if you went from zero to one, but when you go from one to two, you get a little bit more of a boost because of the way

that changes the dynamic there. And so I think you see that with your interactions as well, where and a part of this is because of I mean, we've seen a lot of the work from christ Taxis and Power and others about the way those social social interaction. You can debate the degree to which, but it has some contribution to the social dynamic that extends beyond an individual.

And so if I have a great interaction with my wife or my daughter says some of the meaningfuls I'm walking out of the house that day, that carries on to the first person I interact with at work and amplifies that just a little bit more so, if we think about setting up our day like that, not only does this set us on the right trajectory, but I mean there's also a dynamic of the It gets debated sometimes as well about willpower by the end of the day, where it's a lot easier if you set yourself up

to have to not have a lot of tough food choices or a lot of tough interactions early in the day to be at your best when you need it later on in the day most likely. I really really like that we just have a you know, maybe ten fifty more minutes. And I wanted to get personal. If any questions I ask you make you a cumfortball, of course, just feel free to go into the next question. But

there's something I want to discuss with you. One is that and you have spoken about some various occasions that you were diagnosed at age sixteen with a very rare genetic disorder that causes cancer cells to appear various parts of your body. And I found it very interesting how you've been I read that E've ben experimenting with ways of slowing down the growth of tumors. So what sort of research have you done along those lines and what

have you found. Yeah, I've been very open in recent years, especially with this most recent video, about my own personal battles. I've essentially been battling cancer since I was first diagnosed

when I was sixteen years old. And I have a really rare disorder that essentially shuts off the body's most powerful tumor suppressing gene, and so I lost an eye, all my vision in my left eye to cancer when I was sixteen, and the doctor said, you know, you will have cancer and your kidneys and pancreas and spine and all over your body over whatever long of a

lifetime they thought I could live at that point. And I currently am battling cancer in all those areas, which is an annual thing of doing CT scans, MRIs and

all that. So it's kept me very focused on what are all the things that I can do, not just psychologically, but with my choices on food and diet and exercise activity all that, and also with just traditional medical scans and sciences and drugs that are in trials right now in order to hopefully decrease my odds of new cancers growing and growth rates slowing down, and existing cancers spreading, number tastasizing, and it's I think, I think it's important

that you know, I've been studying this long enough to know that you know, anything that promises there's some miracle cure if you just eat right and exercise or whatever, you won't get these cancers or any other ailments. You know, that's the first sign to start looking somewhere else not believe it. But I am increasingly convinced that the choices we make do significantly increase and decrease our odds. And it's always I mean, it's kind of at the margin.

So if you you really do the right things and eat a lot of healthy vegetable instead of fried foods and sugar and just loading up on carbride rates and things like that, will that help over time with inflammation and potentially slow down cancer growth rates. I'm convinced based on the work I've studied that it will help to some degree. But everything's just kind of chipping away at

the odds there. So I also do the traditional So I've tried multiple approaches over time from the kind of change in my lifestyle dramatically, which I have done and written about two different clinical trials and chemotherapeutics, and just I call an interview and read the research from top medical researchers on my condition all these topics every few months, and also do just a whole week that's the battery of MRI and CT scans and blood tests and everything

else at least once a year, just so I can stay ahead of this situation as much as possible. So I've I've learned a lot about managing cancer, hopefully as a chronic ailment for many years to come through that. When you were sixteen and you got diagnosed, I want to go back to your frame of mind at that age, were you did you go through some existential like angst? Do you do you back then? Did you did you?

And and do you now fear death? You know, it's it's a it's a good question, especially given some of the topics that you're interested in have been talking about with students and growth and development at that age. I when I've looked back on that experience, it's almost hard

for me to even believe my recall today. But I'd taken a lot of notes and written about it earlier on and because I essentially grew up in a household where they were practicing positive psychology to an extreme every day, and I was doing all the ror shocks and block tests and with all the with parents as teachers in

psychologists and academics. That was my childhood. When I found out about this disease and started to do sight in my eye and had a lot of surgeries and so forth, I'm still mind boggled by how little it threw me off my normal course of well being and development. It's it's really remarkable. I mean, I kept doing all the same things with my friends and athletics, and of course it was difficult news and I had to react by it.

But everyone around me was from day one was saying what can we do, how do we stay ahead of it? What are the next steps? And they weren't dwelling on something that was beyond their control, and their actions and words both said to me that, you know, we're going to keep figuring this out and stay ahead of it and things will be okay. And boy, I mean, in hindsight, I am so glad that I have not spent the last whatever twenty four years since then stressing out or

dwelling on something that hasn't come to fruition yet. I've had a pretty good life since that. Well, you know, I think that you're actually quite inspirational for people who you know, a lot of people just have generalized anxieties. Are just anxious and there is no specific reason. It's not like there's an impending you know, like high probability of cancer or not. And I think a lot of what you're saying is, you know, really all that like worry is just really kind of wasting your life in

a way. You know, you can really be working on the things that you know you can do to increase your moment to moment experience in life. That's a great thought. I mean, I haven't thought about it that way before, but it's there. There are so many things that and boy, I mean I see this. I worry more now about my kids having children than I ever did about myself

for that. And I mean just there's so much worry that, even in that capacity as a parent, that I build up for things that never really come through or cause anything. So that I mean, it'd be it'd be fun at some point to study the amount of wasted worry out there in our society today. And I just got back from a trip. It was my fortieth birthday with some friends last week and thank you, and it's it was.

It was interesting and we didn't have a television or watch any news, and boy that helped my I mean, there's you don't have as much worry about when you don't watch the news for eight days. It's a really good point. And I wonder as well, and is likes well being a potential buffer against death anxiety. I think it is from my experience it clearly. I mean my grandfather Don kind of raised me talking about you know

when you have a full bucket. This was this metaphor he went on about from the seventies was you know, when you have a full buck it builds a reserve when things are trying to dip into it. That was the root of that book. I love that, And it really was like that my bucket was so full at that point that, yeah, something was really trying to empty it or dip from it. But the people around me were so good they essentially built that reserve for me

that lasted through a really tough time. And I was just reading a study small ones like seventy five participants this morning but they were looking at reactivity to stress, and they found that when people were focused on others and giving as you might expect, that essentially created a buffer for the momentary physical reaction to stress throughout the day.

And so it's fun for me now to see at kind of a micro level how that's being proven out, which is essentially what I experienced when I was sixteen. Based on my recall and something that speaks very highly of you is almost what I talked to. Really, really he does think highly of you. And we were having a discussion the other day and I was telling some of my colleagues that I was going to have you in my podcast, and they said, you know, he's really a guy that lives his work. He is a very

high character individual. I think. Is how how my colleague phrased it, who really lives it? And you know, it is very inspirational to a lot of people, and to me in particular, because I do as from over age, had a lot of these existential you know, just waking up in a in a sweat at three in the morning, like, oh my god, I'm going to die someday, you know, like I mean, does that ever happen to you anymore or what kind of buffer does that ever happen to you? Ever?

Has that ever happened to you? No? You know, it's it's interesting where I I mean, I have stress about things that I think a lot of us do from more of a more of an immediate threatned standpoint when you've got kids running around near the street or flying on a short runway on a prop plane or whatever. But outside of that, I one thing I learned early on, probably before I had this experience. Thinking back to it,

it's a good question, is that. I mean, it's the you know, the one thing that I've got in my control today is that I know I've got the rest of this data, do at least a few, even if they're small, meaningful things that might have an influence on other people outside of my presence, whether I'm doing something else tomorrow, whether I'm not here tomorrow right, and so that's it's it's oriented my kind of focus of a

day for a long long time. Where it's it's it also, I mean, it creates some urgency to say, I want to do something that has more of a lasting impact, and that helps me to prioritize because nobody's gonna sit around ten years from now and say, oh my gosh, Tom got the inbox zero on December fifteenth, right, So that's I mean, that helps me to at least get focused on a few things on a day to day

basis that uh make somewhat of a difference. And then it's been a fun part of working on all the books and videos and teaching as I'm sure you see and things like that, where I mean hopefully that's that's an influence that makes a difference for kids and for students and people that continues to grow in your absence. Yeah, and I can, I can definitely say that the work you've done will will continue to impact a lot of people,

you know, one hundred years from now. You know, it's really it's really important work and and maybe even beyond one hundred years. Uht. Let me just end with this one question. So what matters the most to you personally in life? I think, I mean one thing is it matters a lot to me that I can make a contribution to something larger than myself that continues to grow when I'm gone. And that's and so I try and

orient things around that thought. And there are ways I do that that are I would call very intensive, which is time with my wife and kids and closest friends and family members, where that's that's intensive and hopefully even more long term help in terms of development and influence.

Then there are things that might be a quick fleeting thought that changes someone's day, that I'll that I'll never meet that those those really count to me and aggregate too, and so it's you know, it's kind of I guess an interesting insight into how I think about my progress would be one when I learned this from Don, my grandfather, is that we used to get it when we were

first and earliers working on Strengths Minder. We'd get a little report each morning talking about how many people had receive their top five and gone through the assessment and so forth, and we looked at that a lot more than we ever looked at any day to day or financials or anything like that, just to say how many people. Is some of this behind the scenes science having an influence on I think even in analytical roles, I've learned

it's important to help people to do that. So there's not only can you see the person you're serving, but there's some measure of the mission as well, because it helps you to do more a week later, a month later. Thank you, Tom, and I really do feel truly honored to be able to chat with you today, So thank you so much for your time, and thank you. This is the topics you're boring are very important for where I think the future education's head and we're all thinking

about from a personal development and insight standpoint. Thanks Tom, have a great day. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Hoffmann. I hope you found this episode just as informative and thought provoking as I did. If you don't like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com