Tom Rath Quotes

Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

No matter how healthy you are today, you can take specific actions to have more energy and live longer.

When your boss and colleagues care enough to invest in your health, it is good for you and the business.

Making better choices takes work. There is a daily give and take, but it is worth the effort.

What's more, we had discovered that people have several times more potential for growth, when they invest energy in developing their strenghts instead of correcting their deficiencies.

Doing for others may be the only way to create lasting well-being.

I've seen so many people - loved ones and colleagues - who jump from one diet to the next, one exercise regimen to the next . I was trying to figure out what were some of the basic things that each of us can build into a lifestyle for good, instead of bouncing from one thing to the next.

People who have at least three or four very close friendships are healthier, have higher wellbeing, and are more engaged in their jobs. But the absence of any close friendships can lead to boredom, loneliness, and depression.

On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.

Every day, I read about new ideas and research that could help someone I care about live a longer and healthier life.

Positive defaults protect you from yourself - and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.

If a school makes an effort to provide kids the right foods and help them to be more active, this benefits the student and the family's health. If you embark on a program to improve your health with a church or community group, you are more likely to stick with it over time.

You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.

It turned out that looking forward to a vacation or event provided even more happiness than the event itself.

At a very basic level, people need to know that there is constancy in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed.

What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths - and can call on the right strength at the right time.

Positive words are the glue that holds relationships together.

I'm a researcher, so I'm realistic that there's nothing I'm doing that's going to prevent me from getting cancer in the future. But I can slow it down.

Every hour you spend on your rear end ... saps your energy and ruins your health.

Across the board, having the opportunity to develop our strengths is more important to our success than our role, our title, or even our pay.

Washington is not a city that takes great pride in being a healthy place, necessarily. Now, I have no data. That's just my own observation.

When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a lot more of who you already are.

Our relationships with people are formed by small moments - and relationships are crucial in business.

Although individuals need not be well-rounded, teams should be.

The most influential choices you make for your health occur in the grocery store. Once you put something in your cart, good or bad, it is likely to end up in your stomach. Even if you feel some remorse about your poor choice in the store, when you get home, your willpower stands little chance. After all, you paid for it, and it is only a few steps away at that point.

Even if people just change two or three things that they are able to sustain over time, it makes quite a difference eventually.

There will be plenty of blame to go around but if you take credit for the sunshine, you also get blamed for the rain.

I act as if my life depends on each decision. Because it does.

Having fewer unhealthy days and, in turn, more days when you have the energy to get things done is probably the global constant through which businesses and individuals can think about the quantifiable upside of increasing wellbeing.

Executives must place a priority on wellbeing if they want to attract the right people, keep their best people, and drive their company's financial performance.

When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.

If you want to improve your life and the lives of those around you, you must take action.

When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.

Followers have a very clear picture of what they want and need from the most influential leaders in their lives: trust, compassion, stability, and hope

I have started forcing myself to substitute thinking "I'm busy" with "I need to do a better job managing my time.

The data suggest that to have a thriving day, we need six hours of social time.

It's unrealistic to expect the person you go to for sage advice also to be the person you go out and have a good time with. And it's unlikely that he or she will be the same person who's pushing you and motivating you to do more every day, like a coach or manager does.

The things that change people's lives are usually an accumulation of small acts.

The single biggest threat to our own wellbeing tends to be ourselves

Make it easier to do things that increase your wellbeing before you have to make a choice because a lot of our choices, though they seem small in the moment, have a big effect.

I've seen the same thing emerge in the research around the interaction of sleeping and moving and eating: if you get a good night's sleep, you are significantly more likely to make the right choices about what you eat the next morning, you're more likely to work out, you're more likely to get a better night's sleep the next night.

The lesson here is clear: If you want people to understand that you value their contributions and that they are important, the recognition and praise you provide must have meaning that is specific to each individual.

You would think that when someone accepts a position with a company, they would assume that their life will be better off because they have that job rather than a different one.

I would absolutely recommend against excessive positivity and optimism. Any positive emotion that you're infusing into a workplace needs to be grounded in reality. If it's not realistic, sincere, meaningful, and individualized, it won't do much good.

Buying experience such as going out to dinner or taking a vacation increases our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. Experiences last while material purchases fade.

We engineered activity out of our lives in the name of convenience. We created foods that put fried, fatty, sweet, and salty ahead of fresh, natural, and healthy. We quickly sacrifice sleep to work longer hours in pursuit of the American Dream. Even when we do these things with good intentions, they have life-threatening consequences.

Clearly, there aren't enough positive moments or interactions happening in the workplace. As a result, our economy suffers, companies suffer, and individual relationships suffer.

When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you're doing when you wake up each day.

When we get at least six hours of daily social time, it increases our wellbeing and minimizes stress and worry. The six hours includes time at work, at home, on the telephone, talking to friends, sending e-mail, and other communication.

If we can find short-term incentives that are consistent with our long-term objectives, it is much easier to make the right decisions in the moment.

I think trust is primarily built through relationships, and it's important because it's the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers.

The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician.

What we've learned is that if you can make the right decision in the supermarket aisle, it's a heck of a lot easier to make a good decision when you reach in your cupboard when you're craving a snack at eight o'clock at night.

Each ounce you consume is either a net positive or a net negative by the time it runs through your body. You don't get healthier by simply trying to eat better in general. You improve your health on a bite-by-bite basis.

I think the term 'friend' itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term 'good friend' is overused. Adding the word 'vital' provides a clear definition of what we mean.

The quickest way to be a little bit happier and more engaged in your job is to spend some time thinking about developing closer friendships.

Every human being has talents that are just waiting to be uncovered.

At its fundamentally flawed core, the aim of almost any learning program is to help us become who we are not.

'StrengthsFinder 2.0' is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers - it was oriented more toward managers - or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.

Ignoring negative things that need to be changed is destructive and does nothing to alleviate negativity. Instead, we should focus on the way we're treating other people in our brief interactions with them.

There is nothing wrong with working on important individual milestones as long as you understand that they may not be the memories you treasure 25 years from now.

When we can see an immediate payoff, we are more likely to change our behavior in the moment. This aligns our daily actions with our long-term interests.

As legendary investor Warren Buffett put it, by definition, "A leader is someone who can get things done through other people:

What works for one person's needs is almost always very different from the next.

The key to human development is building on who you already are

The real energy occurs in each connection between two people, which can bring about exponential returns.

For wellbeing to take hold, it's got to be something that individual team members are getting excited about in their own lives. It can't be something that a company is forcing top-down through hierarchical structures.

Exercise is not enough. Working out three times a week is not enough. Being active throughout the day is what keeps you healthy.

When we asked people if they would rather have a best friend at work or a 10% pay raise, having a friend clearly won.

One's single greatest strength may be uncovering the hidden talents of another person.

There is certainly some predisposition to wellbeing, based on the research I've looked at. There are people who have a lot more natural discipline. But for most of us, it takes a lot more in terms of social expectations, where, say, we tell people we're going to run a 5K.

Don't worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.

It appears that the epidemic of active disengagement we see in workplaces every day could be a curable disease ... if we can help the people around us develop their strengths.

I've spoken with a few employers who have moved away from what has to be some of the least attractive language you could use about health risk to start talking about wellbeing.

The pursuit of meaning, not happiness, is what makes life worthwhile.

One challenge is that our ability to progress in our career is often determined by our effectiveness in responding to near-term needs. When high value is placed on solving these kinds of problems, it creates a culture in which leaders spend little or no time thinking about what could be done because they receive more accolades for simply doing what needs to be done.

It's tempting to work more than 60 hours a week and sacrifice sleep, not move, and eat bad foods as they are convenient. But this comes with a cost.

People who say they have a best friend at work are seven times as likely to be engaged in what they're doing. And if they don't have a best friend at work, the odds of being engaged are just 1 in 12.

I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas.

While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not.

You can intentionally choose to spend more time with the people you enjoy most and engage your strengths as much as possible.

There's a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn't seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I've spoken with have said to me.

Wellbeing is about the combination of our love for what we do each day, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, the vibrancy of our physical health, and the pride we take in what we have contributed to our communities. Most importantly, it's about how these five elements interact.