It's Not About You: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life

by Tom Rath

every exchange with another person either “filled their bucket or dipped from it.” He also taught me the best way to fill my own bucket was to spend time filling other people’s.

Your life has an unknown expiration date. Your efforts and contributions to others do not. The time, energy, and resources you invest in people you care for and your community keep growing forever.

The brilliance of the human species lies in our ability to put collective interests ahead of our own. We have the opportunity, every day, to contribute to collective efforts and others’ lives.

If you are able to have at least five positive conversations for every negative one in a given day, it should carry forward and energize the networks around you. As a part of the research I conducted on this topic, I found that people who have great interactions throughout the day are five times as likely to have a very high sense of well-being.

Even when you’re having a horrible day and someone says something rude to you without reason, you get to decide if you will dig in on the negative tone or try to turn things around. With that choice, you will likely set off a cascading process that will make your day progressively better—or progressively worse.

I am increasingly convinced that even fifteen minutes of time spent listening to another person is one of the most valuable things you can do today.

Invest your time and attention wisely.

In my final year of college, I did share more about my condition with a few of my closest friends, as I was not trying to keep a big secret. But I chose not to have this as a central part of my story, and that strategy served me well during that time.

Most importantly, I wanted to contribute to things that would continue to live on without me.

You do not need to be defined by a family background or chronic condition.

When I studied my options and offers, I knew working at Gallup would be the most challenging opportunity, and not for the right reasons. I would feel the need to work longer and harder than anyone to disprove their assumptions. My actions would be under a microscope given my family connections. Even when no one actually gave me a leg up, everyone would assume I had one. If I did succeed at something, I would always question if that perceived victory was real.

I realized this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a twenty-two-year-old kid to spend a few years working alongside his mentor and someone he loved and admired more than anyone. In the end, that answered my question. When you see a rare opportunity, take it.

Life is too brief for living with regrets.

odd that we essentially wait until people die to praise and celebrate all their contributions in life and “fill their bucket.”

Tell someone how they have contributed to your life . . . while they are still around to hear it.

Don was able to have an outsized influence because he was always playing the long game of contribution.

You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.

Mark lived a life that will just keep on growing to be far bigger than one human life span. This is what I believe we should all aim for: to make contributions to others’ lives that will grow infinitely in our absence.

A great commonality we all share is that we only have today to invest in what could outlive us.

In the end, you are what you contributed to the world.

Take a few moments now to think about some of the people who have had the greatest influence on your life. What can you learn from them?

How can you let them know what a difference they made, before it is too late to tell them?

Every morning, wake up and remind yourself: it’s not about me. Then ask yourself: How can I contribute to another person’s life today?