FZ Book Club: Are You Fully Charged?

Are You Fully Charged? by Tom Rath presents a comprehensive guide to improving your everyday well-being through three key areas: energy, interactions, and meaning. Energy focuses on making intentional choices that improve both your physical and mental health. Interactions deal with fostering more positive than negative moments. Lastly, meaning deals with finding purpose and significance in your everyday. While this book laid out many interesting statistics and points, my biggest takeaways had to do with people's motivation and ability to focus.

Motivation
One of the first things that grabbed my attention was that people are more motivated and satisfied when they make below $40,000/year. They attribute this to the motivation being essential needs like food, shelter, and preventing daily worries. Once you earn > $75,000, well-being scores do not go up. In short, this communicates that once we reach a basic level of financial security, making more money is unlikely to lead to more happiness. Money is not an effective motivator.

In the same strain, people are more motivated, especially in the long term, by intrinsic motivations rather than extrinsic ones. Examples of intrinsic motivations are a desire for mastery, personal growth, curiosity, deeper meaning, lifelong learning, altruism, and passion. Examples of extrinsic motivations are recognition, achievements, or higher pay. When we look to encourage and lead our teams, it's important to think through your ability and capacity to encourage your team's intrinsic motivations. One way we do this is through our core values. For example, how quickly we are able to respond to a customer's needs (responsiveness) and solve their problem honestly (integrity) creates a positive experience for you both that will be remembered (professionalism). All of these values play in with the work we are trying to accomplish every day.

Focus
Another area if importance was around our ability to focus. Here are a few stats that stood out:

• The average American spends eight and a half hours in front of a screen.
• The average American receives 63,000 words of new information every day.
• In a study of 150,000 smartphones, users unlocked their phones 110 times a day on average.
• The average worker loses 28% of their day to distractions.
• One in five workers can focus on one thing at a time throughout a workday.
• On average, people spend half of their time thinking about something other than what they are doing at that moment.

A lack of focus poses a threat to productivity, performance, quality, and above all SAFETY. If we are to keep our teams safe and instill safety as a top priority, we must figure out a way to keep our people alert and focused. As leaders, we need to repeatedly ask the question, "How do we create focus in our teams?"

Overall, I found this book applicable to my role as a leader but also applicable on a personal level. Taking a step back to understand our motivations, areas of distractions, and capacity helps me approach work more intentionally.