What if the thing you spend the most time on at work won't matter at all when you're gone?

It's a confronting question, but it's the kind Tom Rath lives with deliberately. He walks past a 10,000-headstone cemetery near his home in Washington DC and has never once seen a grave mention social media followers, email response times, or job titles. Yet these are the things most of us spend our days chasing.

In this episode, I sit down with Tom Rath, one of the most widely read authors in the world of work and wellbeing and the man behind StrengthsFinder 2.0, How Full Is Your Bucket?, and his just-released book What's the Point? Tom challenges the "follow your passion" narrative head-on and makes the case that purpose isn't a grand discovery waiting for you someday. It's what you do for other people, hour by hour, throughout the day.

We get into the single question Tom uses every morning to reprioritise his time, how to escape the comparison trap that platforms like LinkedIn are designed to pull you into, and why he believes the so-called initiators are the ones who will thrive in the age of AI.

Tom and I discuss:

• Why "follow your passion" is misguided advice, and what Tom recommends doing instead when thinking about work and career

• The statistics on how much of our career path we unconsciously inherit from our parents, and what to do about it

• How strengths only really come to life when they're turned outward in service of another person

• Tom's "what's the point?" question and how to use it daily to reprioritise your time and cut through distraction

• Why resume virtues and eulogy virtues are so different, and how walking through cemeteries has sharpened Tom's thinking on what matters

• Social comparison as the single biggest tax on your sense of progress at work, and how to reduce its grip

• What a "shoulder hunter" is and how to find people whose thinking you can build on

• Why initiators will have a significant advantage over responders as AI continues to reshape the workforce

Key quotes:

"Passion is inherently more self-serving, where purpose is by definition anchored in what it does for other people."

"Stop sleepwalking through your days and lives. The people who are continuing to do that day after day are in for a very rude awakening."

Connect with Tom Rath on Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn, visit his website at https://tomrath.org/, and check out his latest book What's the Point?.

If you enjoyed this episode, I'd recommend going back and listening to my chat with educator and parenting expert Lael Stone, who talks about the power of understanding our imprints — the stories we tell ourselves that we learned in childhood — and how they shape how we show up in the world, and importantly, what we can do to rewrite them. Check out part 1 and part 2.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sign up for Inventium’s AI Agent Bootcamp virtual or in-person.

Your organisation hit its AI adoption target. Eighty percent of staff have a licence, onboarding is done, and the usage dashboard looks great. So why does the work feel the same, or worse? Hitting an adoption target and actually getting value from AI are two completely different things, and most organisations are confusing one for the other.

The truth is that a team using AI badly can actually perform worse than one not using it at all. Buried in mediocre output, drowning in documents nobody reads, and no closer to a better result for their customers.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I dig into what actually separates high-performing AI-augmented teams from the average ones, and why so many organisations are measuring the wrong things.

Neo and I cover:

• Why adoption metrics are almost always vanity metrics, and what to measure instead.
• The difference between AI literacy and AI leverage, and why teams need both but rarely get past the first.
• How poor AI training can actually make teams less productive.
• Why slotting AI into an existing process is only ever an interim step, and what it looks like to genuinely re-engineer workflows.
• The role of AI champions within functional teams, and why workflow architecture is a distinct and critical skill most people do not yet have.

Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits: Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The more AI tools you use, the more productive you get. Right?

Not exactly. Boston Consulting Group leader Gabriella Rosen Kellerman studied what actually happens to people who are using AI intensively at work, and what she found is that beyond a certain point, something breaks. Not burnout. Something different, something the existing research wasn't equipped to explain, and something that organisations are currently making worse without realising it.

In this episode, I sit down with Gabriella to unpack AI Brain Fry: what it is, who is most at risk, and why the sweet spot for productivity might be far fewer tools than you think. We also get into what managers are doing, often unknowingly, that adds 15% more mental fatigue to their teams, and the one cultural message that does more to protect employees than any AI policy.

If you have ever ended the day feeling strangely depleted despite not having done anything physically tiring, this episode will name what's happening and tell you what to do about it.

Gabriella and I discuss:

• What AI Brain Fry is and why it sits outside the existing burnout literature

• Which roles are showing the highest rates of brain fry and what that signals about AI oversight work more broadly

• The productivity cliff: why two to three AI tools is the sweet spot, and what happens to output beyond that

• What the most sophisticated AI users do differently to the people with 25 browser tabs open

• The two manager behaviours that either cut mental fatigue by 15% or actually increase it

• Why some common organisational messages about AI are making employees more vulnerable to fatigue, not less

• The 10/20/70 rule that most organisations are skipping entirely in their AI rollouts

• How to do an informal audit of whether your team is currently suffering from brain fry

Key quotes

"The goal is to develop acute self-awareness of our own intelligence as we come to meet this new alien intelligence."

"AI is completely changing the psychology and behaviour of work. Brain Fry is a proof point of that."

Connect with Gabriella Rosen Kellerman on LinkedIn and her website, and check out her research and writing at Harvard Business Review.

If you enjoyed this chat with Gabriella, I think you'd also love the first time she came on How I Work, where we talked all about thriving in times of uncertainty. You can find that episode here.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.