To succeed, follow your contribution, not your passion
Tom Rath argues that achievement should not be pursued as an end goal but rather as a means to contribute to others. He emphasizes that purpose, rather than passion, drives career success and fulfillment. Building purpose comes from daily contributions and surrounding oneself with inspiring individuals.
- ▪Rath suggests that ambition is fine, but it should not come at the expense of health and relationships.
- ▪Research indicates that people with a strong sense of purpose earn significantly more and feel better than those who chase passion.
- ▪He advises professionals to seek significance in their work by identifying how their skills can help others.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Globe and Mail |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/talent/article-to-succeed-follow-your-contribution-not-your-passion/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T13:06:11.034Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T13:06:11.034Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RUklvZFzj5Z3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
ShareSave for laterPlease log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free AccountInterested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.Achievement has become our most socially acceptable addiction, social science researcher Tom Rath argues.“We celebrate the workaholic, the harried CEOs and executive career climbers, the perpetual hustlers, the never-satisfied strivers – even as they sacrifice their health, their relationships and their inner peace on the seemingly sacred altar of accomplishment,” he writes in What’s the Point?He stresses that ambition is fine. So is excellence. But it’s crucial to not to pursue achievement as an end rather than a means to contribute and help others. Life and work is about contribution.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Globe and Mail.
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