Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 1438: The Right Worm

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“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

The adage is, “The early bird gets the worm”.  Sounds right.  All my life I have enjoyed being early and I would say that it’s true that when we are early, we get to make choices that others don’t.  That being said, being early and having the “worms” available doesn’t guarantee at all that we will make the right choices. A recent article in the New York Times told of a study done by Penn State University that proved that people will go way out of their way to reduce mental stress, including putting physical efforts on their bodies.  This led to an observation that when we have mental burdens we will get up early and do whatever to get rid of them.   And, we also take this further in that when we sit and stare at the work in front of us, many of us will do a bunch of trivial and mundane tasks first, before we tackle the hard stuff.  That’s why we love checklists.  It makes us feel good when we have done a bunch of stuff, without regard to what was really important or not.  The implications are that we (and others) might be getting to the worms early, but we need to to do a better job determining which are the right worms!

Jesus tells us, “Seek first” His Kingdom, making it very clear what our first priority should be .  If we can live our lives with this clearly what we prioritize then we can know that we have sought what we should.  Some of us came to God early in our lives.  Others later.  And many still to come.  Whether we find Him early or not, when we do and we work to bring Him glory, we all receive the same blessing and gifts!  We just need to keep Him first and then all else behind.

Reference:  Matthew 6:33 (King James Version)