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 1066: How Many #1’s?

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

Maybe it is because of our short attention span or because we just can’t be satisfied with only one thing being important at a time, but we seem to like to have multiple number #1 priorities…all at the same time.  How can this be?  Science tells us that our brain, as much as we would like to believe that we can think about more than one thing at a time, can only focus and think about one, yes an absolute one subject at a time.  So, how can we have more than one #1 priority at the same time?  We can’t in reality.  Companies and people have to make a choice and when they are honest about it, there is only one #1 at a time.  So, how do we make sure that we get it all done and in the right order?  It takes clear thinking, ruthless priority setting and discipline to ensure that we we can get our priority work done and make it seem to others that we can indeed focus on multiple projects and achieve across many objectives simultaneously.  But, we need to be careful about how we throw around “This is our #1 priority”.  When someone hears that and takes it to heart then they will watch, listen and evaluate whether that is the truth or not.  It’s a high bar to live up to, so let’s be careful about how cavalierly we throw around this statement.

Followers of Jesus know what we were told about what our #1 priority must be.  “Seek first the Kingdom of God…”  Jesus didn’t give us a bunch of #1’s to squabble about.  His Kingdom sits front and center, or should sit there in our lives.  All else becomes #2.  He goes on to tell us that if we do see His Kingdom first that all else will fall into place.  It sounds so simple, but our nature and the world we live in wants us to always have a bunch of #1’s!  Today, we have choices to make.  Can we make those decisions today with Him as our sole #1 priority?

Reference: Matthew 6:33 (New Living Translation)