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 588: Rest Time

We work hard and then we work harder until we work ourselves to a point of being totally wasted and burned out. I have written before how important it is to take time to rest and recharge. As we are coming out of The Great Recession it feels like we are going to need to be as rested and recharged as we can be as the economy recovers and the work comes back. But, how can we rest when we have so much already going on and we don’t want to miss an opportunity? It’s a great question and even trying to answer it for ourselves can add stress and wear us out even further. What we all have to do is find a place where we can rest and find a place where we can unplug. All of this is getting harder in our fast-paced always connected world. But, we must rest otherwise we can’t perform at our highest level. If athletes did not rest their bodies then they would under perform and eventually breakdown from injury and once that happens for an athlete they may never recover. The same can happen to us if we push ourselves too far and too fast. We break emotionally or we make a bad decision or our judgment fails us. These can be unrecoverable instances that had we been rested we never would have made. As believers we have a place of rest that we can reach for that will recharge us each and every time. We don’t need to walk away to rest. We just need to walk towards the right place of respite. Paul tells us in Hebrews 4 where to find that rest; “For all who enter into God’s rest will find rest from their labors, just as God rested after creating the world.” If we can find the same rest from God that He received after creating the world, then that is the best rest of all.

Reference: Hebrews 4:10 (New Living Testament)