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 22: Yeah, Work Is Hard Too

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Yesterday I referenced Proverbs 12:24 and said that leadership demands hard work. Yes it does but let’s face it work is hard as a whole too and the sooner in our work lives that we accept this fact the better off we will be in finding how to realize joy and purpose from the work we do. Where did this work thing start and how did it get to where it can be a burden in our lives? Well, we can go back to the beginning when Adam and Eve got themselves thrown out of God’s Club Med and their idyllic garden spot. Beyond passing down sin to the rest of us, Adam bequeathed to us the curse of hard work. In Genesis Chapter 3 we get the blow by blow and the particular verses of verse 17 (“…I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.”) and verse 19 (“All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day”) are pretty grim. But, once you get over it and understand that work is always going to be hard and some days will be excruciating, and that it just comes with this human territory, then you can make sense of it and try to manage work life to more than just a struggle and sweat. Someone once said to me, “I don’t like gravity much either and I would prefer it wasn’t harder every day to get out of bed, but I have learned to live with it”. I like that attitude and I like the recognition that there are times in our life when our work will seem really difficult and the only thing we want to do is pack it in and run away. However, we can draw on the fact that it was all set up for us this way. Hard work was not something we created ourselves. It is not something that we are to shy away from or feel like we are being robbed of life because we have to do it or that we are somehow cursed or being punished or unfairly treated. It is part of our human experience and like gravity; it is something that if we can accept then from it we can make the most. My hope for you today is that you don’t head to the office with the feeling of resentment, or feeling burdened down, but instead that you take these feelings and convert them to a rational realization that the hard work you do today, and tomorrow, and the next day, is just all part of life and that there are blessings that can come your way from how you do your work and how others view your attitude and performance. Can today not be a great day that you feel uplifted with what you have in front of you? Sure it can!

Reference: Genesis 3:17-19 (New Living Testament)