370. The Faith Code with Rusty Rueff

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Rusty Rueff:

All those applications of life that we have out there and to say, Those things that you do, are you being the way that you should be being or the way that you want to be being and how can we help you with that?

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard, and I am so excited about our guest today. His name is Rusty Rueff and he invests in, advises, and governs startups. He was appointed by President Obama to the President's Advisory Committee for the Arts for the Kennedy Center, and was the Coordinating National Chair For Technology under Obama.

He's the corporate director of Alioth Talent, The Union Social Clubs and Runcoach. He's also on the founding boards of Glassdoor and HireVue. Rusty was a CEO of SNOCAP, and prior to this, he was an EVP at Electronic Arts, responsible for global HR, talent management, corporate services and facilities, corporate communications, government affairs, reporting to EA's chairman and CEO. Prior to EA, Rusty worked for ten years for the PepsiCo companies concluding as a vice-president in International HR. In addition, he spent six years in the commercial radio space as an on-air personality.

And he's here to talk to us today about his latest book, The Faith Code: A Future-Proof Framework for a Life of Meaning and Impact. We all need that.

Rusty, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

Rusty Rueff:

Thank you, Dr. Richard. Great to be here. Thanks.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I know it's always wild when somebody reads your CV and all of the years are kind of compressed into 30 seconds, you've done a lot of really impressive things. But I want to go back in time and I'd love for you to share with us what was the event or series of events that puts you on the path you're on today?

Rusty Rueff:

Yeah. Well, as it is with many, those earliest formative years, those conversations that happen around the dinner table when you're about ten years old where you start to decide, "Okay. I listened to all this stuff.

What am I going to be or what do I want to do?" And I was fortunate that I grew up in a very creative family. My father was a radio and television personality in the Louisville, Kentucky area. He had many friends in the creative space. And my mother was very supportive. She was not creative herself, but she was extraordinarily supportive.

My brother and I took ten years of tap and ballet. I had a subscription to Actors Theatre of Louisville when I was seven years old. And I'm not recommending that to everybody because not everybody's kids should probably see some of the things that you see in theater at seven years old. But for me, it opened up a world of this idea of what could I do to fulfill my own need to be creative and a little bit to following dad's footsteps. So, I pursued the radio and television career, but I also pursued time as an actor.

And I found that from all those experiences, what was most fascinating to me was not the last 2 percent of the creative processes, which is what most of us enjoy. When we go to a play or listen to a movie or read a book or listen to a song, we are getting the last 2 percent. It's the 98 percent before that that's the most fascinating part of the creative process, all the way to the beginning in someone's mind, like what am I going to create, this play, this song, this book, this movie. And so, I was always very passionate about that.

And that became my lighthouse. My lighthouse was to work in that industry and to have an impact in entertainment and media. And initially, I started off as a radio and television personality. It's how I paid my way through school, through college, I went to Purdue. And I worked on commercial radio stations. I got my first job in Indianapolis. I did all of that and then realized that it's not what I wanted to do. You go to school for something. My undergrad is radio and T.V. I don't even think they give those anymore.

And then, all of a sudden, I've got this medium to big market job and I'm going, "Whoa. Wait a minute. This isn't what I thought it was going to be." Even though I'd done it for all these years, there's a certain point in radio where you don't get to do what you want to do. People tell you what to do. They give you a little liner card and you do 20 seconds every eight minutes, and then you sit back and go, "Well, now I'm bored."

So, I had a little bit of a crisis there, identity crisis. Ended up tacking off. If you're a sailor, you would understand this, you know, the wind changed, I took off this way. And I went into the world of human resources, which was fantastic. It was good for me. I enjoyed it. I felt like I had an impact working with other people.

But I still had this desire to get back into entertainment and media. And I got a call one day in 1997 from a headhunter that said, "Hey, there's this video game company and they are looking for a head of HR. Their first head of HR to report to the CEO and the chairman. Would you be interested?" And I'm like, "Video games?" I mean, I left video games when Mortal Kombat started stealing your quarters. I couldn't afford to stay in the arcade. I had no money, you know. And they said, "You've always told us that you wanted to be in entertainment and you started to say digital technology that enables entertainment, and we think this is great for you."

So, I took a left hand turn. I left a very successful career at PepsiCo. I took a chance to go to a small company on the West Coast. My wife and I knew no one, went from Connecticut to San Francisco, and it was life changing. And so, for those seven years, I got back into entertainment. I got to do all kinds of things in this growing company. I got to work in areas, as you mentioned in my bio that I never would have imagined I got to do.

And then, one day, a guy came along who worked at Yahoo and said, "Look, I've got a company I think you would be great to run, some digital music commerce company. Could you do that?" And I was like, "I think so. Let's try." And that was fantastic. It led to many other things. Joining the Grammy board, becoming chairman of the Grammy Foundation, and a lot of other things that I've been able to do in entertainment.

But at the core of all of that was this idea of there are things that make an impact on the world. And I feel like entertainment is a big piece of the impact of our society, of our culture, how people think, technology being the same. And here I was sitting in Silicon Valley having a front row seat to this, and I was like, "There's more that I need to do. There's clearly more than I need to do." And so, I stepped out of the corporate world when I sold SNOCAP in 2008.

I was fortunate enough to be able to be invited on to a number of different corporate boards that I felt I could make a difference, Glassdoor being one of those. I joined Glassdoor when we didn't even have a PowerPoint. It was just an idea. And the idea being that we're going to give employees more information so they can make better career decisions. So, they're not making a terrible decision that can be career fatal and also emotionally fatal when a job doesn't work.

And that began to lead to other things. I wrote a book on talent and business. And along the way, we can talk about it as we talk about the book. I gave this talk at Purdue University, where I went to school, at the business school, and it was right after the iPhone came out. And if you remember, after the iPhone came out, the thing that made the iPhone work was the app store. And remember, there's an app for that. Ubiquitous marketing campaign that Steve Jobs put out.

And I gave this talk, I said, "Are you building your life as a platform or an app?" And I gave it to the business students at Purdue, and the idea being, are you building your life as a platform, which is a technology platform, like our phones, Android, iOS, very dependable, very stable, very consistent, builds other things on it, has to be updated every now and then, but it is something you could count on. If we couldn't count on it, when we open up our phones or we open up our laptops or iPads, it wouldn't boot up the same way every day. But it does, so it's a very dependable way. 

So, are you building your life as a platform, things like values, principles, relationships, deep understanding of things like your health, your mental health, and focusing on those kinds of things? Or you're building your life as an app, an app that comes and goes and crashes and it's in and it's out?

And there are many things in our life that are apps. Our jobs are apps. They come, they go, they can change beyond our control. And if we built our life on our jobs - and we all know somebody, we've all been there maybe at one time or another - when work is not working out and all of a sudden you lose that job or you're diminished, or you feel like I've given everything, I've had to do this and now it's gone, and my self-esteem crashes, my ego is gone, it affects my friends, my relationships, my kids. What have I done? I've built my life on an app versus on a platform.

And there are many other apps. It could be the school you go to. It could be the car you drive. It can be the sports team that you follow. Think about the ups and the downs that we have when our sports teams succeed or fail and how it affects us.

So, I gave this talk, for years and years I would run into people who were at that talk who say, "Rusty, I'm still working on that platform app, platform app, platform app."

Then, the pastor of my church and I, we get together every Wednesday morning with another buddy, been doing it for decades now. He said, "You know, we should do a message series on that." So, we did a message series called Life Apps, and that went great. He did sort of the spiritual side and I did the applications of life side. And then one day, a few years after that, he said, "We should write a book about that," and that is The Faith Code.

The Faith Code being, are you building your life as a platform or an app and using all the metaphors? And in some ways, Dr. Richard, bringing me back to entertainment again, because I look at entertainment, I define it this way, entertainment is anything you do with your discretionary time.

You have discretionary time, you decide what to do. That's entertainment. And so, if a person picks up a book and reads a book, I hope they're learning, I hope they're getting knowledge, but I also hope they're entertained. So, a long winded answer, starts way back then, here we are today.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Man, I really loved the story and it resonated with me. We talked a little bit before we even hit the record button that, you know, I've done different things, you've done different things, but very clearly the things you've done along the way are all informing what you're doing today. And the analogy between an operating system and an app is one that I've never heard anybody say, so I really want to dig deeper here. So, let's go through the main tenants of The Faith Code. Take us through it. What's a reader going to get out of the book?

Rusty Rueff:

Yeah. So, the framework that we build on, which is we believe that any piece of operating system or any technology framework starts with one thing. It starts with source code. So, you must have a source code that is reliable, that is truthful, that you know can handle anything else. And in our case, the source code is biblical teachings. That's our source code. And that when you build anything else on top of it, you must go back and make sure that the source code is still strong and not being deteriorated. 

Because this is what can happen, like you build code on top of code on top of code, and then you go back and look, somebody made a change in the source code, which is what we do in our lives. So, any of us, if we have a faith code, let's be very agnostic around faith here and say if you have a faith code, it can get corrupted. It can get corrupted by these things in life that come forward and influence and, by the way, like a source code, a faith code should not change, but we change. We change.

And so, we believe that it's one of the things why I like to read the Bible, because the Bible remains new to me, not because it changed, but because I changed. Because my life is different. I'm looking at it through a different lens. But I go back and I say it's valid to me. So, you start with building on a source code, and then from there, it's like, "Okay. So, what is my identity on top of that source code?"

And we spent a lot of time in the book talking about the crucible of identity. And the crucible of identity is the difference between being and doing. Like it's easy for us in today's world to spend all of our time doing. In fact, it's demanded of us. And always on real time access world, an aorta. We are called upon, our bosses expect us to answer that Slack message or that text message or that Teams message at all hours at any time as quickly as we can. So, we're always doing. But if we only pay attention to doing and we don't pay attention to being, then how we be when we do can become corrupted. So, we spent a bunch of time talking about how important it is to get to this idea of understanding your being, and going through and understanding your identity, and then figuring out how to apply it to this crucible.

And then, last thing I'll say as a premise of the book, is, we believe there are three loves that we all should pay attention to. We should love our God. We should love our neighbors. And we have to love ourselves. Because if we don't understand how to love ourselves, we can't ever really truly love our neighbors, our others, or love God. And it's biblical. It says, Love your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and others as you love yourself. And basically it stops right there. It stops right there. It doesn't say and go love this and go love that and go love that.

And I sort of come to the conclusion that if you take those three things and galvanize and say those are my three loves, and you begin to categorize underneath those things what those loves are, How do I love God? When I say I love others, who are those others? Who are those closest ones to me that I should be pouring my love into? Who are those that I care about beyond that, that I should be pouring my love? Who are those that I don't even know, but I know they need somebody else that loves them that I should be loving on? And then, how do I love myself in a healthy manner? You know what, Dr. Richard? You take those three things, life's pretty full. You don't have a lot of time to do a lot of other things.

And I've actually come to the conclusion from my own personal self, and I'll just say this, I used to say I love all kinds of things. I love the theater. I love NBA basketball. I love Purdue. And I found myself saying I like those things because they're different than I love them. I love others. I work to love myself in a healthy way and I work to love my God.

And so, we take those things that I just talked about, those ultimate things, and then we apply them to things in life. All those applications of life that we have out there and to say, Those things that you do, are you being the way that you should be being or the way that you want to be being and how can we help you with that?

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is awesome. I love this so much. So, I have a sneaking suspicion, but I want to ask you, as we're going back to the analogy of the OS, and the source code thing made perfect sense, source codes get corrupted through programming errors, through viruses, through all sorts of things, and you have these apps which serve these different places in our life, sometimes having a corrupt app can crash the whole platform. So, talk to us about when you have an app that is failing, whether it's your job or relationship, whatever it is, what's your advice through the book on how to fix the app or delete it if we have to?

Rusty Rueff:

I mean, you started to hit on it, right? So, the beautiful thing about an app in the technology world is you should always be refreshing it to update it. A lot of times what happens when our apps will crash in the technology world is that we're running on yesterday's version of the platform software on the operating system and it's not keeping up. And so, therefore, the more you try to do with it, eventually, it just says I give up because I can't get back to the source code. You haven't updated me.

And so, I encourage everyone always to look at these apps of life. Let's take our work for a second and use that as the example to constantly be refreshing that app. In our work world, how often do we actually stop and ask ourselves, is the work that I'm doing meeting the purpose and the mission that I long ago said that I wanted to achieve? You heard me at the beginning talk about this idea of sailing. I think our career is very much like sailing. If people who don't understand how sailing works - I think most people do - sailboats don't go straight. They go with the wind. They tack. They take these different angles to go. But if you don't have a lighthouse, if you don't have a point in the distance, you won't know when to come about. You will just keep going with the wind. And you might end up on the shore, but you might be so far away from the destination that you wanted to get to that you can't drag that boat.

And that's what I really worry about people in their careers. If they're not updating and they're not refreshing going back to that lighthouse, to that source code, they could end up someplace that feels really good in the moment or it feels good in the month or the year or the decade. But at the end of it, they go, "Oh, my goodness. What have I done?" And that's the retirement dilemma. That's the people who go I stayed at that company way too long. I did the thing and I never got to what I dreamed about doing and now it's too late. Now, it's too late.

And so, we have to refresh this app. We have to constantly refresh. And in your work, it might mean stepping back and going, "Okay. I'm in finance, but I always wanted to be a marketer. How do I get from here to there?" And it might mean going into your boss or your HR person and saying, "I want to make a shift." And they may say, "We can't afford for you to make a shift." And you may have to say, "Well, if I can't do it here, I got to do it someplace else." So, I might have to delete that app for a second and reload it and look at it differently. Or I might have to make a shift and say, "Guess what? I may have to take a pay cut to go do what I want to do. I may have to go back to school to do what I want to do," all of those things.

But I will just say that if we don't have a source code to go back to, if we're not constantly looking at this platform element that we've established for ourselves, that app could end up obsolete and we don't even know it.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Very well said. So, I want to circle back to the OS itself. To keep it in the tech space, there's malware and phishing, and your OS might be compromised, but you don't even know it. So, talk to us through the book about how you address keeping your OS clean and virus free, I guess, is the analogy.

Rusty Rueff:

Totally. Totally. And it's very, very important. There are insidious things that always want to corrupt code. Now, they can be errors. We all know, as you mentioned at the beginning, somebody can make an error in the code and it messes up everything it causes. That's human. And we make human mistakes. We absolutely make human mistakes. And if we allow those human mistakes to ultimately upend our operating system or upend our code, we end up in a very unhappy and unhealthy place.

We make mistakes in our relationships. We make mistakes in our careers. We make mistakes with our finances. We make mistakes in things that we might be addicted to that we wish we never would have gotten to. And those end up being corruptive things. And they're self-inflicted. They're self-inflicted. So, those things we must watch for and we must guard against them. And we have to be questioning ourselves all the time what is healthy and what is wise and what is not.

And I'll say this, somebody said to me the other day, "Look, I'm trying to find my purpose in life. I'm trying to find maybe what God wants me to do. And I'm trying to ask myself my questions." And I told him, "You know a great question to ask is, Is it wise?" Is it wise? What I'm getting ready to do, is it wise? Is it wise for me to be late to get to work and drive 90 miles an hour to get there? Is that wise? Is it wise to stay in that place a little bit longer than I should stay? Is that wise? Is it wise to say those things when I'm angry to another person? So, it's a great question to ask yourself, Is my code being corrupted? So, that's one thing that we self do.

But then, we've absolutely got the outside influences that are constantly trying to corrupt us and to chip away at that source code. And those kinds of things are the things that try to tell us that our life is not good enough. I'm not doing what everybody else is doing because I see on Instagram where they're going on vacation and what they're doing in the cars that they drive and the things that they do. Well, I'm not good enough. I've got to go pursue that. I've got to have a little bit more.

Back in the day, they asked Rockefeller how much is enough, and he said just a little bit more. And we live in that society that's constantly pushing us that way. And I admit it, I'm part of the problem because I lived in the technology world, and I still do, and you and I are the benefits of technology, and your listeners and viewers right now are benefits of fantastic technology. But the addiction that we have to this and what we've done to the generation behind us to this is corruptive, absolutely corruptive to this platform and to the source code.

So, we have to guard against those. We have to put guardrails up. And the best way I know how to do that, Dr. Richard, is to have others in our lives who speak truth to us, who we surround ourselves with. And I encourage everybody to have a small team of people that they're our friends that are outside of our family, that they want nothing for us other than our best. They just love us.

And we ask them to speak the truth to us, if you see me going off in the wrong direction, if you see me doing things, if you find and you have a suspicion that maybe I'm off track, off purpose, not doing what I said I wouldn't wanted to do with my dreams, to speak truth to me and to say, "Hey, Rusty. Hey, Dr. Richard. I knew you when you wanted to do this and when you were like that. And you are now different and I see it and I don't think it's wise or healthy." So, I think we have to guard against those things. We absolutely have to.

And they call them worms for a reason, because they burrow into us and you may not even know. And that's why, as you said, we may not even know, sometimes we have to have bells and whistles, and I think those bells and whistles are those who love us and can care for us.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is so good, Rusty. I've always felt that the best analogies are the simplest ones. And this is so easy to understand. Makes so much sense. I wish we had more time today to speak, but I've enjoyed our conversation so much.

As you know I ask everybody who comes on this show just one single question, and that is, What is your biggest helping, Rusty? What is the one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

Rusty Rueff:

Well, what I would encourage everybody to do is we pay a lot of attention in our jobs and in the world around us on mind and body. Corporations now, for the last 45 years, have helped us with our body that's why we have corporate gyms and memberships and all those things to take care of our body. And in the last 15 to 20 years, we've started to talk about our mind with mental health, and it's a wonderful thing. You can be expressive about your mental health that you couldn't when I was going into the workplace, which is fantastic. And now, we have tools and enablers to help us.

But what we haven't done is we're not paying enough attention to the spirit. And in a healthy life, in my estimation, it is an isosceles triangle. It is balanced. Mind, body, and spirit. So, whatever and however you define spirit, pursue it. Pursue it. It's the one thing actually in our lives that can get stronger while we age. Our minds will go and our bodies will go. We can fight it as much as we want to, but they will go. But our spirit can increase, and increase, and increase, and we may well be the strongest point in our spirit in the last days of our lives. So, find it, pursue it, and hold on to it and life will be better. That's what I'll leave you with.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Beautifully said. Rusty, tell us where people can learn more about you online.

Rusty Rueff:

You can find me, my name is really easy, rustyrueff.com, so everything about me is there. And if you're interested in The Faith Code, you can find it anywhere books are sold, which is great, or you can go to thefaithcode.com and learn all about it. So, Dr. Richard, thank you so much for just having me. It's just been invigorating for me to be with you, so thank you so much.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Thank you for honoring me with that. And we'll have links to everything Rusty Rueff as well as a direct link to The Faith Code in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com.

Rusty, again, this was fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show. And I want to also thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to our conversation. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you can go pick up the book, go give us a follow and a five star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.