How did you feel after your last interaction with another person? Did that person — your spouse, best friend, coworker, or even a stranger — "fill your bucket" by making you feel more positive? Or did that person "dip from your bucket," leaving you more negative than before? The number one New York Times and number one Business Week bestseller, How Full Is Your Bucket? reveals how even the briefest interactions affect your relationships, productivity, health, and longevity. Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket, and grounded in 50 years of research, this book will show you how to greatly increase the positive moments in your work and your life — while reducing the negative. Filled with discoveries, powerful strategies, and engaging stories, How Full Is Your Bucket? is sure to inspire lasting changes and has all the makings of a timeless classic.

Introduction

In the early 1950s, my grandfather, Don Clifton, was teaching psychology at the University of Nebraska when he noticed a major problem: The field of psychology was based almost entirely on the study of what is wrong with people.
He began to wonder if it would be more important to study what is right with people.
So, over the past five decades, Don and his colleagues conducted millions of interviews, focusing on the positive instead of the negative.
Early in his research, Don discovered that our lives are truly shaped by the momentary interactions we experience every day. Whether we have a long conversation with a friend or simply place an order at a restaurant, every interaction makes a difference in our lives. The results of our encounters are rarely neutral; they are almost always positive or negative. And although we take these interactions for granted, their accumulated effect profoundly influences our lives.
During the latter course of Don’s work in the 1990s, a new field of study finally emerged: Positive Psychology, which focuses entirely on what is right with people. Today, many of the world’s leading scientists research the effects of positive emotions.
In 2002, Don’s pioneering work was recognized by the American Psychological Association, which named him the Grandfather of Positive Psychology and Father of Strengths Psychology. That same year, Don learned that an aggressive and terminal cancer had spread throughout his body. Knowing his time was limited, he spent his final months doing what he did best and what people who know him well would have expected: helping others focus on the positive.
Although Don had already written several books, including the national bestseller Now, Discover Your Strengths, he asked me to join him in writing one last book — one based on a theory he created that had deeply affected his life and work. It’s a theory that resonated with the thousands of audiences Don shared it with over the last forty years — a theory that others inevitably wanted to pass along to friends, colleagues, and loved ones. Although it was based on a simple metaphor of everyone having a "dipper" and a "bucket, " Don’s theory carried profound implications and served to simplify his research and life’s work for others.
The dipper and bucket metaphor, first created and used by Don in the 1960s, is now known around the world. More than 5,000 organizations and over one million people have used "drops for your bucket," an application of the dipper and the bucket metaphor you will learn about in Chapter 5. Although this was Don’s signature idea – the thing he was best known for – he had never published a book on this topic. And people had been asking him to write this book for decades. Now it was time to make that happen.
In his final months, Don and I worked tirelessly to assemble the most compelling discoveries he had gathered over half a century of work. Although Don was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation at the time, we continued to work on this book whenever he had the energy — which was the majority of the time.
We sat in his study for hours, reviewing the research, statistics, and stories we thought you would find compelling. As Don’s health deteriorated, I read sections to him and then took notes on his feedback. Don wanted to review every section of this book to ensure that what we shared was perfectly accurate. He scrutinized every sentence, wanting each story and insight to resonate with you.
For my part, I was honored to be Don’s partner in creating this book. He had always been my mentor, teacher, role model, and friend. We were exceptionally close, and I cherished the time we had together, always motivated and inspired by his vision. And Don knew that I had been touched deeply by this theory throughout my life. As we will describe in Chapter 4, applying Don’s theory of "The Dipper and the Bucket" energized and possibly saved me in my own battles with cancer.
In hindsight, I think this project also gave Don additional energy in the final stages of his fight with cancer. He had spent his life trying to make the world a better place — one person at a time — and he understood that completing this book would make a difference. We finished our first draft of this book just weeks before his death in September 2003.
Over the 79 years of Don’s life, he touched millions of individual lives through his books, teaching, and the global business that he built. Don touched so many people as a result of his unwavering belief in helping individuals and organizations to focus on what is right.
As you read this book, our hope is that you will discover the power of bucket filling in your own life.

— Tom Rath



Prologue
Each of us has an invisible bucket. It is constantly emptied or filled, depending on what others say or do to us. When our bucket is full, we feel great. When it’s empty, we feel awful.
Each of us also has an invisible dipper. When we use that dippeeeeeer to fill other people’s buckets — by saying or doing things to increase their positive emotions — we also fill our own bucket. But when we use that dipper to dip from others’ buckets — by saying or doing things that decrease their positive emotions — we diminish ourselves.
Like the cup that runneth over, a full bucket gives us a positive outlook and renewed energy. Every drop in that bucket makes us more optimistic and stronger.
But an empty bucket poisons our outlook, saps our energy, and undermines our will. That’s why every time someone dips from our bucket, it hurts us.
So we face a choice every moment of every day: We can fill one another’s buckets, or we can dip from them. It’s an important choice — one that profoundly impacts our relationships, productivity, health, and happiness.