How Full is Your Bucket: A Book on Feeling Good

A few years ago, Tom Rath and Donald Clifton wrote How full is Your Bucket: Positive Strategies for Work and Life. It soon became a national bestseller and is still today. The remarkable part of this book is that it is so short, not that revolutionary in concept, and yet became the hit in business publishing. The book revolves around one concept that the authors have dubbed "bucket filling." The theory boils down to this: When you do nice things to people it fills your proverbial bucket just as it fills when others do nice deeds for you. People who spread negative energy in the work place empty the buckets of others and essentially ruin productivity.

While I do enjoy the sentiment behind the book, the statistics the authors preset can be very stretching at times. As far as the message in the book, I believe it to be a very strong and positive one that can indeed help make an organization run better. It's just that How Full is Your Bucket could have just as easily been an orientation pamphlet than a 128-page book.