Book Brief: How Full Is Your Bucket?

How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life
By Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton
Gallup Press, August 2004 127 pages, $19.95

“Each of us has an invisible bucket,” the authors write early on. “It is constantly being emptied or filled, depending on what others say, or do to us. When our bucket is full, we feel great. When it is empty, we feel awful.” We have an invisible dipper, too, it turns out. When we use it to fill other people’s buckets, we fill our own in the process, they contend. When we use it to diminish others, through unjust criticism and unkind actions, we also diminish ourselves. The remaining pages of this slight book are spent trying to answer the question raised by the title. Written by a Gallup employee, Rath, and the co-author of Now, Discover Your Strengths (Free Press, 2001), Clifton, this is the first book by Gallup’s new publishing imprint. Expect to see it everywhere.