Purpose and Motivation

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing purpose and motivation. We're going to be tying these concepts into duty, which kind of dominated last year's episodes of Stone Choir. We wanna make sure that we give you an episode. This is gonna be a short one. If we succeed, this will probably only be about an hour, 'cause one of the points we want to make today is that there's not actually a lot to say about this, but we think it's really important to get it on the record just so that guys have a framework to think about some of these things systematically instead of just being random about the duties that you learn about and

1:17 then the purposes you assume and motivation for those. So we're going to describe how those things interplay. I apologize that we didn't have an episode the last two weeks in a row. We wanted to, we intended to. This was the third week that I prepared to do this episode and a bunch of other stuff just went completely haywire and wasn't able to get it done, so I apologize. If you're listening from the future and you're marathoning as we intend, you know, we want to make our episodes worthy of revisiting, then you didn't miss out, have any disappointment. When we talk about duty in some of the episodes that we do, we focus on that specifically, we're always talking about duties from God. Not all duty necessarily flows directly from God.

2:00 So the things we're gonna say today about duty and motivation and purpose, it may well be that it has nothing moral to it, but this is how it's gonna work whenever these things are assumed. So I'm gonna give a definition here that's not intended to be a fiddly etymological point. Not trying to narrow this down that purpose only means one thing. I just want to tell you what I mean when we're saying it today. Duty is kind of the universal. It's the concept of there's this thing floating around out there that exists that fits for some purpose in some life somehow. And then for the purpose of our discussion today, pardon the reuse of the word, purpose is the adoption of that universal in your particular circumstances.

2:47 So you're just basically taking a duty and making it part of your life. That's what purpose means. Again, there are other definitions and some of them overlap with that, but as we're talking about today, it's limited to that. So just keep in mind, purpose is duty adopted for a person in their own life. It's your particular version of the duty. It's basically the same thing. It's a philosophical concept. You have the universal and then the particular. So your particular purpose is gonna be the same as the duty. It's not some variation on the theme even. It's just that you have chosen to make it yours. And that's one of the reasons that we think this is worth discussing today is that that needs to be a conscious process.

3:27 You have to actually think about, okay, I've learned about some duty. Does that have anything to do with me? If it does, then you make it your purpose. And then having made it your purpose through an intellectual process, you know, maybe it's very brief, you know, there are a number of guys who've said that they've listened to some episode of Stone Choir and something just clicked. And suddenly they realized that they had these duties that they didn't know they had before. And so something changed in their life because they adopted whatever it was that they heard as their purpose. That can happen from anywhere. Like you should be very careful about your inputs because you don't want to just be randomly collecting purposes from all over the place.

4:01 That's not healthy or good. This is something that should be rare because a purpose is gonna stick with you for years, for an era, maybe for the rest of your life. You know, when you're assuming some duty, some of those are completely permanent. When you become a husband, you become a father, that should be permanent. There's no get out of jail free card for that. Because not a jail, it's a duty. It's something you just you gotta do from now on. So you don't want to be casual about assuming those purposes. But even then, once you say, okay, I want to do this, I've decided I want to baptize my kids, I've decided I want to join a church, whatever, it could be any number of things. Once you make that your purpose, that's still just an intellectual process.

4:42 And that's part of the warning of this episode, is it is I originally conceived this episode a few weeks ago, the idea was that we would try to be encouraging, try to be motivating and say, Okay, we got all these general duties floating around in your head. What do you actually do with them? And we want to exhort you, the listener, to whatever duties you feel you have from God, to stick with them. As I was thinking about it, I realized that motivational speaking is almost actually an oxymoron Because a motivational speaker can get you fired up for an evening or something, get you in some emotional high. But whatever information you receive in that learning, the only way you keep it going in your life is if you are internally motivated.

5:26 And that's the third part of this spectrum. So you have the universal duty, you have the particular adoption for your purpose. And then the motivation is the work. It's what keeps you going every day. And the distinction between motivation and purpose is that oftentimes motivation is not really rational at all. It may well be almost entirely emotional. And that's fine. It's kind of an odd thing for me to be saying because that's kind of the last place that I typically go in my life or talk about to other people. But the reality is the motivation is not an intellectual process. The motivation is gonna be different for different people. Maybe it's pure stubbornness, maybe it's anger, maybe it's enthusiasm and optimism,

6:08 maybe it's fear. That's kind of a bad one, but you know whatever motivates you is the thing that's going to keep you moving, keep you fighting towards your purpose, keep you working. Because the day-to-day process is not thinking. That's the trap that we want to make sure the guys don't fall into. So much of this is about thinking you know a podcast is entirely thinking. You're downloading thoughts from two guys on the internet and you listen for a couple hours and you move on with your life. If you pluck something from that and say, okay, this is my purpose, then you're gonna, you know, do some more thinking about it and figure out how it applies to your life. Again, wherever the purpose is coming from, it's not about us.

6:47 You find some purpose, you make it your own. And then the motivation is what keeps you sticking to doing that thing thing. And the reason for highlighting these three distinct things is that not that you should be thinking about them all the time, but you should just you should have thought about it once or twice. Maybe you check in periodically with your own life. Whatever purposes you have, are they still good purposes? You know, maybe there's something that you did for a period of time in your life and now you realize that that's no longer a fulfilling purpose. Maybe you set it aside and move on to something else. Maybe you have purposes that you know are good because they're duties that are, you know, maybe godly duties.

7:25 So you don't just want to set those aside. But maybe you need to stoke the fires of your motivation. Maybe you realize that you're losing motivation for whatever your purpose is. It's really a meta episode talking about thinking about thinking, and we don't want that to be off-putting, so we're going to keep it short because there's not a ton to say, but again, if you don't think about it very deliberately, I've never thought about this in my own life. Like I've done these things at various times, but until I was thinking about this episode, I'd never been really systematic about thinking of the process of okay, what does this have to do with me? Yeah, we talk a lot about the and then of the Christian

8:01 life. This is kind of the and then of duty. You learn about something, that's information. You think about it, you say, okay, I want that to be my purpose. That's still more information. It's still a thought process. And then the doing is the work. And that's the part that you can't get on the internet. There's no talking and the working. The working, the doing, the daily grind, the showing up every day. That's where the motivation comes in. And if you don't have all three of those, if you don't have some duty that you assume is a purpose, so you like you're just either doing nothing or you're doing random things, you're kind of listless, you're kind of making a mess of your life. Or if you assume a bunch of purposes and you don't have

8:41 any follow-through, you have no motivation, you never get anything done. And that's unfulfilling. It's unpleasant. You're not going to be happy. You're not going to be productive. And so just a little bit of thought about it maybe all it takes to structure some small part of your life so that you can keep going. That's ultimately the reason that we wanted to do this episode, because as I said, we talk a lot about duty, but it's theory. That's just you're downloading ideas from the internet, you listen, you set aside, you move on. If that's all it is, that's fine. We're not telling anyone what they must do or should do necessarily. Although when you know we're talking about God's things, that exhortation should

9:18 be from God. But your motivation is not gonna be because some guy on a podcast told you to do something. Your motivation is your personal commitment to the purpose which is coming from wherever the duty flows. And no duties flow from us, for example, because we have no authority. We can't give anybody any duty to do anything. When you assume a duty, make it a purpose, your motivation is going to be a very personal thing. And so you'll have to tend to that yourself. We'll talk a little bit about some examples, but in your daily life, what keeps you moving is really in a way the most important thing because that's where it all actually happens. And we don't want guys to constantly be in the state of

9:59 just thinking and thinking and ruminating and discussing and debating. And it's just it's endless. It ends up just being it's a circular process that goes nowhere. That's useless at some point. You do it for a little bit, you get it done, you make your decision, and then you do the work. So with this framework, I think that hopefully it will help some people to take stock of what it is that you want to do with your life and see how you're doing it. And if you need to make changes or tweaks, do it. I think it's worth thinking about things in this way is just so you don't miss anything. Because that's easy. Unexamined priors, things that we don't think about are usually where a lot of the bugs are hiding.

10:41 So as Will mentioned in his opening, a lot of times when we're speaking about duty, obviously we are speaking about The things of God, because ultimately all duties are owed to God. They are typically mediated, as it were, because you typically owe your duty to some person, your neighbor, your wife, your children, whomever it happens to be, but the ultimate duty is owed to God. In this episode we're not speaking about that so much, so maybe the end of Ecclesiastes may have come to mind for you, and that is, in the ultimate sense, man's duty, man's purpose, the end of the matter all has been heard fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. And that is your duty, and so intellectually you know that you

11:28 make it your purpose, that's an important thing as a Christian. But we're speaking about how you actually go about doing that in your life, because if that's your duty and your purpose, well, how do you do it? It's the other purposes in life that help you to fulfill what God has commanded you to do, what God has made you to do, and then as Woe said, the motivation you can think of it as the fire that drives the engine. And it's going to be different for different men. Not every man is going to be able to motivate himself, because again, motivation is largely an internal matter, but not every man will be able to motivate himself in the same way. It's going to depend on you personally, your personal disposition, and a

12:13 lot of other factors that will go into that. But if your purpose, your goal, as it were, is to get healthy, to lose some weight, to gain more muscle mass, whatever it happens to be, different men are going to find different ways to motivate themselves to get that done. And the motivation is what drives you to do it because simply having the purpose is important, but it's not sufficient. Because if you just have the purpose, if you just think I need to lose weight, and then you never do anything because you lack the motivation, the purpose doesn't matter. Because really, you haven't done anything with that purpose. You haven't followed through. You may think of one of the parables in Matthew.

12:58 We'll actually just read through the parable because it's just a paragraph. What do you think? A man had two sons, and he went to the first and said, Son, go and work in the vineyard to day, and he answered, I will not, but afterward he changed his mind and went, and he went to the other son and said the same, and he answered, I go, sir, but did not go, which of the two did the will of his father? And we all know, of course, the one who did the will of his father is the one who went and actually worked in the field, not the one who simply said, I will go. Because there's a difference between having the purpose and actually following through, actually doing it. You need that motivation. Incidentally, men can help motivate each other.

13:43 That's why I said it's not entirely an internal matter. A particular news story from some years ago comes to mind. There was I believe he was a chef who had quite a bit of weight to lose, and every single day, for months, his friend texted him in the morning, just basically the word fatty, not quite in such polite terms, but he texted him fatty. And that helped motivate him to lose that weight. So men can motivate each other. You can help your brothers keep their motivation up to get done whatever it is they need to do. Of course, all of the men listening who go to the gym with friends know this. Part of that motivation can be that you have others who are going to the gym with you. The same thing is true if you have some other group that

14:30 does some activity. But you have that purpose and then you translate it into action by using that motivation. And so you have to keep that motivation high, as Will was saying. That is going to be different for different men, how you keep your motivation high. Part of that will probably be taking some breaks, which is something that is perhaps a little unnatural for Americane ears to some degree because we have a reputation in the US of being workaholics. Which is not necessarily good, in fact it is typically bad. Part of keeping that motivation high is not burning out. If you burn out, you're not going to achieve the purpose because you have destroyed your motivation. That's what you've done in a burnout.

15:15 And so taking breaks is also part of this. There's a reason that God instituted the Sabbath. He instituted the Sabbath for man. That is why He created it, because you do actually need a rest from time to time. You cannot just go at a hundred percent all of the time. You will burn out. You will lose your motivation, and then you will fail at achieving whatever purpose you had that required that motivation. And to make sure that we're clear, we're not saying you have to have one purpose in life, because obviously not. You can have a number of purposes. If you are a husband and a father, part of your purpose, one of your core purposes, of course, is going to be caring for your wife and children, caring for your family.

16:01 That's how it should be. But you also have a job. You have some occupation. Doing that well is another purpose in your life, and you have other purposes in other places. If you're an elder in your church, that's part of your purpose. And you will have different motivations, perhaps overlapping but different, for these different purposes. And as Woe was saying, there's no such thing really as a true motivational speaker, because we can't motivate you. Because again, motivation is largely internal, but certainly personal. And even in the cases where someone else can help motivate you to some degree, unless it's someone who is an important and consistent part of your life, it's going to be transitory.

16:51 If we manage to motivate you in some way with what we say here or some other episode, you still have to internalize that and keep it going. You have to stoke and feed that fire. We can't do that for you. No one else can do that for you. Because motivation is a matter of the will and of desire. It's not just rational, as well was saying. It is also emotional and these other things. You have to keep that fire burning. That's part of what it means to actually live your life as a man in this world, to achieve those purposes, to fulfill those duties. You cannot do them without motivation, so it is centrally important. And again, you have to do that yourself. You're not going to find your motivation via a podcast or some

17:42 book or anything like that, you can find or at least you can start to discover purpose in those places because someone can explain something to you and go, I recognize that, that's something important. That should be a purpose in my life. And so for instance, if you were not a Christian at some point in your life, and you became a Christian, well that's given you a particular purpose. The motivation did not come along with that purpose for free. The motivation is something that is it's attached to it and related, but you still have to keep it burning. The same thing with a family, that's perhaps one of the best examples. Because by and large, that comes with the motivation. That is a case where the motivation comes alongside the purpose.

18:31 You sort of get it for free. But you still have to keep at it. You have to do your duty, but these terms are obviously related, there's some overlap. But how you're doing that is you're keeping that motivation day in and day out. And again, yes, you have to take breaks from time to time so you don't burn out. But with a family, because of the way that God has constructed human beings, because of the way that He has designed men, if you have a wife and children, you have that natural motivation to care for them, but you still have to feed that fire. You have to make sure that it doesn't wane over time. It doesn't start to burn out. That is part of what it means to live an actual human life in this world, and we're talking about the things of this

19:15 world, because that ultimate purpose from Ecclesiastes, that's important. But this is the how you do it in this life. You do it by having purposes in this life and then following through with the motivation to achieve those things. So, as I said earlier, one of the tricky parts about men thinking about their own purposes and thinking about thinking about duty in general is the tar pit of thinking for its own sake. And that's useful to a point. As I said, I thought three weeks in a row for many, many hours about this episode and kind of iterated through the process of what I wanted to say. I'm kind of glad that it took three weeks because the third week this week, Sunday and yesterday as I was preparing, and we're

20:01 recording on Wednesday, so Tuesday as well, for the first time I actually looked up in the Bible how purpose was used in the Old and New Testament, looking at the same Greek word, and something struck me about the way it was translated that actually changed the way I wanted to talk about this today. And I'm not making a fiddly etymological point here. And I also want to emphasize that one of the reasons we're not talking a ton about the Bible today is that it's really pernicious for guys to think that they have to have a Bible verse for everything. Well they're they're great examples in the Bible of some of these things. They're examples. But what we're talking about here is kind of the mechanical premise

20:40 of how this stuff will always work, regardless of where the duty comes from. You know, typically we talk about certain vocations having duties associated with them, like police, firefighters, medical soldiers, you know, people who are responding to emergencies to some degree. They're considered to be on duty. And so those are opt-in vocations. Those people, typically men, they should be men, are opting into making that their purpose. And then once you have made the duty to respond to a fire or to respond to a call to war, you've made that your purpose, then you do have a moral obligation to follow through because you're the one who's on duty. You know, if you're a police officer assigned to a certain zone

21:26 for an evening on patrol and the dispatcher calls, you have a duty to answer that call. That's the dispatcher isn't senior to you, but they're still giving you orders because they're gonna say you need to go over here and respond to this. You don't get to say no, I'm I don't feel like it. You have a duty to respond because you're in that place to do that. And if you can't do it, you shouldn't have been there. So duty isn't implicitly moral until you adopt it, but then there is a degree of morality. Because if you choose anything to be your purpose and other people depend on you, then you're on the hook. Now you're on the hook to God. Because if people are depending on you and you don't do your

22:06 duty, if you if you're derelict in your duty, people can get hurt in those situations. Maybe it's not the case for other things. You know, if you happen to be on call for tech support or something, you have the page or yeah, whatever they do now, yeah. The notifications. People aren't gonna die if they can't check their email at three in the morning, but you're still on call for that. You opt into that. And once you opt in, say, this is my purpose, then there is a degree of attachment, but you have a choice not to opt into some of those things. There are other things where, you know, when it's a duty from God, you should be pursuing it. You know, if you're a young man listening, you don't have a

22:44 duty yet as a husband or a father, God willing, you will have of those duties someday, hopefully soon. And until that day, you have other duties. You have other you have other things that you should make your purpose. And one of the things that guys need to understand about girls is that oftentimes it's said that women are attracted to ambition. And there are some girls who are attracted specifically to ambitious men. But I think more generally, girls are repulsed by a man who has no purpose. If you are completely purposeless, it's off-putting. You come across as a loser. And it doesn't even necessarily matter if your purpose is super ambitious. You don't need to be the best in the world at whatever.

23:28 You just have to want to do something. You have to be driven by something. And that is what girls are going to tend to find attractive. Some will also want the very best, but yeah, whatever. Most girls just want to see you want to do something. So part of you know, getting a girl is having some purpose that has nothing to do with getting girls. You have to have some purpose in your life. I mean, we can't tell you what that's gonna be. And it may not be the purpose for your entire life. It may just be something, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna try it, I'm gonna work hard at it I'm gonna pour myself into it. Maybe it works out. Maybe you decide it's not for you. That's fine. You're not betraying anything by saying, okay, I want a different purpose

24:05 now. But lacking that is lacking something about being a man. I was saying earlier when I looked at scripture to see how the word purpose was used, what I found was that in the Old Testament, when the same Greek word is used, it's usually translated as thought. And that made me realize something that's I think important for this is that thought itself really means two almost diametrically opposed things at the same time. It's one word used in two very different ways. So the first type of thought is rumination. It's basically what I did in preparation for this episode several weeks in a row. I ruminated on all these ideas, just molded over, chewed it over, chewed it like cud in my mind to sort of find what

24:51 it was that I wanted to say. That doesn't go anywhere to do anything by itself. And the trap that a lot of guys fall into when you know you're downloading podcasts or reading articles or whatever, it's fine to a point, but when your entire thing becomes just constant rumination, that's purposelessness because it doesn't go anywhere and it doesn't do anything. It's just I'm gonna read thing, think about thing and then read next thing, listen to next thing thing it's just a constant cycle of engagement and content that's it's vacuous. There's nothing there. That's not a purpose. Don't do that. Find something else to do that's actually fulfilling. And that's thought. You would call that thought.

25:30 You think about things. You're arguing with friends debating, you're thinking about this episode, thinking about whatever. The other aspect of thought, which is how usually shows up in the old testament, specifically has to do with intent. So, you know, scripture talks about the thoughts of man being ever turned towards evil and various things like that. That is about intent. And that's distinct from rumination. When man is warned about his thoughts being inclined towards evil, that is not simply ruminating on bad things, but it's desiring to do bad things. You know, if you have an encounter with a police officer, you know, you're face to face. You're not under arrest, but you've been detained and he's talking to

26:15 you. Keep your hands at your side. Don't fidget. Don't reach for anything. Don't scratch yourself. Don't reach in your pockets. Don't grab your belt, just leave your hands still. Why? Because I don't remember where I saw this. I saw like a week or two ago on X. Somebody posted something to the effect that you can always tell a current or former cop, because they're always watching your hands. And the reason for that is that hands betray intent. You know, for for a police officer who's dealing with, in some cases, criminals, in many cases suspects, monitoring what a man is doing with his hands is gonna tell you what is going on in his head. Because those are subconscious tells. You know, if a man is concealing a weapon, he's going to

26:58 subconsciously print. He's going to pat it. He's going to touch it. He wants to make sure it's still there while he's talking to a cop. And they don't even know that they're doing that. It's a subconscious process. But a well-trained cop is going to pick up on that and know this guy printed, this guy's definitely carrying a weapon, and he's thinking about I'm talking to a cop, I got to make sure I have my weapon. That's probably criminal intent. There's something there that the cop now, he's not worried about what you're thinking about. He's worried about what does this guy intend to do? So the reason you just want to be calm and keep your hands at your side is so you're not distracting him.

27:32 It's not that not you're gonna trick him, but if you're being annoying and fidgety, it's just there's no point. You want a cop to be at ease. And if he's an ill-trained cop, if he's someone who picks up on that but he's scared, you could be in dangering your life. Because if you're fidgeting and he thinks you have a gun and you don't, you're just itchy. You don't want to get shot 'cause somebody was poorly trained. That is the other kind of thought, the intent, the desire to do something, because scripture's clear that our desire to do evil comes before the evil itself. If you have adulterous thoughts or murderous thoughts, those already are that sin in the heart, but they can then turn physically into the

28:13 sin in the real world, where you have not simply thought evil as a as a desire, but then you follow through on it. Not everyone who thinks evil follows through on it or world would be a living hell, but even at that it's still sin. But that sort of thought as intention is why it's important to think about this, because thought as intention is really what we're talking about when we say purpose. So again, to get back to that three-part continuum of duty, the universal, purpose, the particular, and then the motivation that is the fire that stokes it. When you hear some concept that you decide applies to you, you know, maybe you happen to be just you know for the sake of argument, because it's something common to all of us, you're listening

29:02 to an episode of Stone Choir, and you hear something you never thought about before. And for some reason it just clicks. Like, oh man, that's me. That applies to me. That if it's a duty, it instantly becomes a purpose for you because you like, yep, that's it. You don't need a long thought-out process to adopt it. You're just like, yep, okay. I never thought about it, but absolutely that applies. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe you need to ruminate it for on it for a long time. And it's not that you had to, it's just you heard something that annoyed you and it kind of stuck in the back of your teeth and you had to picket it until you eventually dealt with it. When rumination translates into actual purpose, when thought of rumination

29:48 becomes thought of intention, that is the adoption of purpose that we're talking about. And it doesn't necessarily happen. And you know, like I said, it shouldn't happen most of the time. There are guys who I see online that it seems like every month they have some new purpose, some new personality that they download. It's not everybody. it's typically younger guys that feel completely alienated from the world and they just want to find something. And they're just trying on a bunch of different things. And so they cycle through seemingly personalities. They're mindlessly adopting a bunch of different purposes without you know, they're thinking about it really hard, but they don't know what's gonna stick.

30:25 It's a tough place to be when you're a young guy because we live in a world now where we lack almost any good examples for a lot of this stuff. And that's part of the problem. When you don't see examples of men who are well motivated, who have also adopted good purposes that are attached to godly duties. That's a really hard place to be when you're a young guy just figuring out what do I do. On the other hand, the world is full of terrible examples. You know, somebody like Andrew Tate is a prime example. He certainly has a purpose in life. He has several purposes. And they're basically all bad. They're abusing other people, they're accumulating wealth to no end. They're lying. They're drifting.

31:03 Like it's just it's gross. But he's driven, he's motivated. And so guys who don't evaluate that sort of scene in a moral framework are like, well, look how motivated this guy is. He's got a Bugatti. And never mind, he's renting it. But you know, when you see what seems to be purpose and you see what seems to be motivation and it all seems to be clicking, if you're missing the part that that's actually all really terrible, it can seem appealing because you just focus on whatever good parts about like having more money is nice. Having girls like you is nice. Doing it the way he's doing it is disgusting. But when a young guy has no money and has not one girl, the pre the prospect of accumulating a whole bunch seems appealing.

31:47 And so there's a draw to listen to those guys and then adopt whatever purpose they're selling. Even though they're frauds, they're liars. But it's an easy trap to fall into because it seems like it's working. You need some positive rumination to say, okay, I'm gonna think about this before I make it my purpose. You know, evaluate carefully whatever it is and be ready to walk away from anything. You don't need to adopt some new idea that you got on the internet, including and especially from us. Think about it, if it seems like rubbish, set it aside and go do something else. That's good. you're far better off making mistakes about filtering out things that might have been good if it means you're filtering out a ton of

32:28 crap than if you adopt everything that floats by. Because if you keep adopting everything you hear about, you're just gonna be a a a hamster in a wheel, you're gonna make a mess of your life more so than if you're overly cautious. You know, the hard part of wisdom and maturity is finding the balance, finding out how to think and be cautious and be ruminative. And then strike when you do finally find a purpose that's worth adopting. You find a duty, like, yeah, I want this to be mine. I want to make it particular to my life. So as I mentioned, you're going to have a number of purposes in life, and as Will mentioned, those may change over time. You may not have the same purposes today that you have ten

33:11 years from now. You may not have the same purposes today you had 10 years earlier, depending on how old you happen to be right now. Duty by and large does not change through your life. You can acquire additional duties, and some of those duties are temporal, but duty changes seldom. And you don't really pick up new ones and gain them and choose to drop them. They are part of life, they're part of how God has created things. And there is that connection between duty and purpose. And so you don't want your purpose in life, your purpose is, plural, in life, to change frequently. These are things about which you should think, and which you should take on in a very serious fashion, not lightly. Not all purposes have to be heavy and serious and something that

34:07 is vitally important to your life because you could have a purpose that is transitory. You could, for instance, have a purpose that drives you you want to visit every national park. You want to visit every major peak in the lower forty eight. Probably don't want to include Alaska, that's a lot harder. And that could be one of your purposes in life. And that can drive you. You can have a motivation to get that done. As Woe was saying with regard to attracting women for the young men out there in the audience, having some kind of purpose like that is going to make you seem more attractive to women. Because it makes it seem like, because it is an indication that you are not listless, not just wandering through life with no purpose,

34:59 with no point. This can be achieved in a number of different ways. That could be that's essentially a hobby. So you can pick up other hobbies. Hobbies can be a be a purpose in life. They can't be your sole purpose in life, and they certainly shouldn't be your core purpose in life, but they can be part of your purpose in life. And particularly if you do not yet have a wife and children, That's the sort of thing that can drive you to make you into the sort of man who is ready to have a wife and children, who is ready to take on those duties, to have that purpose. As we said, we can't really necessarily give you a recommendation for which purposes you adopt, which ones you make your own, and then use those to drive you forward in life.

35:51 But there is sort of one general recommendation that of course we can give to all the men in the audience, and this applies to women as well. Stay physically fit. That is something that you can take on as one of your purposes in life, and it can actually help you with motivation too, because if you are physically fit, in some ways it's easier to keep your motivation high. Part of this is just biological reality. Not all of what we're discussing today is purely mental. Because yes, you have to have that mental fortitude, you have to have the will and the desire to do these things, but some of them require you to be in good health. To be physically fit. For instance, if you wanted to take up visiting all of the

36:38 national parks as a purpose in life, if you're going to do any hiking or anything while you're there, you have to be physically fit. And so another purpose in life could be to stay in good shape. And that is something that we should as Christians seek to do because we should take care of the bodies that God has given us Given us. So if you are a man, find a group of men, perhaps in your church, locally wherever it happens to be, and go to the gym. Lift weights, stay in good shape. That can be part of your purpose in life. That is one that should remain throughout your entire life. You're obviously going to do more of it when you're in your twenties, thirties and forties than when you're seventy or eighty, of course,

37:21 but that is something that should stick with you. And then to that you can add hobbies and other things. These help to drive you forward and build you up into the sort of man that is ready to have a wife and children. And I keep returning to that one because, of course, historically and properly, just by the design of things, God's intention, that is going to be the core purpose in life for most men. Not for all men, certainly, but for most men. Some men will have very important purposes other than family. Sometimes in addition to family, sometimes to the exclusion of family. But for most men, throughout all of history, and still today, family is going to be that core purpose. It's one of the reasons that we're so concerned with that topic

38:14 and we address it in a number of different episodes. And every time the topic comes up, I think back to the Genesis narrative, the Garden of Eden. Because Adam, who walked with God, God still said of him it is not good for man to be alone. That's how important that is to God. That's how important it is to the system he designed. It is so central to what he intends for men and women. And so we are always going to be strong advocates for marriage and child rearing, and it is something on which our society and certainly our churches should focus, and they are failing to do that, but we've covered that in other topics. But for individual men, for those who are seeking to have a wife and children, to have a family as a core purpose in

39:08 their life, part of how you do that is having other purposes as well. A wife and children cannot be your sole purpose or you will never have them. And if you do have them, you will not be doing it as well as you could. You have to have other purposes in life as well. You can think of it sort of as a collection of buckets that you're investing time or sand or however you want to conceive of it, because what you're investing is actually time, into these buckets. And so filling them basically is your purpose. Just an illustration to think about this. You have a finite amount of time, of course, and how you invest it is your purpose. You're investing it into either good things or bad things. You want to have that motivation, you want to keep that fire

39:58 burning so that you invest that time into good things. And I'm not using invest in sort of the market sense of the term, because you're not necessarily looking for a return on all of these things. Some of it is just spending your time. And there's nothing wrong with that. It may be that you spend some of your time by sitting at the coffee shop or sitting at the bar with friends. That's fine. That's still part of this life. And that can be part of your purpose as well. Because you're investing that time, you've made part of your purpose, maintaining those relationships with friends. It's important to have that. It's vital to have that. You are going to be more likely to find a wife and to be prepared to keep a wife and a family if you

40:47 have those other relationships as well. If you allow yourself to become isolated, you are going to be worse off. So you need to have these other purposes, you need to have other things that you do in life. We see too many young men these days who decide rightly that they want a wife and children, and then focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. They're going about it almost exactly backwards. You have to focus on the other things because that is what prepares you to have a wife and children. That is what makes you the sort of man who will attract a wife. And that's an important part of this. Yes, ideally we would have systems in place where family and friends and church and things like that help to set up couples, and

41:36 we should certainly work on that. But you still have to be the sort of person when they introduce you to this is my niece or this is my granddaughter, whatever it happens to be, when they introduce you, you have to be the sort of man who isn't repulsive to women? You have to be the sort of man who is ready to step into that role of husband and father, as ready as a man can be, of course, because no man is ever entirely ready for that. This is one of those things that you sort of learn as you go, much like riding a bike. But having these other purposes in life is vitally important and is something that particularly young men should work on. You need to have a personality, you need to be your own

42:20 man. And so you find these purposes that are compatible, and you spend your time on those, you invest your time in those, and then from there you can mature into into the other purposes in life. You can't just have this fixation, this monomania with regard to a wife and children. I'm not saying it's bad. I would hope that that's very clear by now. But focusing on that to the exclusion of other things will actually preclude you from achieving that central goal, from having that core purpose in life. It almost seems like it's counterintuitive, and perhaps it is, but that's just the way these things work. You need to have those other purposes. You need to build up who you are as a man, so that you can then have these other things

43:13 and trust in God that He will give you those things. It doesn't mean that every man will necessarily find a wife and have children. We're certainly dealing with imperfect conditions in this day and age. But if we can help each other, if we can help build up our brothers so that they have this set of purposes in life, and they have the motivation to follow through with it, they will be the sort of men who are more likely to have the family that they want to have. Because this is not just a matter of again, finding that wife and having children. It's not a matter of that. It's a matter of becoming the totality of what you're supposed to be as a man. Well rounded is a term that is often used. It is an accurate term, because you need to have a variety

44:08 of purposes in life. This will also help you with motivation, because different purposes will be driven by different sets of motivations. And so you won't necessarily burn yourself out with regard to one motivation, because you have all of these smaller fires burning, and you can keep them all burning more easily than if you just have this one big bonfire that might burn out. You don't want that one soul motivation, because then you're at risk. You have that sort of one point of failure. Whereas you do not have that if you have a collection of purposes with again probably overlapping, but different sets of motivations. As I said earlier earlier, motivation is frequently at least partially, if not

45:00 largely, emotional. It's not necessarily going to be an intellectual process. I think I've mentioned before on Stone Choir, so I won't go into much detail, but I don't twelve years ago or so I decided I wanted to lose weight. Saw a picture of my face, I had a fat face getting fatter and it made me angry. And it wasn't self-loathing. I looked at that and like, I that's not me. And that anger at seeing someone who was a messed up version of who I knew I really was was my motivation to lose weight. And so I went through the intellectual process of learning about diet and exercise and a bunch of stuff, very nerdy approach to everything. When I say mad and angry, I don't mean like actual breaking walls or anything, just indignation.

45:50 This is crap and I'm not gonna put up with it. And so for me, that was my motivation. I wasn't fat, I was just that was disappointing. It was flabby. I wasn't who I wanted to be, but most people wouldn't have called me fat. I wish somebody had. I wish a friend said, dude, you're looking kind of fat. Because it would have made me angry. And I would have said, Really? I'll show you. And then I would have done something about it. I had to figure it out for myself, but my motivation was not rational. It wasn't, oh, here are the health benefits or what anything else. It was just I'm ticked off. I don't like it and I'm gonna keep doing this until I fix it. And so I changed my diet. I didn't change it a lot because I knew that for my

46:29 personal style that I wasn't going to be motivated to to eat completely clean and eliminate all the things that I enjoyed. I didn't I didn't like switched to keto or anything. I tried that once for like a day and lost my mind. I'll die if I go without carbs. That's bad. You want to see me actually angry that keto will do it. What I did was just got rid of some of the stuff and I started paying attention to what I was eating. I reduced my intake. So I didn't change it a lot, but I changed it consistently. Every time I went to the store there were entire aisles I avoided entirely. And that was that was just the stop. If I go down this aisle, I'm gonna pick up crap that's gonna make me get into a munchie mode and I'm gonna lose

47:10 the ground that I've gained. And so for me personally, that was my motivation process. Wasn't a lot of thought, wasn't a lot of you know, rumination and strategizing. It was just no, don't do that. It was just yelling at myself. You're not allowed to do that. And for me, that personally is the motivation that works for me. You know, one of the examples when you're thinking about fitness would be a personal trainer. So you go hire a personal trainer, you spend a lot of money, and they will show you the proper form of exercises and they'll watch you and they'll motivate you typically. They're going to be very encouraging. And they're good at the sports psychology aspect of here's what is going to motivate different people.

47:52 That works very well for some people. That's something encouraging, saying, you know, dig deep, five more, blah, blah, blah. That would drive me insane. I don't want anyone looking at me. I don't want any critiques. Just leave me alone. I know what I need to do. And so that's personal. Other people, what I did wouldn't work for them. And so there's not a lot to say about motivation except that it's going to be extremely personal. It's not that you're going to be unique. You know, once you get past like the top six styles of personal motivation, you're probably exhausted almost all of them. Some people need encouragement, some people need optimism, some people need to get fired up. Just mad.

48:29 I was ticked. I was always ticked. Not very angry again, but just like, no, absolutely not. I'm not gonna look in the mirror and see a fat man. And so being mad in that way was my personal motivation. That works for other things too. I've you know starred Stone Choir because I was mad. It's not that this isn't an anger filled podcast. It's just I was sick and tired of seeing guys who should have known better failing to say the things they should have done and messing up things that were easy. Should have been easy. So we started this out of anger and frustration. But it's not but that we're angry and frustrated, it's just really no one else is going to show up and do this? This is so obvious.

49:10 So we showed up and did it. And And people keep making those same mistakes. So I guess that motivation is kind of internal in this case. But like for me, that is my style. You may have a different style. Some of you will hear that and say, yep, that's exactly what I'm like. I know exactly what it means. Others, probably the majority of the people listening, think that sounds awful. What's wrong with that guy? It's a certain personal impetus. It's something that's going to be unique to an individual or particular to an individual, but not unique. And so I can't tell you what's going to motivate you. And as Corey said, you're going to have different types of motivations for different things. That's fine.

49:47 That's normal. It's a good, balanced, well-rounded life. But the purpose of pointing out that you will have some motivation, that if you don't know what your motivation is, you've never given it any thought. If you don't pay a little bit of attention to your motivation and make sure that you don't let it wane, you don't want that fire to go out, whatever the fire is. Maybe your fire is optimism. Maybe you just want to be really happy. And whatever optimist, I don't know how to describe that because I'm so the opposite, but like I'm sure that works for some people. And great if it does. You're not doing it wrong. You're just doing it in a way that would absolutely kill me. It wouldn't work at all.

50:25 That's why you can't give particular advice about motivation, because it's going to be individualized. You know one of the other things that can become a cycle of despair and frustration is maybe you do adopt the purpose of I want to lose weight or I'm gonna improve whatever. Or maybe you just become depressed and you're actually suffering from legit depression. And whatever your purposes are in life, you have the intellectual engagement. Okay, this is the stuff I need to do. But you wake up in the morning and you can't imagine anything worse than actually getting out of that bed because you know that as bad as it was when you went to sleep, it's gonna be even worse when you get out of bed.

51:06 That's irrational, and you know it's irrational, but it's an easy thing to wallow in. And depression fuels itself with that sort of wallowing, with that sort of avoidant behavior, where the motivation battery is just drained to zero. It's not like there's a little bit of juice left. There's nothing left. And that's a really deadly trap for someone to fall into. Yeah, when someone you get really genuinely obese, which again I was. I didn't have some struggle with weight. I just I didn't look good and like this is dumb. I should do better. Some people legitimately have real health problems and that's a much bigger struggle. That's a life changing, life defining problem. It's far bigger than anything that I personally understand.

51:51 It's typical to have zero motivation because e despite having the intellectual engagement in Oh, I have a purpose of not being like this, you don't even know where to begin. And you give up before you even start moving. And so one of the aspects of motivation as it intersects with purpose and duty is that there's a vector there. There's you have to have momentum. It's not sufficient to be pointed in a direction, but you have to actually be moving. And your motivation is the fuel. It's what keeps you moving. And it's going to be individualized to you what does that, but when you run out of that, if you don't have that, maybe someone has to come along and help you, pick you up, support you. Maybe they need to kick your butt, like Corey's describing earlier,

52:37 the the really fat guy, the chef who he was like four hundred and fifty pounds or something, he was super fat. And his friend abused him every day for months and months and he'd lost weight. That wouldn't work for everyone, but it worked for him. And because they were friends and they knew each other, he knew it would work. If you do that to a stranger on the internet, it's probably not going to be motivating. It's probably gonna be awful. It's not that that sort of thing that would be abuse in one circumstance can mean motivation in another. That's what we mean we say it's personal, it's particularized. You need to be aware that, you know, if you've gotten off into a rut, if things have gotten really bad, you need to

53:12 figure something out and figure out where to find your motivation. Cause it's not that you're purposeless. It's not that you don't know what you need to do. It's you can't start moving. Your inertia is immobilized. And what you need is momentum. You need to move. You need a direction of motion. Even just a little bit. Like the hardest part to getting a vehicle moving is to go from a dead stop to beginning to move. That breaking loose takes more energy than keeping going. It doesn't take much energy to keep a car moving. It takes a lot more energy to get it up to speed. People are the same way, even psychologically, even emotionally, like these things where it's not that you think about it, but if you neglect

53:53 thinking about the fact that if you're absent any motivation, you know what you need to do and you just have no desire to do it and it's just you're drained. I don't know how to help you with that. Like that's a genuine problem. But that's the problem needs to be solved. The problem of any lack of motivation. And so the distinguishing motivation from purpose, that's where the rubber meets the road there. You can have all the good ideas in the world, you can have all the book knowledge and all the right answers for the test, but if you aren't showing up and doing it every day, you know, if you want to lose weight, but every time you go grocery shopping, you buy the same crap that you're gonna snack

54:32 on and pig out on and lose all the gains that you added during the week. well you're doing something wrong. You have to change that habit. And I think that's the other aspect of motivation is that part of it's just habit forming, part of it's training. By the time someone gets to be in the major league they probably swung a bat close to fifty thousand times. So when a batter steps up to the plate, his purpose is to hit the ball, but he's not thinking about hitting the ball. You know, he might be thinking about the pitcher and how his arm is doing and what pitches he's good at and what pitches the particular batter wants to see 'cause he knows he's good at hitting them. But he's not thinking about how to swing the bat.

55:12 That's muscle memory. There's no thought there. There's a purpose there. But the motivation went into having swung the bat fifty thousand times to get into the major leagues in the first place. So motivation and training and habit forming are all kind of along the same spectrum. It's something that the showing up and the doing, the hard part, the actual work, is going to be completely distinct for any particular purpose, which is why there's no general advice beyond, you need to find it. You need to figure out what your motivation needs to be to achieve a purpose. And then make sure that you stoke it. As Corey said, to tend it as well. don't burn yourself out. You know, it's entirely I saw a mutual yesterday sounding he was

55:56 probably sick 'cause he was in bed all day and he was talking about his prostant work ethic making him feel terrible, making him feel lazy for having stayed in bed. That wasn't a failure of motivation if you're sick. The best thing that you can do if you're run down and you can't move, if at all possible, is to stay in bed, give your body the rest that it needs. That's not laziness, that's not an absence of motivation. To be motivated doesn't mean to be moving all the time. That sort of frenetic I don't even know how to describe it. There's something about kind of the boomer ethos to just say I gotta do all the time. And they're not all like that. It's that's not a sin of the boomer in particular, but it

56:36 seems like there's more of them than others. It's okay to take a break. You actually need to do it. Our bodies need it, our minds need it, and it's not a lack of motivation to do it. So to say that you should be motivated is not to say the same as you can never stop moving. Motivation is the it's a meme that's been floating around for years where there's a guy standing in front of a big barbell and the thaw bubble says, if I don't lift this, I'm gay and my entire family will die. That's motivation. It's not necessarily rational, even though there might be bits and pieces of reason at the far end of those statements, but it's just the motivation is I gotta do this. I gotta do this. I gotta do one more.

57:18 And yeah, again, that like s sports psychology is all about digging deep and pushing yourself and you need to find that somehow or have someone help you find it. But identify it and then just make sure you stoke it. There's not much to say beyond that because I don't know what your personal purposes are going to be. But if you don't have motivation, I can guarantee that your purpose will fail. You You will not do your duty. You will not live up to the purpose you've adopted if you have no motivation. And so the reason it's worth thinking about briefly is to find it, identify it, stoke it and fuel it and care for it, and make sure that you're on the right track. You know, if something seemed like it was good motivation for a

57:58 while and it stopped working, change it up, find some other motivation. Do something else to achieve the purpose. And so that feedback loop is a part of it. And again, all this is not to say you need to be thinking all the time. That's the trap that we're trying to exhort you to get away from. Don't think all the time. Think periodically like okay, check in, measure what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do, how I'm approaching things against success. And against, you know, in the case of duty and godly duty, is it good? Should I be doing this stuff? Hopefully that happened first. But if you're, you know, you're midway through your life, maybe you've adopted purposes that turn out maybe you shouldn't have been doing them,

58:37 check in, fix it. That's it. And then move on. You adopt a new purpose, you find a new motivation, you just keep going. That's life. There's not a ton of thinking and arguing and debating. It's deciding and then acting. If you talk to people who have hiked any of the three triple crown trails, the long distance trails that run north to south, basically dividing the continent, the U.S. in half, because you have the continental, the Pacific Crest and the Appalachian. If you talk to those who have hiked those trails, they will often tell you: you can do some preparation for the trail. Obviously, of course, because you can get into decent cardio shape. I know some in the audience hate cardio, but you really should.

59:27 You can get accustomed to your gear, you can get accustomed to the food you lead on the trail to some degree, but by and large, they will all say you don't really get used to it until you've been hiking for some number of weeks, or at least some number of days. Usually it's weeks. Your body just becomes accustomed to the trail and it gets easier. It gets to be more enjoyable. So it starts out as you have that desire, in this case, that's your motivation. Your desire is to hike the Appalachian Trail. And it's good to have that desire, and the desire is important, and hopefully it sticks with you the whole time, if that happens to be your goal, your purpose in this case, is to hike that trail.

1:00:13 But over time as you do it, it becomes easier, you develop that habit, in this case a number of habits that you need for long distance hiking. But the same thing is true in many other cases. You may start out with one particular kind of motivation, and it may be joined by others or it may transmute into some other sort of motivation, in many cases it's going to start out as a matter of sheer will. Working out is a good example of this. You may have the desire to lose weight, and that'll be part of your motivation. Your purpose is to get in shape, lose weight. But you're probably going to need just sheer will to get yourself off the couch, to get yourself out of bed, and to go to the gym. Or to go walk your dog, to go cycling, whatever it happens

1:01:08 to be, however you've chosen, to get in shape and lose that weight. That is going to be unavoidable for many things. You are going to need to have that force of will within yourself to get started. Now, of course, the goal is to turn that into that habit, to make it something that's simply part of your life. It's something you do. And so if it happens to be something Some form of cardio that you do every morning. It starts out as you forcing yourself as an active will to do it. But then it becomes enjoyable and it becomes a habit, it becomes part of just how you live your life. Once you do that it becomes easier. That is the case with so many of these things, so many of these purposes. It starts out more difficult, and it becomes easier over time, because

1:02:02 every human being is a creature of habit. We like to use that term, and say, Oh, he's a creature of habit, of those for whom a particular habit usually some thing they do every single week, for instance, if you're someone who every Friday night you're at a particular bar, you're a creature of habit with regard to that. And there are individuals for whom that is particularly true, but it is true for every single human being. We are all creatures of habit. And when you develop those habits, particularly we're talking about good habits in this case. When you develop those habits, the motivation becomes easier because it just becomes part of your life. It's part of how your day goes. It's part of your schedule.

1:02:48 It's just normal for you you. Habit is so much a part of human beings, so much a part of human psychology that it's actually admissible in our courts. Our legal system recognizes how important and how salient how powerful habit is. A good example of this, if you were to get into a collision of some kind and there was for some reason a dispute over whether or not you had buckled your seat belt. If you are the sort of person who buckles his seat belt every time you get into the car, I happen to be one of those. I get into the car, I buckle my seatbelt. That would be admissible as evidence that in that particular case, you had buckled your seatbelt. Because it's a matter of habit. The same thing works in so many other parts of life.

1:03:50 Again, it may be difficult to get started with some of these things. It may be that just sheer force of will, just a naked exercise of forcing yourself to do something. And the next time, it will still be a matter of will. But there'll be a little desire along with it, there'll be some enjoyment, there'll be some other motivation that has started to grow, and you'll need to use a little less will. And over time, that continues, and eventually, you're just the sort of person who now wakes up at four in the morning to go swimming. Or maybe you're a night out. You're not a morning person. You're not an early bird. And so maybe it's ten o'clock and you go swimming. Whatever it happens to be. Once you develop that habit, it becomes easier.

1:04:38 And it makes you a better person because you're going to stick with it. It is something you have now internalized. You've taken that purpose that you decided you wanted to have. You wanted to achieve this thing. You wanted to do this thing. You did what was necessary to get started on that path. But now you've internalized it. Now it's part of who you are That is how you develop new habits as a person. That is how you develop as a person. Psychologically speaking. The easiest thing for any individual to do is going to be something that has become a habit. In certain things, like with Wo's example of baseball, it's muscle memory. Muscle memory and habit are very similar things. Essentially, muscle memory is sort of a subset of habit.

1:05:35 But once something turns into that habit, it just becomes easier, it becomes natural. It's no longer something that is difficult you don't have about it. We all have these things in our lives. It may be how you prepare eggs in the morning for breakfast, it could be something as simple as that. You don't have to think about it at all because you have made so many fried eggs that you could basically do it in the dark half asleep. And maybe you do some mornings. The challenge is starting. The challenge is that first step because what is the hardest step in any hike? It's the first one. And that's the case with so many other things in life. The most difficult part is simply starting. And that's why it matters that you have that motivation.

1:06:23 It's the difference between simply having the purpose and having the motivation. The purpose is to hike the Appalachian Trail. The motivation gets you to take the first step, and the second step, and the third step, and however many steps there are in all those miles, you need motivation for each and every one, because the purpose alone is not enough. You need that fire that drives the engine, that drives you forward. And as we've said, for every man that's going to be different, it's going to be personal. Even for something like hiking the Appalachian Trail. For some, it will be the desire to see the trail, to see the natural world, to do that thing. For others, it will be more of a matter of achievement, getting

1:07:12 that triple crown, which is hiking all three of those trails. For most it will be a combination of things. But the combination is going to be different. It may be for you it's 10% desire, and for someone else it's 80% desire. And that's why motivation is personal. You have to find that in yourself. Yes, again, starting out for many of these, it's going to be will is going to be the source of your motivation. It's going to be the fire that drives you forward. Because until you develop it into something else, it has to be will. Because will is what is the the manifestation of that decision to do something. It is the translation of purpose into action. And action is what is actually living your life.

1:07:58 Not just purpose. If you collect a bunch of purposes, a bunch of things that you think you'd like to achieve, you'd like to do in this life, but you never do any of them, what do those purposes mean? Purpose without motivation is purposeless. It's sort of like collecting books you never read. I'm not going to condemn any man for having a collection of books he hasn't read, because of course, there's something to be said for having the books. You can pass them to others, you can pass them down, people can borrow them. It's nice to have them, maybe you like how they look. But you don't get the same thing out of having them on your shelves that you would get out of actually reading them. It's a different thing.

1:08:44 There's the purpose and the motivation, and there is a division between them. You need both or you will not get anything done. If you have motivation but no purpose, you're directionless, you're aimless, you wander through life. If you have purpose but no motivation, you never get anything done. That's apathy, essentially. You must have both. You must have the purpose, which is translating duty into something personal. It's taking the duty and making it your own. And then you must have the motivation that translates that purpose into action. Because that is actually living. Not simply thinking about it, not simply desiring it, not simply having it as something intellectually that entertains you or something you think you'd

1:09:36 like to go for at some point in life. No, you need the motivation because you have to translate this into the doing. Because it is in the doing that life is actually lived in the first.