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On a recent episode of the AoM podcast, I talked with Jordan Grumet<\/a>, a hospice doctor and the author of The Purpose Code<\/em>.<\/p>\n In our interview, Jordan drew a distinction between what he calls \u201cbig P purpose\u201d and \u201clittle p purpose.\u201d While the former focuses on your why<\/em>, the latter is about your what<\/em>.<\/p>\n Big P purpose is the singular, change-the-world project many people feel they’re supposed<\/em> to discover and build their lives around \u2014 the thing they were meant to do. The problem with big P purpose, Jordan says, is that a lot of people can never figure out what their overarching thing is. They spin their wheels for years searching and searching for their one true calling in life. Some even start feeling bad that they haven\u2019t found it and experience an angst psychologists call \u201cpurpose anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n But when researchers define purpose, they\u2019re just looking at things that give someone a sense of action, direction, and goals, and those are qualities that can be had in a much smaller, less existentially fraught form.<\/p>\n Little p purposes are any activities you enjoy doing for their own sake. You’d do them even if they didn\u2019t come with pay or accolades. They\u2019re intrinsically pleasurable pursuits that just light you up. A little p purpose could be fixing old motorcycles, collecting baseball cards, running half-marathons, or volunteering at a soup kitchen on the weekends.<\/p>\n You can have more than one little p purpose, and even though they\u2019re small pursuits, they can add up to significant meaning and a lasting legacy.<\/p>\n When Jordan was describing little p purposes on the podcast, I kept thinking of one person who exemplified the truth of just how life-enriching they can be: my grandpa, William “Bill” Hurst.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve talked about my grandpa, Bill Hurst, before on the site. I published the eulogy I gave at his funeral ten years ago<\/a>. He\u2019s a big inspiration behind AoM.<\/p>\n Bill was a third-generation forester who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for nearly 40 years, finishing his career as Regional Forester of the Southwestern Region, where he managed the national forests and grasslands of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma.<\/p>\n On paper, his Forest Service career looks like it was a big P purpose for Grandpa. And I\u2019m sure it was. Bill was very proud of his work and his family\u2019s legacy in helping to manage federal land and its natural resources.<\/p>\n But his Forest Service career wasn\u2019t the only iron he had in the purpose fire. Outside work \u2014 and especially after retirement \u2014 Grandpa stacked together a bunch of interests for himself: hobbies, clubs, service projects, and causes.<\/p>\n To inspire your own pursuit of little p purposes, I\u2019m going to walk you through those my grandpa cultivated from his 40s into his 90s.<\/p>\n An article the Albuquerque Journal<\/em> did about my grandpa in 1972.<\/p><\/div>\n When he was in his 40s, Grandpa started collecting and restoring horse-drawn buggies from the 1880s to the 1910s.<\/p>\n Why the interest in buggies? Well, Bill grew up riding and driving a horse and buggy in Southern Utah. As he told an Albuquerque Journal <\/em>reporter who did a story about him and his hobbies, \u201c[the buggy] was the only transportation we had until I was 16 or 17, and even after Dad got a Model T, we still had the buggy.\u201d In his early work as a forester, he\u2019d often use a horse and buggy to get around places. So there was a nostalgia factor that drew him to this hobby.<\/p>\n Grandpa not only enjoyed fixing up buggies, but chasing after the parts that made the restorations possible. Restoring 19th-century buggies in the 1950s and 60s \u2014 before the advent of the internet \u2014 required a lot of on-the-ground sleuthing.<\/p>\n Grandpa posing with a charcoal buggy heater. You\u2019d put charcoal in the heater, light it up, and keep it by your feet when you were driving your buggy in the cold.<\/p><\/div>\n If he couldn\u2019t find a part or replacement that fit exactly, he\u2019d have to machine something or tweak modern materials to make them work. This was another appeal of buggy restoration: the improvisation. Grandpa credited his career in the Forest Service for instilling this ability to alter and jerry-rig: \u201cIn the Forest Service you have to be self-reliant and build things yourself, so I don\u2019t have any trouble with a piece of work,\u201d Grandpa said in his Albuquerque Journal <\/em>interview.<\/p>\n Grandpa with one of the phonographs he restored. He carved that ornate panel with nothing but a pocket knife.<\/p><\/div>\n Besides restoring antique buggies and surreys, Bill also developed a passion for restoring phonograph players. I\u2019m sure there was a nostalgia factor with this hobby, too, but what specifically kickstarted the interest was inheriting a broken 1920s Sonora player from his grandmother. When he couldn\u2019t find anyone to repair its broken spring, he decided to do it himself.<\/p>\n After plenty of old-school gumshoe work to find a replacement part, an Arizona antique dealer connected Grandpa with a parts dealer out of Richmond, VA who went by \u201cA. Nugent.\u201d Grandpa wrote Nugent, Nugent mailed back the spring with an invoice, and Bill got the Sonora working again. Nugent became Grandpa\u2019s source for parts, and he was soon restoring other phonographs too.<\/p>\n Just as with the buggies, Grandpa often had to improvise during his phonograph restorations. For one cabinet player, the scrollwork panel that covers the horn where the sound comes out was broken, so Grandpa carved a duplicate with just his trusty pocket knife. How\u2019s that for handy!<\/p>\n Several of the phonograph players Grandpa restored are still in the family. My mom has one, along with a large collection of records. I\u2019ll be fighting my siblings for it. I want that thing!<\/p>\n When retirement came, Grandpa continued his buggy and phonograph restoration, but he also developed other little p purposes to fill his newly acquired free time.<\/p>\n He\u2019d go on regular horse and mule pack trips through the mountains of the West, from New Mexico to Oregon, well into old age. He\u2019d often go with his son or with a group called the Wilderness Trail Riders. Sometimes he went on these pack trips by himself.<\/p>\n Reading through his memoirs, it looks like Grandpa didn\u2019t hang up the reins on his last pack trip until he was in his early 80s. He loved his horses and being out in nature.<\/p>\n In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an American male archetype called \u201cthe clubman.\u201d This was a guy whose wallet was stuffed with membership cards to all sorts of clubs and fraternal organizations. Grandpa Hurst was definitely a clubman. Like a lot of Greatest Generation men, he was a joiner.<\/p>\n Grandpa belonged to the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Society of American Foresters, and the Society for Range Management and earned awards from all of those organizations for his service. Grandpa was also active in Scouting as an adult leader and was awarded the Silver Beaver for his years of distinguished service.<\/p>\n Through his involvement in these groups, Grandpa was able to scratch his itch to serve and be useful. It also provided a social outlet for his affable temperament.<\/p>\n Through the Rotary Club, Grandpa got involved with Meals on Wheels as a food deliverer. I remember visiting him in New Mexico as a kid and watching him go out for his deliveries. He was probably in his 80s when he was doing this, and I remember thinking, \u201cShouldn\u2019t you be the one getting food delivered to you<\/em>? You\u2019re the old guy.\u201d But Grandpa was spry and liked to be helpful. He understood being old often meant being lonely, so he thought it was important to spend time with his elderly, less mobile peers.<\/p>\n Even after retiring from the Forest Service, Grandpa stayed in the conservation game. He was a charter member and past president of the Society for Range Management. He continued writing papers to help influence policy on the state and federal level. He\u2019d regularly meet with congressmen and governors about forest and land issues. He spent several decades of his retirement organizing his papers and diaries about his Forest Service work so they could be donated to Utah State University. <\/p>\n When my grandpa was in his late 90s, he started an advocacy group for a squirrel.<\/p>\n When Bill was nine years old, he encountered a Kaibab squirrel, a subspecies of the tassel-eared Abert’s squirrel found on the Kaibab Plateau in Northern Arizona and nowhere else on earth. He took a keen interest in the critter from then on and looked out for it during his years as Regional Forester.<\/p>\nBill Hurst, Little P Purpose Stacker<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Restoring Antique Horse-Drawn Buggies<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Restoring Phonograph Players<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Horse Pack Trips<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nClubs and Service<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Staying Connected to Conservation<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Protecting the Kaibab Squirrel<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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