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<p>On a recent episode of the AoM podcast, <a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/self-improvement/podcast-1128-big-p-vs-little-p-purpose-why-you-dont-need-to-find-your-one-true-calling/">I talked with Jordan Grumet</a>, a hospice doctor and the author of <em>The Purpose Code</em>.</p>
<p>In our interview, Jordan drew a distinction between what he calls “big P purpose” and “little p purpose.” While the former focuses on your <em>why</em>, the latter is about your <em>what</em>.</p>
<p>Big P purpose is the singular, change-the-world project many people feel they’re <em>supposed</em> to discover and build their lives around — 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’t found it and experience an angst psychologists call “purpose anxiety.”</p>
<p>But when researchers define purpose, they’re 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>
<p>Little p purposes are any activities you enjoy doing for their own sake. You’d do them even if they didn’t come with pay or accolades. They’re 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>
<p>You can have more than one little p purpose, and even though they’re small pursuits, they can add up to significant meaning and a lasting legacy.</p>
<p>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>
<h3><strong>Bill Hurst, Little P Purpose Stacker</strong></h3>
<p>I’ve talked about my grandpa, Bill Hurst, before on the site. <a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/manhood/eulogy-grandfather-william-d-hurst/">I published the eulogy I gave at his funeral ten years ago</a>. He’s a big inspiration behind AoM.</p>
<p>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>
<p>On paper, his Forest Service career looks like it was a big P purpose for Grandpa. And I’m sure it was. Bill was very proud of his work and his family’s legacy in helping to manage federal land and its natural resources.</p>
<p>But his Forest Service career wasn’t the only iron he had in the purpose fire. Outside work — and especially after retirement — Grandpa stacked together a bunch of interests for himself: hobbies, clubs, service projects, and causes.</p>
<p>To inspire your own pursuit of little p purposes, I’m going to walk you through those my grandpa cultivated from his 40s into his 90s.</p>
<h3><strong>Restoring Antique Horse-Drawn Buggies</strong></h3>
<div id="attachment_194483" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-194483" class="wp-image-194483 size-full" src="https://content.artofmanliness.com//2026/08/buggy.png" alt="" width="600" height="644" srcset="https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/buggy.png 600w, https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/buggy-320x343.png 320w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"/></p>
<p id="caption-attachment-194483" class="wp-caption-text">An article the <em>Albuquerque Journal</em> did about my grandpa in 1972.</p>
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<p>When he was in his 40s, Grandpa started collecting and restoring horse-drawn buggies from the 1880s to the 1910s.</p>
<p>Why the interest in buggies? Well, Bill grew up riding and driving a horse and buggy in Southern Utah. As he told an <em>Albuquerque Journal </em>reporter who did a story about him and his hobbies, “[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.” In his early work as a forester, he’d often use a horse and buggy to get around places. So there was a nostalgia factor that drew him to this hobby.</p>
<p>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 — before the advent of the internet — required a lot of on-the-ground sleuthing.</p>
<div id="attachment_194484" style="width: 454px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-194484" class="wp-image-194484 " src="https://content.artofmanliness.com//2026/08/heater.png" alt="" width="444" height="699" srcset="https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/heater.png 450w, https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/heater-320x503.png 320w" sizes="(max-width: 444px) 100vw, 444px"/></p>
<p id="caption-attachment-194484" class="wp-caption-text">Grandpa posing with a charcoal buggy heater. You’d put charcoal in the heater, light it up, and keep it by your feet when you were driving your buggy in the cold.</p>
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<p>If he couldn’t find a part or replacement that fit exactly, he’d 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: “In the Forest Service you have to be self-reliant and build things yourself, so I don’t have any trouble with a piece of work,” Grandpa said in his <em>Albuquerque Journal </em>interview.</p>
<h3><strong>Restoring Phonograph Players</strong></h3>
<div id="attachment_194473" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-194473" class="wp-image-194473 size-full" src="https://content.artofmanliness.com//2026/08/image3.png" alt="" width="500" height="494" srcset="https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/image3.png 500w, https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/image3-320x316.png 320w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px"/></p>
<p id="caption-attachment-194473" class="wp-caption-text">Grandpa with one of the phonographs he restored. He carved that ornate panel with nothing but a pocket knife.</p>
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<p>Besides restoring antique buggies and surreys, Bill also developed a passion for restoring phonograph players. I’m 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’t find anyone to repair its broken spring, he decided to do it himself.</p>
<p>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 “A. Nugent.” Grandpa wrote Nugent, Nugent mailed back the spring with an invoice, and Bill got the Sonora working again. Nugent became Grandpa’s source for parts, and he was soon restoring other phonographs too.</p>
<p>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’s that for handy!</p>
<p>Several of the phonograph players Grandpa restored are still in the family. My mom has one, along with a large collection of records. I’ll be fighting my siblings for it. I want that thing!</p>
<h3><strong>Horse Pack Trips</strong></h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-194471" src="https://content.artofmanliness.com//2026/08/image1.png" alt="" width="500" height="661" srcset="https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/image1.png 500w, https://content.artofmanliness.com/2026/08/image1-320x423.png 320w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px"/></p>
<p>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>
<p>He’d go on regular horse and mule pack trips through the mountains of the West, from New Mexico to Oregon, well into old age. He’d often go with his son or with a group called the Wilderness Trail Riders. Sometimes he went on these pack trips by himself.</p>
<p>Reading through his memoirs, it looks like Grandpa didn’t 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>
<h3><strong>Clubs and Service</strong></h3>
<p>In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an American male archetype called “the clubman.” 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>
<p>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>
<p>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>
<p>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, “Shouldn’t you be the one getting food delivered to <em>you</em>? You’re the old guy.” 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>
<h3><strong>Staying Connected to Conservation</strong></h3>
<p>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’d 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>
<h3><strong>Protecting the Kaibab Squirrel</strong></h3>
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<p>When my grandpa was in his late 90s, he started an advocacy group for a squirrel.</p>
<p>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>
<p>As he approached his 100th birthday, he rounded up some friends and family and formed the <a href="http://www.kaibabsquirrel.org/">Friends of the Kaibab Squirrel</a>, a group dedicated to educating government agencies and citizens about the animal so its population wouldn’t decline. It’s still going. You can buy a lapel pin to support the organization.</p>
<h3><strong>Grandpa Hurst’s Little P Purposes Left an Outsized Legacy</strong></h3>
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<p>One of Jordan’s arguments for pursuing little p purposes (besides being intrinsically enjoyable) is that they’re one of the best ways to find and foster community — and that community is one of the best ways to find joy and meaning.</p>
<p>When you pursue something that lights you up, other people take notice. People want to mentor you and learn from you and collaborate with you. Little p purposes attract others and bring people into your life.</p>
<p>That was Grandpa’s life exactly. When his buggy restoring pastime got write-ups in a farming magazine and the <em>Albuquerque Journal</em>, strangers started calling to offer him buggies. It connected him to an Oklahoma City craftsman who restored buggies for the Cowboy Hall of Fame and to collectors all over New Mexico and Utah. His phonograph restoration hobby turned that mysterious parts dealer in Richmond, “A. Nugent,” into a pen pal and made Grandpa the guy the local paper’s help hotline sent its phonograph questions to. His range society work had him rubbing shoulders with everyone from ranchers to U.S. senators. His Meals on Wheels volunteering kept him in regular contact with other seniors in his area.</p>
<p>What’s more, my grandfather’s life affirms the argument Jordan also makes that pursuing your little p purposes often creates the legacy many people are looking to leave when they search for their big P purpose.</p>
<p>The small contributions Bill continued to make to conservation during retirement definitely left a mark. And watching Grandpa tinker and volunteer and squirrel-advocate his way through four decades of retirement shaped how I and the rest of his grandkids think about what a good life looks like. He kept himself busy being useful and being curious about the world and other people for all of his life. When I grow up, I want to be like my Grandpa Hurst.</p>
<h3><strong>Small Purposes Add Up</strong></h3>
<p>If you’ve spent years trying to figure out your life’s purpose and keep coming up empty, my grandpa’s example points to a different way to go about it. Quit hunting for the one big thing you were meant to do and start pursuing some little things instead.</p>
<p>If you’re wondering where to start looking for your little p purposes, Jordan suggests thinking back to what lit you up as a kid. If you look at my grandpa’s little p purposes, most of them were sparked in his childhood. He grew up with buggies and phonograph players and found an itch to restore them. He met a rare squirrel when he was nine, and it inspired him to start an advocacy group for it when he was 100.</p>
<p>Bill Hurst’s life shows that when you follow your small interests, you can create a big, meaningful life for yourself.</p>
<p><strong><em>Be sure to listen to <a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/self-improvement/podcast-1128-big-p-vs-little-p-purpose-why-you-dont-need-to-find-your-one-true-calling/">my podcast with Jordan Grumet</a> about how to find your little p purposes: </em></strong></p>
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<br /><a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/self-improvement/how-my-grandpa-built-a-big-life-from-little-purposes/">Source link </a></p>
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How My Grandpa Built a Big Life From Little Purposes
