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So, some time ago, I made a video and I was showing my rock wall. I have a retaining wall that I've built out of rocks, hence the rock and the rock wall. And I was using it as an analogy for repentance. And I guess the analogy just wasn't as solid as I thought. Get it? Solid rock. if it's not all cracked up to be. I guess from time to time I have conversations with friends and and I think, oh, I have some information I could use to help there. And so, here we go with this. I want to talk about continuous improvement and I want to revisit the rock wall in spirit, not literally because it's very cold outside. And I want to talk through this a little bit more. And what I'd like to do here is basically make repentance a lot easier than I think it seems for most people. So it turns out that in the book of Elma, Elma's counseling his sons and he says in in two places he he says, "Look, you need to be really worried about this, but you need to not be more worried than you should." Effectively, that's what he says. And it turns out that when it comes to feeling guilty, it's almost always the case that people are either too guilty or not guilty enough. Finding that sweet spot is really hard. And it helps to have a friend with some external perspective that can help to calibrate your guilt. That's actually a very important duty in the ministry of angels, but that's beyond the scope of this video. So instead, I'm going to show you how to do this uh with an example instead of talking about how to do it. So getting back to this rock wall, when we think of repentance, we think of, well, there are a couple of options. Sometimes people say, well, I have this one sin that I need to get rid of. Usually it's something that we need to stop. Sometimes it's something we need to do more of. But repentance is never about one thing. And sin is never about one thing. It's about deciding to fully follow God. So then if you flip that lever and you start talking about the universal sense of repentance, people get overwhelmed very quickly because they think, well, it it was a hard enough idea to think about changing this one behavior and now I have to change my whole life. Well, yes and no. On the one hand, if if you don't fully repent in in the sense of forsaking all sin, you can't actually be forgiven. But on the other hand, you can't change all things all at once. If I and and this is where that rock wall analogy helps. We need to escape the religious dissociations that we have accustomed ourselves to. Get out of the Sunday school fake reality oversimplified version of reality and out of the scriptures and into real life. And when you do that, all these things start making a lot more sense and they become a lot more practical. So let's set aside this idea of repentance and religion for a second and let's talk about if you were my employee and your job was to build a rock wall and you had invested quite a bit of time and then I come to the job to inspect. Let's say I'm the foreman and I say, "Look, this isn't right. What are the odds that the entire This is a loose loose stack rock wall that the entire rock wall is bad and needs to go. Well, of course that's possible, but if you've been doing this for a while and you're not the brand new guy on the job and and the rock wall is actually standing because if you do it very poorly, it'll fall down immediately. Odds are that there's something there that's redeemable. That's an important word. Maybe at least the rocks themselves are okay to reuse and we could get into the details on this. But the point is you could look at that and be completely overwhelmed and say, "Oh, you know, any feedback that's constructive about this is just going to be too much for me to implement because I have to change my whole life. My whole life is coming down with this rock ball." Uh, no. It's just part of the job. First off, you're getting paid. Second, you've ostensibly got the correct equipment. It's just going to take a little bit of time to do it the right way. But guess what? If you don't, very bad things will happen. That wall is going to fall down. The company's going to get sued. You're going to lose your job. Whatever, right? Maybe somebody dies. So, in real life, we deal with things like this every day. Maybe you've never built a rock wall before, and that's fine, and good for you. I'm sure your elbows thank you. But you do things like this every day, and you don't sit there and ring your hands and say, "Oh, the report I did at work. My boss said it could be a little better in this specific way. My life is over. What am I going to do? I can't deal with this." No, you just you put it in the pipeline. You say, "Okay, well, I'll do better next time. No big deal. Right? At home, we could go through a million examples. You don't lose your mind over silly little things. Why? Because you understand that there's this sense of a worklist that resources are limited and you do what you can when you can to make things the best you can. But the problem is, and this is it's a real um it's we've been cheated. we've been stolen from because at some point people came along and they say said we're going to substitute the actual religion of Jesus Christ with this fake thing that consists of a list of rules and the real thing is really hard. It has to be your whole life and you have to actually be like Jesus. But this fake one's really easy because we've got a couple rules of things that we care about. And as long as you check those boxes, we'll just pretend that everything's fine. And the issue is that actually very few people check those boxes. And there's not so much savings between checking the boxes and doing the real thing. It turns out because people start dropping things through the cracks and not checking the boxes, at least sometimes, at least when when people aren't looking. And the more close you the closer you get to actually checking the boxes, you start to see the wisdom of what Jesus said when he said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." And actually being like him is a lot better than trying to check boxes all the time in this limited approach, right? So, we got bamboozled at some point and it's time to get back to the real thing, but we tried to do the real thing in the old way. And the old way is broken. It doesn't work. So, what is the real way? What is the way that works? What is the good stuff? The good stuff is continuous improvement. Now, getting back to Elma, you might be in a in a or the rock wall. You might look at your rock wall and say, "My goodness, there's a giant boulder that's totally cracked at the bottom of this or it's completely skew. It's not going to work." And there are 50 rocks sitting on top of that thing. More realistically, let's say there are five. Okay. Well, I showed you in a video that this this rock wall is really long. That's not the whole wall. You can take down just that part and make it right. If you have a a a limitation where it's like, I can work on this three hours a Saturday until it's done. Okay, great. If it's in your queue and you're working on it, you're working on it, right? Maybe you know about it and you can't get to it because there are more important things in front of it. That's fine. That is literally the best you can do. So there's this essential portion of prioritization. Now again, this is like a gauge and you can be too far one way or the other. If you say, "Oh yeah, I know it's a problem and I'm going to get to it one day." That's not the same thing. That's not what I'm talking about. This is where a lot of the tools that I have given you in the book Joy on purpose come into play. If you have a specific plan uh or in in the book through faith, I call this a plausible plan. If you have a plausible plan of action, then it's just as good as changing the thing. It doesn't mean that you can get the blessings of having changed it before you actually do. But as far as moral, how could we put this? As moral accountability goes, it's just as good. Now, it doesn't give you a free pass. When it's time to act, you actually have to do the thing. You have to have a plausible path. You can't just say, "I'll get to it one day." None of those things are going to make you feel less guilty. Nor should they. Okay? So, that's that's about prioritization. Now, what about if you I I made a video recently and I was I was talking about how this life is as close to heaven as most people will get, which is a very provocative thing to say, but it's also true. And I had a friend who was particularly affected by that video. And he said that he's dedicated his life to building a business and he thinks that he has made that business into his heaven. and he feels like he needs to change that. Okay, this is probably a case of you've got an entire rock wall, most of which is probably pretty dang good. Don't throw away the whole rock wall because you have to change out a couple of rocks, right? So when you have a rock wall there are rocks that must go away sometimes but but even then in the most extreme case of this rock cannot be on the wall. You can use it for back fill right it's it's not the case that you have to even throw it out completely then it's it's extremely rare that the thing in your life has to go away totally and forever and will never mention it by name again. Right? And then there are rocks that just have to go into a different place. They there's a better place for certain things in your life, better times and better places. There are some rocks that are cracked and you need to recognize that crack and you probably can't put as much weight on that rock, but it doesn't mean it has to go. It could just stay right where it is and you're aware of the crack. It's not a solid rock and that's okay. Maybe you leave part of that rock there and you move the other part either to another spot on the wall, which is likely, or at at worst, you use it as backfill behind the wall. Maybe there's a rock that's on the top that needs to be on the bottom, or rock that's on the bottom that needs to be on the top. So, Rob, can you can you make this less figurative? Sure. I mean, using this example with the business, there are a million different ways or reasons, sorry, and ways that you can found a business or or run a business. If you find that there's something lacking, it doesn't mean you have to flush the whole thing down the toilet. It means that you need to be more careful about asking what you're doing and why. I've talked about this a million times, but you you say, "What am I doing?" and you make a list. It could be mentally, but it's better to write it down. You say, "Well, why am I doing the those things? What's the intent?" Then you reverse it for each why. You look at the what and you say, "Is this the best way I know of to do this? Is it working? Do I need to find something else? Is there something I'm already aware of?" And you make the changes again in an organized and sensible way. A lot of times we can have things that are ranked poorly. This is in life, not just business. All of this applies to everything. We can have motives that maybe aren't as good or as pure as we thought. And I just need to spend a minute talking about purity. Purity is not a synonym for goodness. Those are not the same word. If something is pure, it just means it's homogeneous. It's the same throughout. That's what purity means. And so, um, to have a pure motive is to not have mixed motives. And a lot could be said about that. I say a lot about hidden motives and mixed motives in a book I wrote called Be Who You Really Are. Anyway, a good example of how rank and motives can change over time is found in Paul. So he at some point learned how to make tents and he used that skill while he was a a missionary to help finance his mission. So because of the constraints of geography and safety and technology back then if you went to a place to preach the gospel you were going to be there for a while and you couldn't just set up on a soap box 247 and preach the gospel. you had meetings that you could organize and then there was a lot of downtime. So he used that downtime to make tents and used the money he made in making tents to finance his mission because it's always hard to get donations. So um that didn't mean that that that because he was a missionary he had to abandon the fact that he knew how to make tents. He still had that skill and when it came in handy, he applied it, but he never let it take priority over preaching the gospel. He wasn't like, "Oh, I have to go to Macedonia, but I'm going to put it on hold until I finish this tent, right?" Or, "You know what? I I need to up my tent sales before I go to Macedonia." Everything was subordinate to the primary purpose, which was preach the gospel. Now, if your primary purpose in business is make as much money as you can, you are going to be a very sad person in the long run. There are really good motives that people have in business. And if you're in business, you don't need to hear this from me. You already know this. You've probably already experienced the limitations of seeking for money for its own sake. Money is all about what you can do with it. And businesses are more than just money. They're they can be a very powerful tool to help people in extremely direct ways in in ways that have a huge payoff in terms of their improvement in life. So I know this from my own experience. I founded a business where one of the prime goals was to radically advance the professional development of people with very few opportunities and I crushed that goal. It's something that gives me a lot of joy that we were able to help a whole ton of people radically advance in their lives professionally. It was like in my mind the image was I wanted to be like that skybridge thing at the airport where you can walk at the normal speed and go 10 times faster. And we succeeded at that. You can also use a business um not not for money in and of itself but to buy your own time. That money the thing that helps people the most is proximity. And in order to give someone your presence, you need your time. You need to go to them or have them come to you and you need time to spend with them. Money is a very direct way to get that. And so if you build up a business, you can buy your time to do things to directly contribute who you are to other people. Some people will find that they're radically better at earning money than they are at helping people directly. That's okay because there's a whole bunch of weirdos out there like myself who've dedicated dedicated their lives to one-on-one interactions and helping people instead of making money. And you can help people like me through donating your money. And it's not hard to find situations where you can find people who take that dollar and transform it into a much greater good than you could directly. One fantastic way to spend time that money can buy is with your own family. Although it's very frequently the case that this gets corrupted into, hey, let's have fun. There's a time and a place for fun with family, but that's not the end. It is a useful means at the right time and place for the end. The end is improvement. And so time with family, like everything else, ought to be aimed at helping people become the best people they can be. Anyway, if you have a better reason than just money in business, you will find yourself a really solid why. And not only will it help you feel much more meaning in your day-to-day labor, you may find it becomes a great source of strength when you face challenges in your life, whether those be at work or home or anything else. If if you end up getting terminal cancer, you can look back at the the things that you did for other people through your business and feel really good about yourself because of that, as you should. Now, uh it's kind of a funny example, but I wanted to bring up uh the movie Nacho Libre because it I think it's a there's so much in that movie that's just a wonderful example of uh or or that are wonderful examples of gospel principles, believe it or not. And uh it's a it's a wonderful example of finding truth in strange places. But in the movie, there is a monk who really likes wrestling and in his order it's forbidden, but he sneaks out and becomes a secret wrestler anyway and hilarity ensues. But in the end of the movie, basically he's praying and he he discovers that there's probably a path where God could use this wrestling for helping these orphans that he lives with and takes care of as part of being a monk, a frier, I guess. And he has to make an incredibly significant change to why he's doing what he's doing. But he doesn't change what he's doing. And this is this is what I wanted to get at with this idea of continuous improvement. Repentance is a binary state. You're either sinless or you're not. But repentance, when you're in a state of repentance, you're also in a state of continuous improvement. So it's it's you're always changing. You're always learning and growing. And so we have to dedicate ourselves to the greatest good and then continue that dedication. And the the scripture words for that are justification which is the initial dedication to God and then sanctification where we maintain that dedication while we learn more about him and ourselves and everybody else etc. And when we get into these moments of, hey, I have a strong feeling that something has to change, let's not get bogged down in, hey, I have to nuke my entire life and start from scratch. Now, now maybe you're in a position where that's the best thing. I don't know. But for most people, it's not the best thing. The best thing is actually to go in there with a scalpel and start making surgical corrections. And like I said, this I love the rock wall analogy. A lot of times that means pulling off a couple of rocks, taking out one that's not so great, finding a better one to put in its place, changing the priority order of what we do in our lives. But most often, it's a question of why we do what we do and making tweaks to that. And here's the crazy thing. Like in the movie Nacho Libre, you can have this radical shift in why you do something. The people around you might not even notice that anything has changed, but it can be as different for you as anything could be. And it's a very, very important take-home message. So, I invite you to think about what you do and why you do it and really put time into asking the question,"What about me can be better? What about what I do or why I do it could be improved?" Make a plan and get used to this plan and these changes being something that never stops. And always try to make your life as good as it can be. And to do the same for everyone around you.