 Productiveness, every virtue has a material application and a spiritual application. A material application of productivity seems to be pretty straightforward, right? You produce the stuff that you need in order to survive. You produce the stuff that is a requirement of human life. Clothing, shelter, food, and everything else. But it's more than that, right? It's not just, and objective aesthetics is very clear about this, life is not just to be lived okay, right? Life is not just to be lived, you know, having water and food and shelter and whatever. But human needs, human wants and human needs are endless. So it's the ongoing continuous production of material values that is productiveness. It's in a sense never settling. It's always being engaged in that process of creation. It's what? You know, to a large extent makes us human. That process of creation, that process of production, that process of manifesting our ideas. Intellectual ideas, artistic ideas, you know, scientific ideas, production ideas, business ideas. Manifestation of all the ideas in reality, that's what gives them a reality. That's an essential part of what it means to be human. It's to produce, it's to make it whatever level of ability you have. To make and to produce guided by your reason, again, at whatever level of ability you have. It's that taking your ideas and applying them to reality. Whether you're a street sweeper or nuclear engineer on entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, is the use of the mind, applying it to a problem and solving that problem in reality out there. Creating something, building something, making something, doing something different. And that's what life is about. And that's what work should be about. It should be about producing, creating, making, applying one's reason. It's so sad. It's so sad and we get the spiritual element. The spiritual element is even more dramatically so. To see people just going through the motions. In a sense, negating being a human being. Just acting like an animal, doing what they're told. Not engaging their mind in the activity they're involved in. Not engaging their mind in making the world around them. It's one way or another, a better world. So being productive, creating, building is an essential, essential virtue in objectivism. And what is the purpose? Virtues after all are actions. Actions that lead to the good life. Actions that lead to happiness. Actions that lead to the attainment of values. What is the primary value? What is the central value that productiveness is targeted at achieving? Well, in a sense, it's necessary for the achievement of all values. You need to produce in order to consume. You need to produce in order to achieve the value of reason. Because you're using rationality in production. So rationality is the recognition of reason as a means of knowledge, a means of survival. So productiveness really is a way, and of course it's a necessary means of attaining self-esteem. And we'll get to that in a little while. But the one thing that it's really directly related to is the value of purpose. I had my book opened to a particular passage and of course that's gone. Purpose. Purpose is one of the objectives called no values. Reason, purpose and self-esteem. Purpose means that you have a goal in everything in mind, in life. That you have a higher care values that you are actively working to pursue. That you have something in mind in every activity that you engage in in life. That it's not random, that it's not whatever you feel like doing. That it isn't just cruising through life. That there actually is a focal point, a purpose, a direction, a goal. That all your activities are leading towards. Right? So I'm gonna retry, try to find this section that I lost. Right? It's gone. Alright. I wanted to quote something about purpose. Alright. Okay, doesn't matter. So in every activity in life, in everything we do, we should have a purpose and a goal. Think of how it would work. Everything he does, even when he's relaxing, is purposeful. The purpose might be to properly relax. And what does it take to properly relax? And how does one properly relax? And with whom does one choose to properly relax or go on vacations? They have a good time. That's not random. That too is essentialized. Everything in how it works life is in a sense goal, purpose, directed. If you think about all the heroes of Ayn Rand's books, think about Ayn Rand. She came to the United States young girl with nothing, with some English, but nowhere near the kind of knowledge of the English language that would allow her to write a novel like Atlas Shrugged. Everything in her life from the moment she arrived in America until the publication of Atlas Shrugged was targeted towards the publication of Atlas Shrugged, even though she didn't have Atlas Shrugged in mind. But she knew she had to learn English because she wanted to be a writer. She knew to write and write and write and figure it out and become a better and better writer and use English and study English and learn English and know English. Read and write, read and write, read and write. Even if she had to do jobs that were relatively meaningless to her, still productive, she was still real good at them, but that allowed her to earn enough money so she could in the evenings really, really devote herself to a true productive activity, which was writing. So she worked as a clerk in the World War Department, became head of that department, but that was just a means to a proper productiveness goal which was the writing. But everything, everything was focused towards one productive purpose, right? And so purpose, this idea that we have to have a purpose in all that we do. We have to have a reason to do it. We have to have a goal to which we're striving towards. And it can be happiness. Happiness is the outcome from achieving one's values. Happiness is not something you drive towards. Happiness is what happens to you. It happens to you, sounds too passive. It happens within you when you exercise your virtues to attain your values. It's the outcome. It's the consequence, right? I mean, here's a quote that Phoenix has put up on the chat. The man of purpose defines explicitly his abstract values and then in every area, this specific object, he seeks to gain the values and the means by which to gain them. So whether it's object, whether it's knowledge, whatever it is. In every realm of your life, romantic realm, your career, we'll talk about career in a minute, your family, how you treat your kids, your vacation, every one of those realms. You should know what you're trying to achieve. You should know what you're striving towards. You should figure out what will lead to you achieving and succeeding in order to achieve your goals. And you should make those as explicit as you can. Now you can't always because it involves the future and involves uncertainties. But to the extent you can, you figure it out, you plan and you create a hierarchy of values based on how important they are in achieving your purpose, in achieving your goals, in achieving your values. So productive activity, productive activity is at the end of the day where we spend most of our life, most of our time. And there's a spiritual value for that. There's an existential reason for that because many of us still need to work all of our lives to produce income, all of our lives in order to sustain all the other values that we want. A home, a computer, you know, the opera, all the other things that require us to sustain income. But even if you become fabulously rich because of your work, why then do people continue working? Because it's the one area of our life in which we apply reason consistently. We're always challenged mentally. Our minds are always being challenged. We're always pushing ourselves. We'll always have the opportunities to be creative, to do new things, to push the envelope. That's why wealthy people continue working. Because it's fun, and this goes to the spiritual aspect of productiveness. Because it's the application of reason, because reason is such an important value. We have to exercise it. We have to challenge ourselves. We have to push ourselves. And when we do that, when we push ourselves and exercise our reason and achieve and succeed and attain values, what is the reward for that? Well, that's the third cardinal value that Iron Man identifies, right? That's self-esteem. So when we apply reason to purpose, apply reason to purpose, we get self-esteem. And our self-esteem allows us, because we're confident in ourselves, we feel at home in this world. That allows us to take on even bigger challenges. That allows us to push ourselves even further in terms of our career, in terms of our purpose, and in terms of applying reason, applying our rationality, our minds to greater and greater challenges, greater and greater things, you know? Like I'm trying to do with this podcasting stuff and radio stuff and all these shows, right? Taking it to the next level. Taking it to the next level. You guys are cheating. You're looking up the Iron Man lexicon on the purpose. You know, I'm thumbing through OPA. See OPA? Right there. OPA. The camera doesn't work quite right. There we go. So you should all be reading OPA.