And hello to you! It's bonus episode day, something short and sweet, but I hope meaningful.

I've been thinking a lot about purpose lately, not in that big life-defining way, necessarily, but in the small, quiet sense of it.

The kind that gets you out of bed in the morning

makes you feel like you're not just treading water.

Because the truth is, purpose isn't always loud.

It doesn't have to be about curing diseases or writing novels.

Sometimes it's just about knowing that something you do, anything,

makes a difference, even if it's only to you. And that brings me on to a story. I wanted to share a true

story and a powerful one. It's about a man named Eugene Heimler.

Heimler was a Hungarian Jew, and during the Second World War, he and his entire family were deported to Auschwitz, and his family were murdered, and he was kept alive for one of the Nazi's so-called experiments.

Now, this wasn't the kind of experiment you'd want to survive. It wasn't about medicine, it wasn't curing anything. It was about hopelessness. The Nazis wanted to

see what would happen if you forced people to do something completely and utterly pointless.

Every single day, would it break them?

Would they give up?

So they made this group of prisoners, dig a hole at one end of the camp,

and then carry all the soil to the other end, where they dig another hole and bury it, and then

repeat again and again, backwards and forwards, day after day. Nothing would ever come of it. No goal,

no end, just meaningless repetition underarm guard. And of course, it did break people. That despair that it created,

the futility of it all got too much. And lots of the prisoners were throwing themselves

in electric fences and provoking the guards, hoping to be shot. Because if nothing you do matters,

then what's the point in surviving? But Heimler found something, a small,

almost silly thing, but it saved him. One day, while digging, it came across a broken brick,

...