Everything in this book comes down to one thing and I want to state it as simply as I can before the end.
You have been trying to earn a verdict that was already issued.
What the audition was actually for
Go back to the introduction.
You wanted somebody with standing to look at you and say some version of that's a man.
That is not a defect. It is the correct instinct pointed in a direction that cannot deliver.
You wanted a settled, informed, final assessment from a source with authority.
And there is exactly one of those, and it exists, and it was issued at a cost you did not pay, and it is not contingent on the performance you have been running.
The thing that is hard to accept
Not that God accepts you. Men can say that.
That there is nothing left for you to contribute to it.
That is the offense. A man wants to add something. To demonstrate, to earn a portion, to be at least partly responsible for the outcome.
And the answer is that the position is not available, which is Chapter Eighteen's father interrupting the speech, and it is the hardest thing in this book to receive because receiving is the one operation you have never practiced.
Every other thing in your life came to you because you performed. This is the single exception and you have no category for it.
The last objection
There is one left and it arrives at exactly this point in the book.
"If it is that simple, why has it not worked already?"
A fair question from a man who has been in church for thirty years and is reading the last chapter of a book that tells him something he already knew.
Three answers.
Because you agreed with it rather than receiving it. Chapter Fifteen. Those are different operations and one of them you have never performed.
Because you never brought the specific thing. Chapter Sixteen. You brought the category, for thirty years, in language general enough to avoid the item, and the item is what was doing the work.
And because you did it alone. Chapter Twenty-Four. A thing confessed only in an empty room stays partially in the dark, because a man can say it with nobody present and never fully believe it was heard.
Simple is not the same as easy and it is not the same as done.
The instructions in this book are four sentences long and men have avoided them for decades, and the avoidance is not a failure of intelligence. It is the entire subject of the book, operating on the book itself.
What it actually means
Concretely, because this can float.
You are not on trial. The proceeding you have been preparing for is over. There is no future moment where the case gets heard and the verdict gets rendered.
Which means the file you have been building has no recipient, and it never did, and the building can stop.
You will still do the work. Nothing in here says stop. Provide, build, lead, finish, hold the standard. Every book in this line still applies.
The engine is what changed, and the engine determines whether the work produces something or consumes the man doing it.
And you are already known. Completely. Including the thing from Chapter Twenty-Three. There is no disclosure that could revise the assessment, because the assessment was made with the whole file in view.
That is either the most frightening sentence in this book or the most freeing one, and for every man I have ever watched receive it, it is first the one and then the other.
The last thing i will argue
There is a version of a man that this book is aiming at and I want to describe him, because the whole thing has been diagnosis and a man deserves to know the target.
He is not tense.
He is not braced. He is not scanning the room. He is not managing anybody's temperature and he is not fighting anybody either, because he does not need to win and does not need to be liked, and the absence of both is restful to be around.
He can be corrected without it costing him anything.
He can say no without a speech.
He can be wrong in public and say so in one sentence.
He can hear that somebody dislikes him and it registers as information rather than as an emergency.
And he is not remarkable. That is the part nobody expects. He does not look like anything in particular. He looks ordinary and slightly unhurried, and men do not identify that as the thing they were after.
It is the thing they were after.
An excerpt from Whose Approval?. The free course is based on this material and is not the same thing.