F3 A man can pour his worry into things far away, the country, the culture, the news, and spend almost none on the handful of people right next to him. F3’s field manual gently turns that around. It starts with what it calls the Group, and it draws a line most men have never stopped to think about.
What makes a group of people a real community?
The most basic group, F3 says, is a community: two or more people who choose to live close to one another. What makes it a community is that nearness, not shared traits like background, race, or job. F3 makes the point bluntly with its own author, a middle-aged lawyer who notes that the governor of his state is also a middle-aged lawyer, yet the two have never met and live two hundred miles apart. Whatever they have in common, they are not in community. Two very different men who show up to the same parking lot every morning are. Those communities do not sit side by side either; they fit inside one another.
How are communities connected to each other?
They nest inside one another like rings. Your family is the closest community, under one roof. Your neighborhood is families living near each other. Then the town, the county, the state, the country, and finally the whole world, each one wider and farther away. F3 notes there is a second kind of group too, an organization, where people are joined by a shared mission rather than by nearness, like a company or a team. But the group that shapes a man’s daily life most is the community closest to him. And that closeness is exactly where a man’s leadership carries the most weight.
Where does a man have the most influence?
Here is the line that should change how a man spends himself. A leader has the most impact on the communities at the center of his own circle. A father matters far more to his own children than any governor or president does, simply because he is closer. The distant, famous leaders matter, but less. The man with the most power over your kids’ lives is not in Washington. He is at your dinner table, and he is you. F3’s point is not that the big things do not matter. It is that a man who neglects the people nearest him to fret about the people farthest from him has it exactly backwards. Your leadership counts most in the place right in front of you.
F3 calls this the Group, its third Foundation in the F3 Nation Q-Source, the field manual for virtuous leadership that F3 is built on. Read the full teaching: f3nation.com/group. F3 Denver is where men practice it. Find a workout.