F3 Most men have one weakness that keeps tripping them up. They beat it for a while, then fall for it again, then again. F3’s field manual says that recurring stumble is not random, and it has a name.
What is the one thing that keeps tripping a man up?
F3 calls it your Jester: the particular temptation that keeps hindering you, the one stumbling block, out of the many available, that you trip over again and again. It might be alcohol, gambling, pornography, laziness, anxiety, or quietly enjoying other people’s failures. No matter how disciplined a man is about his fitness or his diet, if he does not prepare for his Jester it will undo all of it. It is the crack in the foundation. A man might hope that getting strong enough elsewhere would cover the crack, but it does not.
Can being fit or successful protect you?
Not by itself, and here F3 says something surprising. The king of all Jesters is pride, and a man’s very success can become it. A man who gets fit and then uses it to feel superior to less-fit men has let his strength curdle into his weakness. Pride is the insidious one, F3 says, because it takes something good and necessary and quietly perverts it into something destructive. The strongest man is not automatically safe. Sometimes his strength is the trap. So the question is how a man fights something that hides inside his own strengths.
How does a man fight it?
By recognizing that the Jester is a master liar, and that his lies follow an old, predictable pattern. The first is “you are the boss of me,” the whisper that you can stop anytime you want, right up until the day you cannot. The second is “you are what you do,” the lie that your worst moments, rather than your better self, are the real you. A man beats his Jester not by pretending he has no weakness, but by naming it, expecting the lies, and building his defenses before the moment of temptation instead of during it.
F3 calls this the Jester, part of getting right in the F3 Nation Q-Source, the field manual for virtuous leadership that F3 is built on. Read the full teaching: f3nation.com/jester. F3 Denver is where men practice it. Find a workout.