F3 F3’s field manual is blunt about a man’s priorities, and its answer surprises men who have spent years chasing work. At the very center of a man’s life, F3 puts one relationship above all the rest: his wife.
Why does F3 call marriage a man’s most important relationship?
F3 pictures a man’s relationships as a set of rings, like an archery target, with the people closest to him at the center. At the bullseye is his wife. F3 calls her the transformative relationship, because through marriage a man becomes something new. Before it he is an “I”; after it he is part of something larger than himself. Every other relationship in his life is built on top of that one. Get the center wrong and the outer rings wobble. Which is why F3 has no patience for the usual advice about juggling it all.
What is wrong with “work-life balance”?
F3 rejects it outright, and not gently. The problem is the word balance. You can only balance things that never change, dead weight on a scale. People are not dead weight. A wife, a marriage, a family are alive and always shifting, with needs and moods of their own that a man cannot control. And the idea that work sits on one side of the scale, equal to everything else, has it backwards. A man works to provide, but his work is far less important than the people he provides for. If balance is the wrong target, a man still needs to know what the right one is.
So what should a man aim for instead?
Not balance, but rhythm. F3 compares it to spinning plates on poles: some need attention now, others can wait, and a man cannot control when each one will start to wobble. So instead of trying to hold everything perfectly level, he stays ready, gives his best attention to the center first, and keeps the most important relationship, his marriage, spinning true. Much of the rest of his life steadies when that one does.
F3 calls this the M, the first relationship 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/m. F3 Denver is where men practice it. Find a workout.