F3 Everyone knows the feeling: the thing you committed to, and the strong pull to skip it just this once. F3’s field manual makes a surprising case that the days you least want to show up are exactly the days it matters most.
Why is showing up so hard?
F3 is honest about the friction. Getting the family up, fed, and out the door is work. You show up and end up next to someone you would never choose to spend time with. Maybe you do not like how it is run or what is said. You have other things you could be doing, maybe things you should be doing. F3 lists every reason to stay home, because it knows them all. Then it says a man goes anyway. Which sounds like stubbornness until you see what he is actually going for.
Why go when you get nothing out of it?
Because, F3 says, showing up has a purpose that has little to do with how you feel that day. Every man has ups and downs. Some weeks you are on the mountaintop and want to tell strangers about it. Other weeks you are slogging through a valley and want only to be left alone. And here is the twist F3 points to: the valley weeks, when showing up is the last thing you want, are the very weeks you most need to be in the room, because a brother who is on his mountaintop can reach down and pull you up. And something happens in that room that a man almost never sees coming.
What actually happens when a man shows up anyway?
Something he does not expect. F3 says that when a man drags himself in while he is low, he almost always finds another man there in an even darker place. Turning to help that man, he forgets his own troubles just long enough to be useful, and in that forgetting of himself he finds his own way back up. F3 calls this the secret behind why the whole thing works. The joy of forgetting yourself in service of someone else is bigger than any mood you walked in with. You do not show up because you feel like it. You show up because someone in that room needs you to, and because that is how you get pulled out of your own pit.
F3 calls this Meeting, 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/meeting. F3 Denver is where men practice it. Find a workout.