How Do We Begin New Beginnings?
There’s an old cliché that spring is the time for new beginnings. Hogwash. For robins and gladiolas, maybe, but for men? For men, any time is the right time for new beginnings.
That said, it is spring and it’s an old cliché and I find myself thinking about new beginnings regardless. What are you, the cliche police?
More than a year ago, we in the leadership of Mentor, Discover, Inspire (MDI) laid out a new path to get men to attend a specific initiation event called The Art of Masculinity (TAOM). We wanted to start them on their way to becoming mature masculine leaders and that event is the most powerful beginning to that path that we know of. Having seen a year’s worth of results, we continue to believe that getting a man to a life-changing initiation event as soon as possible is the best we can do for him. Let me be clear: it’s not all we can do for a man. It is the best we can do for him.
I’m sure some men will disagree about exactly how to do that. Shocking! The brilliance of the US’s founders was, in part, that they didn’t attempt to preemptively decide every law that might be needed, every social challenge that might arise, or every threat that might heave over the horizon. They made things as flexible as possible so the nascent United States could grow and stretch and develop into the country it has become. They saved many issues for the states, the courts, and the congress to figure out and they gave them elastic mechanisms and levers to work with as it happened.
In some ways that model represents MDI’s various regions and divisions. We don’t all do things in the same way. We’re often on different pages. That is not new and to some extent it is by design.
I need only point to the varied ways we invite men into our organization: many continue to focus on personal invitations. In recent years, Facebook ads and outreach on social media has been ascendent. Some areas use MeetUp to draw men to our teams and events while one inventive division actually sets a table up at a public market. Sitting behind it as the crowd ambles by, they invite men to ask them about MDI. Recently, a team handed out little printed slips inviting men all over their town to come to a fun event—a cookout and cornhole contest—in a man’s backyard.1
There’s no one right way and the only way that isn’t right is not to invite men at all. What we have is too good not to share. It’s too precious. It’s too rare. And it’s far, far too important to simply let men who need what we’re doing—need it badly—simply wander in by accident.
However you prefer to set men on the path to a fantastic new beginning, make sure you are truly engaged in it. It’s life or death for some; mediocrity versus greatness for others.
So, whether it’s winter, summer, fall or, yes, spring, begin a new beginning for a man. All of us. Let’s do this.
- If I failed to mention your favorite method, please email me at cchristopher@darden brothers.com and let me know what you are up to. ↩︎
About the Author:
Chris Christopher Christopher is the sitting president of Mentor, Discover, Inspire (MDI), an international non-profit men’s organization dedicated to mentoring men to live with excellence, hence to become better husbands, fathers and leaders.
Christopher earned a bachelor’s in economics and political science from Northwestern University and a law degree and MBA from the University of Virginia. He is a partner at Darden Brothers, a private equity firm he co-founded in 1995. It is, among other things, the largest independent battery distributor in Canada.
Christopher lives in San Diego, California, and has two adult children.
