Continuing to Rise: Life After MDI

Erfan Ahmadi
Guest Writer

[Editor’s Note: This article is the latest in Legacy Magazine’s ongoing series Why Men Leave / Life After MDI.]

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Before I get into the whole Life After MDI topic, I’d like to level set why I left in the first place.

MDI is an incredible resource for men. It changed my trajectory on how I look at relationships with men in general.

I never truly knew that I could be so deeply vulnerable with men, yet still be unconditionally accepted and loved. The first man who truly made me feel that way was Olaf Krop.¹

I remember the first conversation I ever had with him, through MDI’s expansion initiative back in 2020. He listened to me, made me feel heard, understood, and accepted. In a lot of ways, that’s what MDI does. It makes us go out there and achieve greatness, knowing we are truly accepted and seen. 

I guess, there isn’t one thing or event that got me to the decision of leaving MDI. Rather, it was a build up of many events. I think there comes a point for for each person who has left that is different. My reasons are summed up below:

• First, the splitting of the teams back in 2023/24 was uncalled for, and used a homogenous brush across all teams to solve a problem that not all teams had. This caused a tremendous number of powerful men to leave: men like Toby Fisher, and Hue Fitzpatrick
• The new teams were formed by men who have never led before. And, when that wasn’t working for some, those men were not permitted to go on walk-about to try and make it work with a different team. This caused tremendous anger for me, as I was coming to the organization for a solution and trying to stay part of MDI. But our DC² at the time did not allow changing teams. That backed me into a corner: I had to either try to make it work with my current team or leave the organization
• The leader of my division was a man I neither respected nor cared for. I found his behavior contradictory, hypocritical, and immature. Despite all this, he was celebrated within the division
• Our organization completely forgot about Legacy Discovery,³ and how incredible that weekend was, and began to focus on their shiny new toy, “The Art of Masculinity.”⁴
• The measure of our success became how many men our organization had, rather than the quality of the teams
• MDI tends to place new members in leadership roles in order to give them leadership training, rather than having them shadow incredible leaders to learn from them first. This is a broken system that leaves MDI in a never- thriving state, a place of constant new leader training. Which means MDI will never perform

Now: what is life like after MDI?
I needed a lifeline immediately because, after being introduced to Men’s work, I could never imagine my life without it. So, my lifeline became the ManKind Project (MKP). That organization is similar to MDI but far bigger and way more organized. They follow the Warrior, Magician, Lover, and King archetypes⁴ very closely. 

Each meeting is surrounded by self awareness, processing emotions, and accessing the collective wisdom of the men. People fight for circle time. They get support, and most of all, what I needed was an IN PERSON shoulders to shoulders meeting. MKP provides that for me.

I felt like I graduated from MDI to MKP. MDI is good introductory work to mens work. But MDI is more hinted towards leadership training and action driven initiatives. MKP is more introspective, deep work, psychological evolution, and self awareness. It is still mens work, but a deeper version. 

So what’s it like not having a team? I don’t know, because I have one. I will never be without a team. People like Tyler Burt, Parth Chandak, and Keith Raskin will always be MY MEN. They will always be my pillars that I lean on for growth. They will be my mirrors and tell me when I am full of shit, or I am onto something and to keep going. I lean on them to keep me on the straight path. 

Leaving MDI was not an easy decision, but it was the right one at the time. I don’t know if it is permanent and forever. But I do know the goals programs are incredibly useful. I hope the legacy that Olaf Krop placed in our organization continues to live on. And that Legacy Discovery doesn’t die with him. I hope that MDI doesn’t just focus on its new shiny toy and recognizes the hard work and legacy that soooo many men have placed on Legacy Discovery. The exercises, the syllabus, the lessons, the sequence, and the WISDOM. 

I hope MDI lives on, and continues to rise. In order for that to happen, the organization needs to do something different. I think my Division is in hands of a good DC now. I am sad I’m not a part of that. But I will always wish MDI success.

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1. Olaf Krop was a long-time member of Mentor, Discover, Inspire(MDI) who served – among many other roles – as chairman of the Board of Directors and, briefly due to health issues, as President of MDI.
   Olaf Krop is now deceased. For more on him, see our interview with Krop on The Mature King and our article in last month’s issue, Krop Circles: Closing the Loop with an Old Friend and Mentor (August 2025) ↩︎
2. DC is the acronym for Division Coordinator, the leader of an MDI division, i.e., a grouping of MDI Men’s Teams ↩︎
3. Legacy Discovery (LD) is the signature Men’s Weekend of MDI ↩︎
4. The four Jungian masculine archetypes ↩︎