What is success?
For years I’ve chased this question. From summit to seminar. With mentors and pros who should know. But in the context of church and ministry nothing seemed to give me an answer that satisfied me. Nothing quite caught the essence of what would bring those golden words from the Father we all long to hear, “Well done good and faithful servant.”
Then I listened to a podcast about the men’s group F3 with it’s CEO. This guy really nailed it. The link to the whole interview is at the bottom but this was the part that made me say-yeah, this is it… what do you think?
Brett McKay: How should leaders of small groups of men, whether it’s a church or you got a book club or whatever, how should they define success?
Frank Schwartz: That’s a good question. Every group is gonna have it’s own definition, I’m sure. And so, I would say, success looks like adherence to whatever that mission is. So for me, how about this? How about I answer it this way? For F3, here’s what I think success looks like.
And guys all over the country and even our board sometimes and certainly from outside organizations, look and they’re like, well, how are you measuring success? And I’m like, well, that’s a good question. It sounds like you probably have an opinion about that.
Why don’t you tell me what you think? And they’re like, well, growth numbers. Like how many men are in F3? You should be tracking that. You should know. And I’m like, okay, but what if every guy in F3 is an idiot? But we have 500,000 of them, but they’re idiots. And they’re like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Exactly. So that can’t be it. Okay, well, what if we have only 10 guys that are in it, but they’re really dedicated to the mission? Is that success? Again, I go, well maybe. I don’t know. Here’s what I know.
For me, success looks like, I wore myself out, my personal success. I wore myself out in the service of the mission. And I think success across the organization, for us anyway, is largely anecdotal. It’s the stories I hear about men saying, I recaptured my life. My wife and I get along now. We snatched our marriage from the jaws of divorce. Or it looks like I quit drugs and alcohol. Or I lost 100 pounds or whatever it is. The individual results of “success” I think you’re gonna have as many, as there are individual guys. So I think success for us, is knowing that we did the best we could to adhere to the mission and serve the thing that is greater than us. That’s the best I can answer on that one.
From… https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/podcast-1068-building-tribe-how-to-create-and-sustain-communities-of-men/
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