Category: Basic Training

The Male Friendship Creed

I kicked off this year in my last post about why we need common language for the pursuit of better male friendships. In this next post, I will provide a core statement about the aspects of friendships that build men up and encourage them, rather than break us down and beat us up. It describes high-quality friends who call us up to a higher standard of manhood and hold us accountable. It describes male friends who provide support when it’s needed most and celebrate our successes. This creed describes the type of men who help each other become better men.  While my GodBuddies concept has a faith-based foundation, I believe every man needs deeper, more authentic friendships, even if religion or spirituality isn’t your thing. My hope is that having a Male Friendship Creed will cast a vision that inspires you to develop better friendships. In subsequent posts, I’ll provide

Read More »

A New Year, a New Language for Male Friendship

To kick off my eighth full year of writing this blog, I want to sharpen the focus of this quest to build better friendships by developing some common language you can use. I’ll start by developing a creed or core statement about my beliefs about how we help each other become better men. I’ll follow that with a broader declaration or manifesto to inspire the much-needed challenge to the norms about male friendships.  Future posts will include the action items to build an inner circle of friends and a guided journey to strengthen those bonds. I will also create an easy-to-remember shared brotherhood covenant to help your commitment to build men who help each other become better men. Always Begin with the ‘Why’ American author and inspirational speaker, Simon Sinek, believes that great leaders and organizations inspire action by communicating clearly. They state their purpose (the ‘Why’) before their methods

Read More »

The (Friendship) Problem with Ai 

Depending on your occupation (teachers either like it or hate it), demographic (OK, Boomer!), or financial strategy (Nvidia investors), Artificial Intelligence (Ai or AI) can be scary or exciting. I’m on the fence about whether Ai is good or bad (probably both) and use it occasionally for idea-generation and images for this blog, so I was intrigued when I recently read that Time Magazine named Ai the ‘Person of the Year.’  Ai as a ‘person.’ WHAT??? Digging deeper (as we should for anything we see in media these days), Time actually named the “Architects of AI” as ‘Person of the Year’ and has used two images for the cover of the magazine (Yes, it’s still in print!). One shows current tech leaders, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and a few others, sitting on the steel beam resembling the iconic

Read More »