Leadership is a skill that a person must learn and master during their lifetime rather than an attribute of their character with which they are born. As a skill, it is like learning to play the piano. If it were an attribute, it would be like having blue eyes or a square jaw.

Because it is a skill, a person must commit to learning to lead in the same way that they would learn to play the piano. The degree to which they will ultimately master it will depend both upon their natural ability and their willingness to practice. Because we are all born with some leadership ability, even a man with very little natural skill can still be an effective leader if he is willing to practice hard. But a man who will not practice at all will never master the skill even if he is born with the heart of a lion. The decision to become an effective leader is volitional. No one else can make it for you.

F3 was born on January 1, 2011. Its initial purpose was to give men a way to improve their lives by exercising together as part of a workout community. While that worked, we quickly realized that the members of F3 needed more than just physical fitness to improve their lives. They also needed help in mastering their leadership skills. Their families, their workplaces and their neighborhoods were all communities that needed leadership just as much as the F3 workout community did. From this need, F3’s mission of the invigoration of male community leadership evolved.

To help the men of F3 learn and master leadership we began to develop a body of practices that we drew from the timeless principles of leadership and their effective application in our workout community. Initially, these leadership practices were transmitted between us verbally, like a set of oral traditions passed around a campfire.

As F3 grew, and the limits of this rudimentary method became increasingly clear to us, we began cataloguing our practices more deliberately through blogs and social media. While this was an improvement over the verbal transmission method, its effectiveness was limited by the lack of cohesion among the various principles and practices themselves, which was exacerbated by the geographical separation of our growing organization. We began searching for a way to provide a common set of principles that were internally integrated and were as useful to our group in Seattle as they were to the men in Savannah.

From this search, the QSource was born. It is the integrated expression of F3’s leadership philosophy. It is our leadership manual. As such, it is designed to be used by F3 members to improve their leadership skills for the benefit of their families, workplaces and neighborhoods. However, because it is based on timeless principles, it is also useful for any group that wants to improve the leadership skills of its members.