The Power of the Invitation
Being left out sucks. So ask people to join you.
MABA 2025 starts soon. Sign up here! MABA is Make America Burpee Again, the annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees every day in January. The theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together. Watch: The point is to end loneliness because you can’t be lonely if you’re doing burpees outside with your friends.
Also: you’re not going to do 100 burpees a day and not buy a t-shirt, are you?
The power of the invitation
They aren’t even addressed to me and still these envelopes make me nervous. For I know that they contain key information about my daughter’s future. I look at the upper left corner to see from whence they came. Places with “college” or “university” in the title. The more exclusive the name, the higher my heart rate spikes as I wait to see what’s inside.
My daughter tears them open. “Dear Ralph’s Daughter,” they start (paraphrasing), “we are pleased to …” and then I start breathing again.
Yes, we have waded through the college application process and are now neck deep in the acceptance process. And in those acceptance letters—really, they are invitation letters—I see the Power of the Invitation, a phenomenon that has fascinated me across the life of this newsletter.
Indeed, this newsletter owes its very life to the Power of the Invitation.
I started this newsletter four years ago to chronicle MABA — Make America Burpee Again, the annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day every day in January. It has become a home for my journalism work, too, but every January, it becomes mostly burpees most of the time.
To the best of my recollection, MABA was born when Corey “Slow Pitch” Rudd and I challenged each other in late December, 2000 to do 100 burpees a day in January, 2021. I told him I’d invite friends from our F3 location near St. Charles, Missouri, and that if six of them did it, I’d invite all of F3 St. Louis, and if 20 F3 St. Louis men agreed to do it, I’d invite F3 Nation.
I doubted any of that would happen.
I didn’t understand the Power of the Invitation … yet.
Fast forward to January, 2024, and 1,227 men on seven continents did 3 million burpees. Over the years, I can’t tell you how many men have thanked me for inviting them to do it. At first I thought that was odd, like, Um, you’re welcome for inviting you to be miserable every day for a month. Hey, want to go eat some glass?
But now I see their gratitude as something much different, as evidence of a larger problem we all deal with. We’re all lonely, and we’re all desperate for connections. So even if the invitation is to do something odd or difficult, the recipient happy to be thought of, to be wanted in something, to be seen as worthy of joining such an event.
I have wrestled to understand why that’s true. No, wait. Let me restate that. I know why that’s true, I just don’t like it.
The loneliness epidemic among men in America is staggering. There are so many gobsmacking statistics I’m not even sure which one to quote, but this is the one that bothers me the most: The number of men who say they have no close friends has increased fivefold since 1990.
My friend Jason “Cherry Limeade” Meinershagen sent me a paper about male loneliness that he wrote for a college class that I’m still thinking about five days after I read it.
“I came to my first F3 workouts for the Fitness, with the targeted focus of losing weight, improving my fitness level and becoming more physically active,” he wrote. “Within just a few short weeks, I began to see that these men I was meeting three times a week in the pre-dawn hours on hot summer days had something I deeply craved – connection and a sense of belonging.”
That phrase – a sense of belonging – requires at least two people. You have to feel like you belong, and there has to be someone, hopefully many someones, that you belong with.
And the bridge that makes that possible is the invitation.
As the dad of two teen-age girls, I see the power of this dynamic all the time, albeit in reverse. My daughters feel utter horror at the thought of leaving someone out of anything. Their tender hearts know how much that hurts. They haven’t accepted it as normal yet. They would, if they could, go to great lengths to make sure either a) the left-out person never knows they were left out or better yet b) invite everybody they possibly could so nobody gets left out.
No lie, I bought a minivan three years ago in large part because I wanted to be able to shuttle them and their friends all over the place, and our 2007 Pontiac Vibe (don’t be jealous) couldn’t fit enough of their friends.
This explains why getting ghosted during job hunting (or anything else) is so annoying. It sucks bad enough not to be wanted. You don’t have to give me the job — to invite me to come work for you — but at least have the common courtesy to tell me you’re not going to invite me. It’s hard to respect, and easy to resent, someone who doesn’t have the courage to tell me I don’t belong.
As much as I struggled in the adventure race I described last week, I still have fond memories of when my teammates first invited me to join them five years ago. Wait, YOU want ME to do this crazy thing with YOU? Seriously? Then hells, yeah, I AM IN!
Every year they re-up that invitation, even if I wonder if eventually they’re going to decide they’d rather have someone who can ride a mountain bike more than 50 feet without going ass over applecart.
Back to the acceptance letters. I like them even better when they have fat scholarships attached. They want her even more!
We are sifting through them, trying to make only the most important decision of my daughter’s life so far.
No pressure.
I almost wish we had fewer invitations!
It feels like an impossible decision. There so many unknowns. But at least we know this: Wherever she goes, she’ll be wanted, she’ll be welcomed, she’ll belong.
I want to end with two calls to action.
1. I invite you – I challenge you: this holiday season, after the holiday season, whenever: invite someone to do something. Do burpees. Get coffee. Go for a hike, whatever. The invitation matters far more than the thing you invite them to. Then keep doing that all year.
2. And I invite you to, of course, sign up for MABA. You belong with us.