From Setting the Bar to Raising Men
The Ten Rules for Every Young Man, a Mentor Guide, a Sharpened Focus.
Hello Bar-setters,
The Setting the Bar newsletter has always been about clarifying the principles of thriving and reclaiming the standards that make life meaningful. I focused that lens on schools, raising children, and youth development, broadly.
But as I look ahead, I feel the need to sharpen this work further. To move from broad principles into more targeted, practical guidance—especially for raising boys into men who can shoulder responsibility and live with purpose.
👉 Download the 10 Rules for Every Young Man (PDF)
For much of my career, my greatest challenge came with incoming freshman boys. As a Strength and Conditioning Coordinator, I coached athletes of all kinds, but the ninth-grade boys were always “the biggest lift.” They arrived full of energy but little direction. Helping them grow into disciplined young men became the most meaningful transformation I witnessed year after year.
That experience led me to launch a men’s group—an invitation-only circle of young men I believed could become strong leaders. Each meeting began with a three-minute cold plunge, followed by discussions of major ideas drawn from articles or podcasts I’d assigned. We committed to a higher standard and explored what it meant to be “Arete Men” in the modern world. Upon graduation, I took them on a Rite of Passage trip. To this day I believe it was the most significant work I’ve ever done.
Raising Men is the continuation of that mission. It’s about helping to clarify a path to manhood that inspires and excites. It’s about equipping fathers, coaches, and mentors with clearer support for their roles. And it’s about giving boys what every successful society has always given them: a clear, demanding, and honorable standard to rise to with clear expectations for everything from their fitness to the responsibilities they must take on.
Boys need this. Without a clear path and firm standards, we see arrested development on a mass scale. Rob Henderson makes the point powerfully in his essay on Young Male Syndrome:
“If we don’t want to see young men fall prey to the worst expressions of the young male syndrome, we must be intentional in guiding the avenues through which they seek status.
If parents, caregivers, educators, peers, cultural trailblazers, potential romantic partners and other influential members of society overlook the important roles they play, then males will lack the guidance they need to opt into productive paths to prestige and will either take the path of dominance or drop out of society by playing virtual status games that have no real world benefit or contribution…
In contemporary western societies, parents, teachers, coaches, local community leaders, and other high-status figures used to raise boys to become men, imparting lessons about personal responsibility, hard work, relationships, and obligations. Today, in the absence of such guidance, many young boys are being raised by viral TikTok influencers peddling diluted and ungrounded conceptions of masculinity.
In a recent essay, Richard Reeves and the great Robert Putnam captured this need as well:
“More than a century ago, reformers recognized that the most effective solution to the boy problem was to build civic institutions and spaces where men could help boys to navigate their way successfully to a mature, pro-social manhood. That is a lesson that needs to be relearned for our own times…
It takes a village to raise a child. But some of the villagers must be men.”
Though this work is aimed at equipping men to raise men, I know many women are reading too. You are vital to the work of raising men, and I’m grateful you’re here. I can’t tell you how many impressive men credit the mothers or grandmothers who stood in the gap for them—who saw the need and worked to fill it.
That’s the conviction behind Raising Men. Our boys don’t just need company—they need clarity, challenge, and conviction. They need to see an ideal worth striving toward and a path they can actually walk.
To mark this transition, I’ve created The 10 Rules for Every Young Man: A Mentor’s Guide.
👉 Download the 10 Rules for Every Young Man (PDF)
Included in the PDF, you will find:
A Mentor Letter
The Ten Rules for Every Young Man (and Man)
The Mentor Guide (for deepening and clarifying those rules)
The Raising Men Code
This is a practical resource you can use right away—with clear rules, gateway actions, and discussion prompts designed to help fathers, coaches, and mentors clarify an inspiring path while guiding young men to aspire and mature.
I hope you are excited by this resource and that you will share with anyone you think would enjoy!
Much more to come.
Carry the fire!
Shane