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Tag Line: Bringing generations together to help young people win in life with mindset, relationships, money, and practical skills.
The Pilanesberg Project is an action-oriented community of young people who are interested in working together to learn and teach practical skills and build character so that America’s young men and women can be more independent and live more productive and enjoyable lives. This is a lifestyle design approach to fix America’s skill and life achievement gap in our boys and young men, and in turn, help those who are raising and mentoring them to become better leaders.
One of my favorite authors, Simon Sinek, says that leaders need to “start with why” if they hope to inspire others to take action.
Here is my why: I’m tired of seeing the young people of my community go around with no hope because older generations didn’t take their responsibility to pass on skill sets seriously. I want to see sons and daughters improve their relationships with their parents and vice versa. I want to see young men develop the confidence they need to ask out the girl they like or to start a business. I want our girls to recognize just how much they’re worth without it being based on how many likes they receive on an Instagram post. I want them to be financially independent from their parents. I want them to develop a love of learning so that they can grow and create with their God-given talents. I want to see more young men and women raise their hand and answer the call of mentorship.
More than anything, I want to help empower America’s young people to build a life that gives them options so that they can live it on their own terms.
The Pilanesberg Project encompasses everything from the practical to the philosophical and everything in between. In my bi-weekly podcast, along with my articles and supplemental video content, I explore essential questions about how we can work together to be more effective parents and mentors to build up our young men, learn and teach practical skills, and help members of the audience win in all areas of life.
Why is This Work Needed?
The greatest failure of leadership in this country occurs at the individual level.
Parents and caregivers who fail to take charge of their own lives leave entire generations to flail aimlessly without any sense of purpose. We eventually see it in the workplace and in other social institutions, but the first place it rears its head is in the education system.
Too many adolescents — boys as well as girls — are arriving at schools and universities emotionally unavailable to learn and experience significant difficulty establishing quality relationships.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms are stepping in and playing the role that friends and family, work, and leisure have traditionally played. These problems are manifesting themselves into loneliness, underemployment, and sadly, even suicide. The last couple of generations of young people, particularly men, have been sinking inexorably into crisis when you examine the data.
According to a 2016 Pew Research Center report, for the first time in the modern era, men ages 18 to 34 are now more likely to still live in the home of their parent(s) than they are to live alone or with a spouse or partner in their own home.
Suicide rates among 15 to 24-year-olds are at their highest point since 2000 and show no sign of decreasing according to a 2017 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide rates for teen boys were up 14% a year between 2015 and 2017, the most recent year for which data is available. In less than two decades, from 2000 to 2017, the suicide rate for 15 to 19-year-olds increased. As an educator who works with adolescents, this unprecedented surge hits too close to home to sit back and do nothing.
Despite our current state of what economists call full employment, workforce participation rates among men in their prime earning years (ages 25 to 54) has been spiraling downward for the past half century. While there are myriad causes for this on the supply side, from increased reliance on disability programs, an increase in incarceration rates, to a decrease in the demand side with manufacturing jobs due to technological advancements and automation, the bottom line is that there is a “flight from work”, as author Nick Eberstadt calls it. More men than ever before are out of paid work and are not looking.
We are sailing in uncharted waters. Drugs of despair such as opioids and alcohol are tearing apart formerly strong communities. Boys are struggling academically because they are arriving at our schools and college campuses emotionally unavailable to learn with few of the traditional social support systems that previous generations could rely on.
In the absence of clearly-defined life purpose, many of our young men high-school-age and beyond are simply not learning the social-emotional and practical skills that they will need in order to live independently and lead productive and enjoyable lives.
These problems stem from a detachment from the things that are important and an overall unawareness of one’s purpose in life. They are a direct result of how we are raising our boys and the fact that they don’t know what it means to be a man because so many no longer know what that looks like.
Before we talk about solutions, we have to understand how we got here. We have all lamented how the generation that is currently coming to age seriously lacks technical skills and real-world knowledge. We aren’t wrong on these points; but, how did this happen?
We didn’t teach them these things.
Young guys stopped working on cars together after school because they no longer know how. Many of their own fathers didn’t know how because somewhere along the line we stopped teaching it. Parents are calling and emailing college professors to advocate for their children’s grades. There’s a good chance that many of our own parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents didn’t teach us, either. As a Marine, one of my favorite quotes is from former President Ronald Reagan, who said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” Couldn’t we substitute learning how to be a man for freedom in that quote?
Who is This For?
The Pilanesberg Project is a resource for anyone who seeks to be the father-figure or mentor that they needed in their own life when they were growing up, as well as for the young men who don’t have this person and have to learn life’s lessons on their own.
Do you have the heart of a teacher? Are you here because you don’t (or didn’t) have anyone like this in your life? This work is for you.
A parent’s job is unique in the sense that their job is to work themselves out of a job and to give their children a childhood that they don’t have to spend the rest of their life recovering from. Whether you’re here because you want to do the first part or because you need help figuring out the second, I will have something for you.
I am here as much for the young man who never met his real father and has watched mom’s boyfriends entering and exiting his life as I am for the one whose father advised the national council of Eagle Scouts. The grandfather who has found himself raising his own children’s children has a place here, as does the middle-age mother who wants to do more hands-on activities with her son. The new father who never learned many of these skills himself but wants better for his own children will benefit just as much as the one he’s teaching it to.
While my content is targeted toward helping adolescents and young men in their formative years, I recognize that this is a wide range. We’re here to talk about living your best life; this work across gender, age, race, religion, and socio-economic status. There is no reason that you shouldn’t teach your daughter how to properly replace a cracked flooring tile or deescalate a potentially violent situation. I tailor my content to the male experience because this is what I know and where I see the greatest need for this work.
As a full-time teacher myself, I can attest to the validity of the old adage that we reach the peak of understanding a concept when we are able teach it to someone else. I am positive that you will experience a surge of confidence as a result of learning new skills and brushing up on old ones.
What Motivated Me To Do This
Several months ago, I was at the grocery store and noticed a mother and her adult son who appeared to be in his mid-20s. He was walking behind her playing Mario Kart on his phone while she asked him what he wanted her to make for dinner. He didn’t even look up when he replied. Just for clarification, this young man did not appear to be developmentally disabled, rather he was a boy in a man’s body.
There was the high school sophomore with the look of disgust and despair on his face when he opened his lunch bag and declared to his class that his mother had not cut the crust off the sandwich that she packed for him.
What’s The Problem?
Why we should be positive: It has never been easier or cheaper to start a business. All the knowledge in the world is available for free within milliseconds to anyone with an internet connection. We have creature comforts that we couldn’t have imagined only 20 years ago. We can find hundreds of thousands of other members of our tribe online for the hobbies that we pursue.
“Tough times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men.” -Attribution