Do you have a third place that’s JUST yours? It’s powerful!

You’ve got a place you call home and a place you call work—but do you have a third place that’s just yours? My third place is pretty obvious. It’s the gym. It has been the gym for basically my entire life. I was 11 when I watched Rocky, and something about seeing Rocky train completely blew my little mind. I wanted muscles, I wanted to be strong, and I wanted to feel like that dude. So when I was 12, and my mom asked what I wanted for Christmas, I didn’t ask for a bike, a video game, or some other toy. I asked for a gym membership.

And from that point on, I was hooked. Every day after school, my mom would drive me to the gym, drop me off, and then come back an hour and a half or two hours later to pick me up. I freaking loved it. If they had let me sleep there, I probably would have. The gym wasn’t just someplace I went to exercise. It became someplace I felt comfortable. It was familiar. I knew the people. I knew the sounds. I knew the smells—which, admittedly, weren’t always awesome. It felt like my place.

All these years later, it still does. I’ve trained in different gyms, lived in different places, built businesses, gotten married, gotten older, and gone through pretty much every phase of life imaginable. But the gym has always been there. It’s been one of the few constants in my life, and I recently realized there’s a name for what the gym has been to me all these years: my “third place.”

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg popularized the term in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. The concept is incredibly simple. Your first place is home, your second place is work, and your third place is somewhere else you regularly go where you can relax, interact with other people, and feel like you belong. Traditionally, these places might have been coffee shops, pubs, barbershops, churches, parks, community centers, or neighborhood hangouts. Today, your third place could be a gym, golf course, running club, hiking trail, volunteer organization, martial arts studio, or pretty much anywhere you regularly show up and connect with other people.

What makes a third place powerful is that you don’t necessarily need to have deep conversations every time you go there. You don’t even need to be friends with everybody. There’s something incredibly valuable about simply being a regular. The guy behind the counter knows your name. Somebody asks how your weekend was. You see the same dude at the gym every Tuesday morning. You joke with the barista. You nod at the same people on the trail. These interactions might seem insignificant, but collectively they create something incredibly important: connection.

And I think guys especially underestimate how much we need that. A lot of men get older, and their worlds gradually get smaller without them even realizing it. You’ve got your family, your job, and your responsibilities. Maybe you’ve got a couple of buddies you text occasionally, but everybody is busy. Nobody necessarily decides, “I’m going to stop having a social life.” It just happens. Work gets demanding, kids need you, people move, and friendships fade. Before you know it, your entire existence can basically become home, work, home, work, home, work.

This is where having a third place becomes incredibly powerful. It gets you out into the world. It exposes you to people who aren’t your coworkers or family members. It creates opportunities for spontaneous interaction, which is something I think we’re losing because so much of our lives now happens through screens. You can order your groceries without talking to anybody. You can work from home without seeing anybody. You can entertain yourself endlessly without leaving the couch. Technology has made life unbelievably convenient, but convenience isn’t always the same thing as connection.

Researchers studying adult development have repeatedly found that social connection matters tremendously to our long-term well-being. Researchers associated with the Harvard Study of Adult Development have even used the term “social fitness” to describe the idea that relationships require ongoing attention and maintenance, just like our physical fitness does. I love that concept because you wouldn’t expect to get physically fit by working out once every six months. Relationships aren’t really that different. Connection requires repetition. You have to show up.

A third place gives you a natural way to do exactly that without making it feel like work. You don’t need to schedule a formal friendship appointment for Thursday at 3:30. You just go someplace you enjoy going anyway. You become familiar with people, and they become familiar with you. Over time, conversations happen. Relationships develop, you hear different perspectives, you laugh and learn things, and you start feeling like you’re part of something instead of simply moving from one obligation to the next.

Another thing I love about third places is that they can be great equalizers. At the gym, nobody really cares about your job title. The weights don’t give a damn how much money you make. The treadmill isn’t impressed by your house or your car. You’re simply another dude trying to get through a workout. The same thing can happen at a barbershop, coffee shop, church, golf course, or volunteer organization. You meet people you probably never would have encountered professionally or socially, and you interact on neutral ground.

Third places can also become part of your identity in a really healthy way. I’m a husband, an entrepreneur, a business owner, Alpha, and Pete & Pedro. But I’m also simply a dude who loves going to the gym. That part of me existed long before any of the other stuff. Having someplace that connects you to an identity outside of your career and responsibilities can be incredibly grounding, especially when life gets stressful or things change.

And now that I think about it, I probably have another third place: Starbucks. If you know me, you know I freaking love coffee, and I’m at Starbucks pretty much every day. But it isn’t only about the coffee. I talk to people, I know people there, and I’ve had conversations and made connections there. Hell, I even discovered somebody at Starbucks who eventually came to work with us at Pete & Pedro. Think about that: a random place I regularly went for coffee actually ended up affecting my business and my life because I was out in the world interacting with people.

Your third place doesn’t need to be my third place. Maybe you hate gyms and think Starbucks coffee tastes like burnt dirt. That’s cool. Your place could be a church, a cigar lounge, a climbing gym, a pickleball court, a motorcycle group, a woodworking shop, a running club, a dog park, a volunteer organization, or the same local diner where you grab breakfast every Saturday morning. The specific location matters far less than enjoying being there and showing up.

So here’s what I want you to think about: what’s your third place? Where do you go that isn’t home and isn’t work, where people recognize you, where you interact with other human beings, and where you feel like you belong? And if you don’t have one right now, maybe it’s time to find one. Don’t wait until you’re lonely or isolated to start building community. Find someplace you genuinely enjoy, put the phone away for a minute, look people in the eye, start saying hello, and keep showing up. Because one of the healthiest things you can build as you get older might not be another accomplishment, a bigger bank account, or even bigger biceps. It might simply be a place where somebody notices when you walk through the door.