Men know it’s all their fault

Men are responsible for their behavior.  If a man is complete, the buck stops with him.  A man is true to his word.  A man follows through with his commitments.  But more than anything, a man completely owns his share of a problem.  In this way, a man is a leader.

If a situation does not come out correctly, a man does not point fingers at others.  He does not look for excuses.  He does not play what-if scenarios.  He looks at himself.  He looks at his behavior, his plan, his execution.  He finds fault where he could have done better.  Even if the fault is not directly his, a man owns his part in not helping others. 

Accepting all fault is the responsibility of ownership.  Men take full ownership of their lives - their successes, their failures, their efforts.  Men want to a load to bear.  It is rooted deep within a man's core that he is responsible for his actions.

While men want and crave this responsibility, and it's coded deep in their DNA, they must still be taught how embody the behavior.  No animal in nature is left by its parents right after birth.  All creatures need guidance on how best to hunt, survive, interact, and many other kinds of behavior.  These behaviors are learned through the guidance of adults who benefit from millennia of experience of their ancestors, passing down successful methods from generation to generation.  The methods are successful because the ancestors 1) survived and 2) bred.

Men pass this behavior down to other men.  Increasingly, this message is lost in today's boys and men.  Complete and total ownership of failure and responsibility is emotionally and physically arduous.  In a world of increasing comfort where pain is something to be avoided, the idea of intentionally embracing the pain of failure and fault is no longer taught in the same way, if at all.  Accepting the short term discomfort of full ownership of a problem leads to the long term soul-enhancing meaning that men desperately crave as a part of who they are.