“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” — Marcus Aurelius
One of the most draining cycles men get caught in is spending enormous energy describing the man they want to be instead of becoming him. I’ve lived in that cycle. I know what it costs. You argue about masculinity. You debate what leadership looks like. You consume the content, listen to the podcasts, read the books. And somewhere in all of that, you get very comfortable describing the gap without doing anything to close it.
Aurelius doesn’t give you room for that. The man you’re after being isn’t found in the argument. He’s found in the moment you act.
That landed harder than usual this week.
My daughter left her curling iron powered on this morning. Earlier in the week, she’d left the gas running on the cooktop. Two instances. A pattern. Either one, in the wrong moment, could have caused real harm to our family.
I had a choice. I could do what a lot of fathers do: punish her, load the moment with guilt, make sure the weight of it sticks. Or I could close the gap between the father I say I want to be and the one I actually am in that moment.
She didn’t set out to leave that curling iron on. She was rushing. She said so herself. But I told her: acknowledgment isn’t accountability.
“I’m sorry, I’ll do better”, doesn’t close the gap. It defers it.
So I asked her one question. “What would you like to do to get back in honor?”
She thought about it. Then she said, “What if I muck out the running shed? The one with the cow manure? And I’ll take the shavings from the chicken coop and spread them in there to absorb the water.”
And so my daughter found her way back to accountability. Not because I told her what the consequence would be, but because I gave her the space to figure out how to restore honor for herself. She chose something that would cost her something. Something tangible. That’s the gap closing in real time.
Men, the man you’re after being isn’t waiting somewhere on the other side of a long argument about what good leadership looks like. He shows up in the moments nobody else is watching. A conversation with a daughter at 7 in the morning. A hard call at work. A decision that doesn’t get a standing ovation. You either close the gap in that moment or you widen it.
For me right now, that gap lives in this newsletter. Ten issues in. Every single one of those issues has distance between where I am and where I want to be. The question is the same every morning: am I describing the man or am I being him?
This week’s lesson: Stop arguing about the man. Be him.
