100 Things Every Man Should Know About Character

Forty feet of rain between you and the cart corral. Trunk's loaded, the kid's buckled, and nobody in that lot will ever learn your name. It costs eleven seconds. That's the whole test, and you take some version of it about nine times a day.

Character isn't a personality you were issued at birth. It's a stack of small decisions you've made so often you stopped feeling them happen. What follows is a hundred of them. Some you already do. A few will irritate you, and those are usually the bill.

The table stakes

• 1. Be early enough that being on time isn't luck. Ten minutes covers a wreck on the interstate.
• 2. Return the cart.
• 3. Learn a name on the first pass. Ask again on the second. Never a third.
• 4. Hold the door without making it a statement.
• 5. Tip in cash when the food was bad and the server wasn't the reason.
• 6. Answer the phone when your mother calls.
• 7. Give back the borrowed truck cleaner than you got it, gas gauge included.
• 8. If you broke it, say so before anybody asks.
• 9. Don't be the loudest man in a quiet room.
• 10. Learn to stand still. Most men can't.

Your word

• 11. "I'll be there" is a contract.
• 12. Small promises are load-bearing.
• 13. Don't say maybe when you mean no.
• 14. Write down what you agreed to. Memory edits in your favor.
• 15. If you'll be late, text before the hour, not after.
• 16. Never volunteer another man's time.
• 17. Renegotiate out loud. A silent revision is just breaking your word in slow motion.
• 18. The man who's always double-booked is telling you where you rank.
• 19. Don't tell a kid "we'll see" when you mean no.
• 20. Keep the promise you made in a good mood on a day you're in a bad one.
• 21. Don't promise anything inside a funeral, a hangover or a sales pitch.
• 22. Say the hard thing at the start of the conversation, not the end.

Money

• 23. Pay the people you owe before you pay yourself.
• 24. Never borrow from a friend an amount that could cost you the friend.
• 25. Tell your wife about the purchase before the statement does.
• 26. Know the number that would end you, and stay nowhere near it.
• 27. Cash has no opinion. Debt has several, and it shares them at 3 a.m.
• 28. Don't let a man buy lunch three times before you buy his.
• 29. Give something away every month, automatically, whether or not you feel generous.
• 30. Don't measure yourself against the truck in the next driveway. You can't see the note on it.
• 31. Never quote a price you'll resent on day four.
• 32. Bring the receipt, not the story.
• 33. If money turns you into a different man, you don't have money. It has you.

Work

• 34. Do the unglamorous part first.
• 35. Call the customer before the customer calls you.
• 36. Weld the back of the bracket. Quality lives where nobody inspects.
• 37. Never take credit in a room the guy who earned it isn't standing in.
• 38. Take the blame in the room where it costs you something.
• 39. Sweep up. Rank isn't an excuse.
• 40. Answer the email you're dreading before you answer the easy ones.
• 41. Learn the job of whoever you depend on most.
• 42. Don't badmouth the last employer in the interview. Everybody in the room does that math.
• 43. Leave with two weeks' notice and no speech.
• 44. Teach somebody your job. Hoarding it's fear in a hard hat.
• 45. When you're on the clock, be on the clock.

Temper

Half of what men call character is just refusing to make one specific decision in one specific ninety seconds.

• 46. Sit down. Anger likes to stand.
• 47. Ask a question before you make a statement.
• 48. Drink water, eat something, then decide. A shocking amount of virtue is blood sugar.
• 49. Never send the second text.
• 50. Lower your voice at exactly the moment you want to raise it.
• 51. Don't correct a man in front of his crew.
• 52. Learn the two-second pause. It buys back years.
• 53. Don't punish silence with more silence.
• 54. Your kids are learning what your face does when a car cuts you off.
• 55. What you write at 11 p.m. gets sent at 7 a.m. or never.
• 56. Losing your temper is a decision, which means you can stop making it.
• 57. If you're right and cruel, you're wrong.

Repair

• 58. Apologize with a period, not a comma. "I'm sorry I did it." Stop there.
• 59. Name the thing you did. A vague apology is a second offense.
• 60. Never apologize just to end the conversation.
• 61. Changed behavior costs more than "sorry," and it's the only one anybody grades.
• 62. Ask what repair looks like to them, then do that instead of what's convenient for you.
• 63. Forgive faster than you want to and slower than they demand.
• 64. You can forgive a man and still lock the door.
• 65. Don't bring up 2019.
• 66. Confess before you're caught. The gap between those two is your whole reputation.
• 67. Some debts can't be paid back, only forward.

Home

• 68. Your wife should never learn something about your life from a third party.
• 69. Make her laugh on a Tuesday for no reason.
• 70. Phone face down at dinner. Every night, not most.
• 71. Speak well of her in the rooms she isn't in.
• 72. Never make your child the messenger between adults.
• 73. How you treat her when she's slow in the hardware store is who you actually are.
• 74. If the argument happened in front of the kids, the apology happens there too.
• 75. Come home as the same man you're at work. One of those two is a costume, and you get to pick which.
• 76. Don't make your children audition for your attention.
• 77. Guard the front door of your marriage. No private jokes with somebody else's wife.
• 78. Hug your teenage son. He's not too old. You're just uncomfortable.

Other men

• 79. Praise specifically. "Good job" is noise. "You didn't quit at hour nine" lands.
• 80. Say it to his face or don't say it.
• 81. Go to the funeral. That's the entire rule.
• 82. Help somebody move.
• 83. Loan the tool. Expect the ding.
• 84. Don't compete with your friend's good news.
• 85. Learn to sit with a grieving man without flinching or filling the silence.
• 86. Drive the drunk guy home and never tell the story at a party.
• 87. Stop keeping score with people you love.
• 88. Ask one more question than you feel like asking.

Alone

• 89. What you do at 11 p.m. alone sets the ceiling on what you can do at 11 a.m. in front of people.
• 90. Keep your word to yourself. Same muscle, smaller weight.
• 91. Make the bed. Four minutes, one promise kept before coffee.
• 92. Train something. A man who can't carry his own weight up a hill has quietly delegated that to somebody else.
• 93. Get comfortable being bored. Your phone farms that weakness for a living.
• 94. If you own a firearm, own the responsibility with it. Train on the dull weeks, lock it away from kids, know the law in your state, and never outsource your judgment to somebody else's opinion about your rights.
• 95. Don't drink to fix a feeling.
• 96. Read something written before you were born.
• 97. Keep a short list of things you won't do for money, and say it out loud once a year.
• 98. Give one hour a week to something that has nothing in it for you.
• 99. Do one good thing a week that nobody will ever find out about.
• 100. Decide today what you'd do if it cost you the job, so you're not deciding it at 4:45 on a Friday with a mortgage in your head.

Pick three. Not thirty. Write them on masking tape inside the lid of your toolbox and live with them until Thanksgiving. Men who actually change are boring about it, and the parking lot in the rain will still be there tomorrow.