I despise little catch phrases and puns pawned off as profound wisdom. To me, it's cheap and easy to play with words to make something sound cute which ultimately has little – if any – substantial meaning or application in our lives. That being said, here's a little catch phrase pawned off as profound wisdom.

A fault is a crack in the ground; responsibility is the ability to respond.

What does that mean? Think of it this way: if all I do is find fault, then all I accomplish is finding what cannot be addressed. But if I consider responsibility as “the ability to respond”, then that enables me to do something about it. Unfortunately as a society, our focus has become passing blame around. “It's not my fault, it's his, hers, theirs, and yours! It's society's fault! It's the world's fault! It's God's fault!” We almost cannot go a whole twenty-four hours without looking for someone to blame for something.

I've known several engineers over the course of my years. One thing that bugs the hell out of me is their need to blame. Everything is the fault of someone, and progress cannot be made until someone accepts blame. “Your fault, your fault, your fault, nothing is beyond your control.” That's just irritating, and only because it is flatly and deliberately untrue.

I dated a woman who blamed her daughter for an accident that she was in. Her need for her daughter to take the blame for that accident was so intense that, as she showed me a picture of the wreck, she was almost pathological in her attempts at forcing me to accept her word that “you see? It was her fault.” But the daughter's car was nowhere near the roadway, and the car that hit her clearly went off the road, across a ditch, and straight into her driver's door. Regardless of what the police concluded, regardless of what the picture showed, regardless of what the witnesses said, “she manipulated them, it was her fault.” Abandonment and irresponsibility personified.

Here's the problem with finding fault: it takes away from the person being blamed the ability to do anything about the problem being presented. Like pointing to a large crack in the ground, nothing can be done.

Instead, what could be the result of shifting our focus to responsibility? What then could be our future? Now, instead of being powerless to change the course of my life, I have the ability to consider responses to the scenario – and, as such, learn how to overcome and to grow.

I was at a restaurant with my daughter and her mother. Kids will do what kids will do, she was climbing on the metal pipe divider for the waiting line leading up to the register. As she held onto the vertical supports for a sign mount on that bar, it fell backward and the horizontal bar hit her in the head. A resilient little girl, she just got off the pipe and put her hand on her head looking at me as though I were going to get mad at her. Her mom chided her, as apparently she had done before, and an employee flatly said, “that's your fault.” I took a different approach. After checking on her to make sure she wasn't injured, I told her, “whenever you're climbing on something, always test it to make sure it can support your weight – and then keep your weight toward the joints.” Instead of telling her whose fault it was, and that she could do nothing about the potential for injury, I taught her where her abilities lie and how to mitigate future problems. I taught her to take full advantage of her ability to respond – to take responsibility.

Responsibility is Humanity

Hannah Zoe is a smart little girl. A problem solver. The last thing she needs is to be told that problems cannot be solved, and blaming does just that. When you blame a child, you teach that child that there is nothing that can be done to solve this problem. Children are the most primal form of humanity, and as such they can see when something is out of balance with nature. This is why blaming a child often incurs negative, sometimes hostile, responses from them. Therefore, I do not tell her that problems cannot be solved, I tell her how to look for those solutions – and then teach her a principle of wisdom taught by Miyamoto Musashi: From one thing, know ten thousand.

Problem solvers see the ability and the opportunity to respond to a challenge or a problem – and human beings are by nature problem solvers. When I have a child, the child is not the problem. The inexperience is the problem. When I respond to that problem by teaching through patience, observation, adaptation, communication, and experience, then something so simple happens that it becomes profound: Children do what they see.

I teach my children through patience, observation, adaptation, communication, and experience, then my children grow up to have children of their own whom they will teach through patience, observation, adaptation, communication, and experience. Their children will grow up to have their own children, who will have their own, who will have their own, all of whom are taught through those principles the values of Honor, wisdom, Truth, knowledge, compassion, and decency. What is the end result of that? Tune in next week to see what follows.