If you’re a man, you need to earn that man card.
Before earning that card, you must display proficiency in these 12 areas. These are bare-minimum skills that every dude should have in their metaphorical tool belt.
1. Keeping It Clean
A man’s home reflects his state of being. A house in chaos is a man in chaos, and chaos is nowhere for a man to be.
2. Confronting Your Problems
What is more macho than confrontation? One thing: civil, composed confrontation. Addressing problems head-on, especially when they involve someone else, separates manly men from passive-aggressive boys.
3. Personal Finance
There isn’t anything manly about being broke. Too many men think a higher salary is the only way to level up in life, but a dollar saved truly is a dollar earned. Keeping your finances in check is Manhood 101.
4. Using All the Fingers
Specifically, figure out how to carry all 14 grocery bags from the car to the house in one trip. Ten fingers, 14 sacks, and one trip. That’s man math.
5. Cleaning Thyself
From the West Virginian coal miner to Shrek, some portrayals of the macho man suggest that dirt and grime are part and parcel of manhood. However, there is a time and a place for dirt. A man who doesn’t know how to clean himself or chooses not to “clean up well” is no man at all. He’s merely a brute.
6. Swimming
You never know when you might need to forge a river or rescue an infant from a pool. If you can’t swim, you’re not prepared. If you’re not prepared, you’re not a man.
7. Fixing a Leak
For that matter, a guy should know how to use a caulking gun, a screwdriver, a Shop-Vac, a jigsaw, and a nail gun. Knowing basic home repair skills will save you money, add some much-needed callouses to your palms, and beef up your manhood resume.
8. Learning Stuff
Take it from Plato, Stephen Hawking, or the Dos Equis guy. Knowing things is an essential feature of a fully-formed man. That’s why one who is unwilling to learn can never reach the pinnacle of manhood.
Whether it’s a line out of Othello or how to change a tire, a real man never fears a lesson.
9. Taking Your Lumps
Handling disappointment, rejection, and adversity with emotional intelligence is easier said than done. But that’s why those who take their lumps on the chin and keep plugging can call themselves a man.
10. Embracing the Golden Rule
You have to give respect to get respect. Men know this, so they embrace the Golden Rule and Platinum Rule as a personal credo.
11. Saying No
Whether it’s a boss asking you to do chores outside your job description or a partner pressuring you to abandon your values and let the kid eat Reese’s Pieces at 10 p.m., manly men just say no. Even if Nancy Reagan said it first, saying no is an act every man should be comfortable with.
12. Surviving Alone in the Modern World
You don’t have to audition for Alone to be a man. Many men must survive on their own in the modern world. That means managing an expense spreadsheet, knowing the way around a stove, doing the laundry, and wielding a vacuum cleaner.
A real man can stand on his own to-do list, fully checked off.
Source: Reddit.
