A few months ago I read Project Hail Mary and found myself thinking about observation and agency. Einstein didn’t “invent” spacetime dilation—he created the conditions to perceive it. Without the means to observe, you’re just touching walls in complete darkness. Trial and error, yes, but you never truly know the depth of what you’re sensing.

Saturday mornings I take my son to flag football. He’s been in martial arts for half his life—his coach loves his resilience. But something surfaced in team sports that doesn’t appear on the mat.

He was playing receiver. Pass got intercepted. He couldn’t hold back tears.

“I let my team down.”

I knew that wasn’t the moment to talk. Three days later, driving to martial arts, light atmosphere—we circled back. Individual sports versus group sports. How in a team, nobody wins alone, nobody loses alone.

He returned to “all the blame on me.”

So we built some containers for blame together.

Here’s the thing: blame has structure. John Nash formalized it—non-cooperative game theory. And Jung understood something fundamental about why cooperation is hard: the Ego, by design, orients toward “what’s better for me.” This isn’t a flaw to be corrected—it’s embedded in our psychology, in our biology, in the physics of any living system.

The goal isn’t eliminating self-interest. It’s keeping the system in equilibrium.

What matters is system balance. In teams, the “hero” is just an organizational single point of failure.

A team member who insists on absorbing all blame isn’t displaying leadership or accountability—they’re the lone wolf who looks impressive in autumn and starves at first winter.

In resilience engineering, we learned this lesson decades ago. The era of “my network core is this rack”—pointing at a massive chassis humming with authority—is over. Distributed, non-blocking architectures are the standard now. Every well-designed system accepts an uncomfortable truth: at some point, even the most engineered and reliable component will fail.

NASA had to rework the Hubble lens in space. The most scrutinized mirror in human history, built by the best optical engineers alive, and it launched flawed. The system survived not because the mirror was perfect, but because the system was designed to adapt.

Want a simpler example? You’re buying a second-hand GPU on eBay. Two options, same model. One has a history of casual gaming—eight hours a week, FPS games, stock settings. The other was part of a mining rig, running 24/7 overclocked for three years. Which one are you paying more for?

MTBF matters. Mean Time Between Failures isn’t just a spec sheet number—it’s the physics of wear. And when the stressed component finally gives out, if you relied only on it, you’re taking the bus home.

Shared load. Shared fate. Shared wins.

Darwin described the pattern over two hundred years ago. A thriving ecosystem isn’t a zoo where everyone lines up to see the lion or the gorilla. It’s the unremarkable distribution of load across species that makes it resilient, sustainable, productive.

The same applies to teams. The same applies to infrastructure. The same applies to championships.

Good offense gets you victories. Good defense gets you championships.

Defense isn’t one player. It’s coverage, rotation, communication, trust. It’s the understanding that when someone gets beat—and someone will get beat—the system absorbs it.

When someone says “this is all on me”—whether in triumph or defeat—I hear a system vulnerability declaring itself. Healthy organizations distribute accountability the way healthy architectures distribute load.

My son will learn this. Not because I told him, but because the game will teach him. The interception wasn’t his alone. The coverage scheme, the route timing, the throw placement, the defender’s read—it’s a system. Always was.

The hardest part isn’t accepting blame. It’s accepting the system is bigger than you—and that you need to play your role in it.

Ever seen a circus acrobat balance a pole vertically on their fingernails? They never close their eyes. Constant micro-adjustments, continuous awareness, intentional correction.

We all need to be aware of entropy. Systems don’t stay balanced on their own. Equilibrium requires work—conscious, distributed, never-ending work.

That’s not a burden. That’s the game.