No one’s perfect.

Some people wear their imperfections on their sleeve. Some people show them off when they open their mouths to speak. And some carry their imperfections around on the inside, hidden from the world.

But make no mistake: whatever you see, however perfect someone looks, you can trust—sure as God put little green apples on this earth—that everyone’s got something.

Sometimes, all you need to do to fix a situation is turn the question on its head.

Do you know your limits? Do you respect them?

A quick update on my workout experiment: during a jump move the other day, I pulled my quad. Nothing too bad, but rather than finish the last 15 minutes of my workout, I immediately went to the cool down and then scheduled a massage, which seems to have done the trick.

I was tempted there for a moment to push through the pain, but for what? I already know I can’t achieve physical perfection—it’s not in my DNA. I’m a writer, not a fighter.

It’s nice knowing my limits. It keeps things like perfection and photoshop in perspective.

Welcome back, Michael Plahn! For those of you who don’t know, Michael runs Life Skills Authorities, a group that helps individuals with addiction treatment. Michael also runs a program called Project Rejection, with I, as co-creator of the Fail Spectacularly! Party, find freaking awesome. Here’s the scoop on Project Rejection:

In the past, I would rather be tortured by a deranged sociopath than rejected by an attractive woman in public. Rejection was more than I could handle. At all costs I would avoid putting myself in a situation where I was vulnerable. I avoided conversations, even people or places, where rejection was possible. The fear of those feelings was debilitating so I created a safety bubble for myself.

Looking back, I actually cannot even remember being outright rejected. I went to such lengths to avoid rejection that I didn’t approach certain women, or take necessary risks to excel in relationships. That bubble of safety was nothing more than a liability against my evolution as a social being.

I don’t know where this paralyzing fear came from, but know precisely when it left. I stumbled upon the secret dating back thousands of years. The secret to overcoming my fear of rejection was to actually be rejected. Repeatedly! Yes, repeated rejection solved my fear of rejection.

Now I help others overcome fear of rejection through a hands-on workshop aptly named: Project Rejection.

Want to learn how to overcome your fears in as little as two weeks? Contact me at http://lifeskillsauthorities.com/ for further information.

Since our thoughts are Not Fit To Print, my friend and colleague Carol Roth and I did this little video on our take of Seth’s big announcement, including, why did it take him 12 frickin bestselling books to figure this out and a big thanks in advance for thinning the herd…

Long story short: I decided to get back into shape and my daughters asked me if that meant I was going to get a 6-pack.

Hmm, I thought. Never had one of those. Why not?

Enter P90X. Actually, enter my willingness to buy things off TV. (You didn’t know that about me, did you?) Then enter P90X.

I’m on day 8 of the 90 day workout today.

For the record: This workout is tough. My left calf is still struggling to release lactic acid from 2 days ago. My arms are tight. And… I’m actually feeling pretty good, to tell the truth. I managed to get my butt out of bed early every day last week, pop in the TV, block out the awareness of how ridiculous I must look marching in place in front of the TV, and grind out the workout. My goal was to get through the workouts, and I did—often with light weights and low reps.

Results have come surprisingly quickly. Today, I calculated I did over 60 pull ups during the course of the workout. And the stomach routine? Whereas I could barely do 10 reps of the 11 exercises on Day 1, today I knocked out 18 reps on each. Then I puked. Or at least I thought about puking. I definitely grunted a lot and rolled on the floor for a minute like a wounded beast.

And it dawned on me, by which I mean a friend called my attention to this fact: I run a blog called Fail Spectacularly! Failure isn’t just a work thing, it’s a friendship thing, family thing, spiritual thing, and—of course—a physical thing! So why not share my journey with you? You know: no place to hide. Either I get the six pack or fail, spectacularly, trying.

You’re going to love this.

Here’s a photo of me on day 7:

I wonder what kind of shape I’ll be in 82 days from now?

Let’s find out.

Together.

Stay tuned.

“Learning politics” is like learning chess: understanding the rules of the game accounts for about 1/1000% of mastery.

If that.

If you truly want to understand politics, you need to be able to shift your entire perspective of the world around you. You need to cultivate a deeper appreciation for what drives people. And you need to be willing to answer tough questions of yourself that defy easy, black-and-white answers.

All of which takes time, and the ability to go beyond a by-the-book appreciation for what’s happening.

A coachee of mine recently wanted to put “learn politics” on his development plan as an action item. That didn’t fly with me. What we ended up doing, though, was putting the following on his development plan:

• Meet regularly, but informally, with my boss and key client contact until the relationships are deep enough that it becomes uncomfortable to continue to have these meetings on my development plan

The idea behind this is that eventually, these relationships will develop to the point where it will begin to feel disingenuous to have these meetings on a development plan—he’ll want to have those meetings because it’s the right thing to do… not because he’s “supposed to.”

This may not get him the intellectual understanding of politics he wants, but that he can learn later. The intellectual part he can learn it quickly. It’s the relationships, and the resulting shift of perspective that inevitably happens when one surround him or herself with new and different people, that’s most important. And since those relationships take awhile to form, that’s where we need to start.

A few months from now—or maybe a few years from now—once he has an adequate foundation for the discussion, we’ll circle back to start talking “politics.”

Not everything in life is clean. On the contrary, life is pretty darn messy. Messiness is a given.

Your job is to do your job while also dealing with the mess.

The mess could be a noisy cubemate, a bad boss, an impossible deadline, conflicting priorities, or an out-of-whack personal life. The mess could be unclear directions, a desire to be someplace else, or a presentation scheduled for the day after your best friend’s wedding.

It could be the wrong outfit on a day when you really need to be dressed perfectly.

You get the point.

If we accept that life is a story, and that we are all protagonists in our own stories, then we also need to accept that every story has conflict… also known as, the mess.

You can’t on the one hand complain that your life is boring, that you’re a cog in the machine, and on the other complain when life’s messiness throws you out of your routine and shakes up your story. That’s called Not Knowing What You Want in Life.

Mess is inevitable. It’s part of what makes your life story interesting.

Don’t complain. Nobody likes a whiny protagonist.

You cannot calculate the ROI of culture, using modern technologies and knowledge, any more than you can calculate the value of trust or the health benefits of love.

If you are responsible for stewarding culture at your organization, and you are pressed to deliver an ROI for your efforts, memorize the following passage. You’ll find it handy:

“You want an ROI on trust? Learning orientation? Loyalty? I can’t do that. Nobody can do that. When people try, the numbers are off the charts. But immeasurable does not mean unimportant. We all know that, too.

Now, if you’re telling me that you are questioning my project’s ability to deliver an improved culture, that’s one thing, and I want to know that.

But if you’re saying you won’t invest in any culture-enhancing activities without an ROI tied to the effort, then we have a bigger issue we need to talk about.”

Hey, I never said it was going to be an easy conversation!

Years ago, I worked at a company where we had a quote board. It was a whole section of the wall in our office wing, and it was covered in completely conversational snippets things like:

‘There’s nothing at that URL.’
‘That’s because you typed lickmyballs.com. Try lickmynuts.com.’

That line is from the actual board, and on a scale of “mildly inappropriate” to “OMFG this conversation is not actually happening in a work setting,” this would have placed somewhere in the middle.

When our General Counsel saw the wall, he thought maybe it should come down. Then, in a display of courage and big picture thinking that I still appreciate to this day, he thought about it.

Ultimately, he decided that the board wasn’t so much a unique risk factor as it was evidence of our daily lives, and he let it slide.

He was uneasy about it, but he figured his job was to mitigate risk, and he trusted himself enough not to feel compelled to try to eliminate all risk.

In the end, he concluded that the considerable pros of the board outweighed the considerable cons.

Now, I don’t imagine corporate cultures today are quite as free form as our dot-com was, but I do hope his way of thinking still exists in those places where lines are being drawn.

It takes a good amount of courage to recognize that not every risk is bad.

How much of that spirit is alive at your organization?

How much of it is alive within you?