The best leaders recognize their weaknesses–and struggle through them.

I am known as a pretty quick study on most issues I face in my professional career. But that ability to master the situation has hit a roadblock. It’s called physical therapy.

In my work I operate pretty much in the cognitive realm; I size up issues and help my clients work through them. As an executive coach I of course touch on the emotional domain because it is important to know how clients are feeling especially in their relations to others.

Physical therapy is another matter. While I have been through physical therapy a few times, I recently had a foot operation, and my current sessions have been not so much painful as disconcerting. I have been assigned some tasks that involve coordination in which I am woefully lacking. I know the motion that my kind therapist Jessica wants me to do, but I cannot reproduce the effort to satisfaction.

It reminds me of a drawing course I took in college. One day after class the professor pulled me aside and asked me point blank if I understood what was going in the class. I did not take his comment personally; in fact, I explained that sure I knew what I was supposed to do, but my hand could not reproduce the lines he asked us to draw. In my mind I could draw perfectly; in my hand I was pretty much a stick figure guy.

Knowing your limits is essential to self-growth. Leadership author and researcher Jim Collins wrote about this in an essay he contributed to Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits. When he was in his early 40s he decided that he wanted to become a better climber. So he hired a personal climbing coach, a young woman in her early 20s. She put Jim through a rigorous unlearning process that forced him to undo all of the habits he had put into his climbing technique since his teen years. It was an awkward and humbling process but Collins persisted and gained the proficiency he needed to become better. He has since scaled the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan in a single day to celebrate turning 50.

Recognition of limitations is the first step. As Collins illustrates, it is what you do next that matters. This is an important lesson in personal development. An executive coach may be able to point out things to do differently but unless you try them out, and commit to the change process, no amount of coaching in the world will work.

This is what I have learned with some of my failings at coordination. I am not a total klutz. I used to play tennis regularly and I still play plenty of golf, but when it comes to certain aspects of coordination I am deficient. That said, I am not giving up.

I know this perseverance is essential to the growth process. Very bright people in management sometimes run into obstacles with a major challenge; it is not something they can knock off as easily as they once might have aced a statistics exam or physics final. Very often they are facing human issues, ones not solvable on paper.

And at first they may struggle at their lack of coordination that is ability to connect with peers or direct reports. Good ones, those who end up leading their organizations, pretty soon learn to acknowledge their limitations. And when they do, they open up themselves to others. People want to work with a manager who knows what he can and cannot do.

Mastery of a task may be a straightforward path. Mastery in leadership is a lifetime pursuit, one that is both humbling and challenging as well as rewarding to the individual, and the team, when it works.

Now back to physical therapy. Argh.

Researchers offer strong medicine for those who are too scared to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, finding evidence that, in the long-term, we regret actions not taken far more than failed attempts.

So you have dreams of starting a business. You also have a long list of potential downsides of following that passion, including perhaps significant financial and personal costs and a lizard-brain terror of failure and rejection. Poverty, divorce, and shame are hardly small fears, so let’s be realistic, after you have your financial ducks in a row and sit down for a heart-to-heart with your spouse, what can you set against your remaining doubts to balance out your terror and actually make a move towards your entrepreneurial dream?

How about research? Each of us only gets one life’s worth of experiences to learn from, but luckily we don’t have to arrive at the end of our years in order to learn what we’re likely to regret. A professor at the Kellogg School of Management has rounded up the wisdom of others to determine which regrets haunt people the most and which failures end up bothering us less in the long run.

The research team polled nearly 400 Americans about their regrets and found some startling patterns, a couple of which are relevant to entrepreneurs and a few which are not. Romantic regret was the most frequently cited, which may be a healthy reminder around Valentine’s Day but isn’t exactly pertinent to your start-up dreams. Another broad pattern very much is, however. In the long-term, what you fail to do bothers you far more than what you tried but screwed up, it seems. Kellogg Insight reports:

Research by Victoria Medvec, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, had previously established a connection between time and regret: The more time that has passed since an event, the more likely people are to focus on what they failed to do, rather than what they actually did. “Lost opportunities linger in our memory longer,” [Neal J. Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management] puts it. That is because people can quickly rationalize their actual actions, even when they went wrong. But for a possible action that was never taken, “there are so many ways in which you can see different things you could have done,” he explains.

He illustrates the concept with a romantic example—asking someone for a date. In remembering an unsuccessful attempt, an unlucky suitor might think, “I asked this person out on a date, she shot me down, it’s done.” But if he never even tried, the suitor might ponder all sorts of scenarios: “What if I had asked her when I saw her in the hallway? What if I had phoned right after we first met? What if I had sent flowers?”

The lesson clearly extends beyond daters to entrepreneurs. The evidence suggests that eventually you’ll be far more troubled by not having given your entrepreneurial dreams a go than by your any imperfect efforts to start a business.

And if you’re looking for more big-picture thinking about what’s truly of value in life, be advised that meditations on regret are somewhat in vogue at the moment with big name media outlets from the New York Times to the UK Guardian running stories on what other people’s regrets have to teach us. Pondering people’s painful but unfixable errors may not be cheery, but if you have the stomach for it, reading about mistakes made by others could help you avoid similar regrets later down the line.

Wal-Mart is unveiling a simple icon that it says will help consumers make a snap decision about whether a food is healthy, without delving into the nitty-gritty of the nutrition label.

We all know that meetings can be dull and boring. A new study shows that they can also make you stupid.

An appeals court ruled on Monday that Alberto Contador, a three-time winner of the Tour de France, used a performance-enhancing drug when he won the race in 2010.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is replacing the entire staff of Miramonte Elementary School following the arrest of two teachers on lewd conduct charges last week, Superintendent John Deasy told parents at a meeting Monday night.

An Iowa woman has been charged with trying to extort Discovery Communications, the parent company of the TLC network, to either cancel the show or give her $10,000.

More than than 250 million photos are uploaded each day on Facebook, according to the social network’s media site.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says one of the toughest parts about being president is that his wife has been dragged into the “political realm.”

Obama was responding to a question about how he felt when Michelle Obama said she has been inaccurately portrayed as an “angry black woman.” While the president did not address that comment specifically, he says his wife is as good a first lady as anyone could imagine, and says he believes Americans have a positive impression of her.

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Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content “did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site,” but said it’s currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker.

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Some people meet with adversity and still manage to amaze. Allen Allensworth (1842-1914) was one of those people who started life with no advantages, and yet his accomplishments go on and on. He inspired then; he inspires now.
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Estimates are that NBC has spent as much as $25 million promoting “Smash,” a new series that the network hopes will be the hit it desperately needs.

Madonna earned praise early on for her half-time performance at the Super Bowl on Sunday night, but it was her guest star M.I.A. who may have stolen the headlines from her by making an obscene gesture during the show.

A statistical analyst said Ahmad Bradshaw’s 6-yard touchdown run may have been the most counterproductive score of all time.

There is much about the rich, earthy genre of dance from the African Diaspora that is worthy of intellectual exploration; it’s a connection between worlds. African dance is celestial; transcending beyond just artistic expression, it contains movements of spirit possession.
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Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income.

On Tuesday night’s “Glee,” Ricky Martin guest stars as “The Spanish Teacher,” and aside from shaking his bon-bon, Martin will also be making quite an impression on the New Directions.

In order to regain control over his glee club, Mr. Schue, played by Matthew Morrison, challenges the new sexy spanish teacher to an Español-off.

“I go to night school now because I need to know how to speak Spanish so I can teach Spanish,” Morrison dished to Access Hollywood. “He comes in and I bring him into the Glee Club and people like, really love him, he’s a great teacher and stuff, so my job is kind of on the line now because the kids really love him.”

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Risk-taking, rule-breaking ideas were as hard to find among the more than 50 Super Bowl commercials as good taste in a GoDaddy ad.

NBC has apologized for airing footage of MIA flipping off the cameras while delivering the line “I don’t give a shit” during Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show “The NFL hired the talent and produced the halftime show” NBC said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter “Our system was late…

Feel like you’re always scrambling to keep up with the latest technology? Stop. These are the only five things you need to worry about.

Technology can be an enabler—or an impediment. Installing a server in the backroom for e-mail might have made sense in 2002, but today many companies are moving to cloud e-mail. Those BlackBerry phones you handed out to every employee a few years ago made sense from a security standpoint, but now everyone keeps squawking about the app selection and tiny screen.

Just when you think you have a handle on a new innovation and agree to a major technology uprade, along comes a new, improved approach. Yet, over the past 15 years, I’ve learned a few important lessons about office technology that apply to just about every situation—and they have proved nearly impervious to trends.

1. Develop a standard desktop
I remember first hearing about the standard desktop when I was a corporate manager with a team of about 30 employees. In some ways, the concept reminds me of the office management dictum: It’s best to touch a document once and be done with it. A standard desktop means you have removed the clutter—every employee has the same basic apps for word processing and browsing the Web. The “touch it once” rule applies because your tech staff only has to deal with one set of apps and utilities.

2. Use good data to evaluate employees
Once again, a lesson from a bygone era that still stands today: Let data drive your employee decisions—and make sure it’s good data. As a former manager, I learned a ton about collecting data through the year. We used a time-reporting tool that gave us a wealth of insight into how employees spent their time. We used a performance review process that was not based on feelings or even experiences, but a measure of accomplishments. When I evaluated employees, I told them about how many projects they completed and reveled together in succeses, but also recounted any instances where project budgets slipped and tasks went undone. We scored accomplishments and behavior together, and came up with a mutual performance rating. One new tool to consider for this: GoWerk.

3. Choose the best software, not the least expensive
I learned this lesson the hard way. I was a penny-pincher, so I’d often approve software that provided just enough utility for a lower price. For example, my team of writers and designers wanted to use Adobe Photoshop but I insisted on having everyone use a freeware clone. Bad idea: the software crashed often, delaying projects. (As a side-note, that same freeware app eventually became a sound commercial product.)

4. Log every customer contact
During my tenure in management, I had a co-worker friend who was an advocate for a new software paradigm called customer relationship management or CRM. This was before Salesforce existed. He eventually rolled out a CRM package companywide as a way to record every customer interaction. Today, the concept exists in many forms, some of them as open-source offerings. But the idea remains the same: The more information you have about sales contacts, complaints, and even former customers the better. Interestingly, I find CRM to be somewhat overlooked at smaller companies. I know of one SMB that only records the basic address, phone, and e-mail for new customers and that’s it.

5. Break the tech rules
Another lesson I learned early on: Take risks with technology and break the rules sometimes. It’s safe to stick with your storage network in the back office, but a new cloud-based file-sync tool like Dropbox might free employees to work remotely or when they travel on business trips. At times, it’s wise to wait and see how a new trend plays out, but then again, small business owners are all about risk-taking. Go ahead and dump your current smartphones and move to Android. Try giving every employee a new iPad tablet. Take a leap of faith on the cloud. These are the kind of risks that could fuel new ideas or ways of working together with your team.