A few years ago I ran into an old acquaintance that I hadn’t seen for awhile. Our short conversation confirmed just why I hadn’t seen him in awhile – and wouldn’t see him again soon if I could help it. I started off with, “Hey Phil. How’s it going?” His response was, “Oh, you know; same crap, different day.” His expletive-laced language was much spicier than that, but you get the picture. He then proceeded to proudly pile up the most recent crap in his life and invited me to wallow in it with him.

Our world does have an abundance of crap. There’s lots of injustice, inequality, and unfairness. The crap that hits the fan in life is often not evenly distributed. But we get to decide whether to stand in it or not. We decide if we want today to be crappy or happy. If we walk around with our “crap glasses” on, we’ll see lots of it. The more crap we look for, the more crap we see. The more crap we see, the more we look for. My friend, fellow performance improvement author/speaker, and psychologist, Peter Jensen calls this “opticalrectumitis,” which he loosely translates as “having a shi…(crappy) outlook on life.”