I coach leaders for a living. Almost all of them have spent more time in school than me. As a proud college dropout I took my education into my own hands decades ago. I took ownership of the information that enters my mind and the values that I assign to it. This has made me a bit of a weirdo; a necessity when people come to you for a new perspective.

Does the phrase The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment perfectly sum up the current election to you? Does it point to the real path forward when it comes to climate change? How about the way to figure out what to do with your career or your health? If the fertile ground of bewilderment does not point towards a solution, perhaps it should. This is the argument that one of my favorite thinkers on the planet puts forth in his forthcoming book and in the lecture that gives us a preview below.

Do you consider yourself to be creative? Do you have a strong critical mind? What connection do you think there is between these two? Which has your education helped develop? Which does the world need you to have more of right now?

Once you have identified and tracked the cues that send you into autopilot you can now choose to follow that cue with a healthier, more supportive behavior.

Do you have a bad habit…or 12? Maybe you have or have had an addiction? Have you ever tried to pick up a new, more healthy habit? Do you know how to change bad habits? Or how to install good habits? That’s right, I said install, like installing a program in a computer. Conventional wisdom tells us that habits are mysterious and control over habits is an elusive and mysterious process. A new book by Charles Duhigg tells us otherwise.

Charles Eisenstein has written an important book for our time: Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Community in an age of Transition. In the hopes of inspiring potential readers and informing the rest, I would like to offer a brief summary and commentary on four key ideas contained in his work. I highly recommend you investigate further. Whether or not one agrees with Eisenstein’s ideas is second to the fact that these are the conversations we need to be having.

Put simply, gumption is your initiative, your energy to move forward and your ability to do so with commonsense and shrewdness. Gumption is the drive that pushes you to start a project and also the focus, clarity and motivation that carries you through until you finish it.

When said book happens to be about a Zen master hedonist with an incredibly checkered past who was has spent time in prison, modeling on a runway, made millions manufacturing LSD for people such as the Grateful Dead, is deeply versed in integral theory, friends with Ken Wilber, an abuse survivor, yogi, true iconoclast and by all accounts a fearless seeker who consistently refused to accept setbacks as a limiting factor along his journey; I’m enthralled.

Starcrossed is exceptional. Recently published by Harper Teen it is the first book in a trilogy. It takes the Illiad, the epic Greek poem with Helen of Troy, the Trojan War, gods, demigods, love and destruction, and places it in a high school in modern day Nantucket. Josie described it to me as Romeo and Juliet meets the Iliad. There might be a touch of Twilight and Harry Potter in there as well.

Correlation and Causation seem to me to be two of the most commonly confused terms in the modern world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the reporting and interpretation of genetic research.