Feel free to ask ques­tions, chal­lenge assump­tions, and change your mind. Being con­sid­er­ate of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives helps us become bet­ter informed. Learn from oth­ers, but make your own meaning.

Think long-term. Go after last­ing knowl­edge and wis­dom. Dis­tin­guish between infor­ma­tion, data, and knowl­edge. Seek to syn­chro­nize with what is good and just. Seek wis­dom from both ancient and emerg­ing sources.

Your heart is like a crys­tal ball into every sit­u­a­tion. When you’re irri­tat­ed, you can feel the dis­sat­is­fac­tion com­press­ing in your chest. When you’re excit­ed, your heart-rate amps up. We don’t have to be car­di­ol­o­gists to under­stand this infor­ma­tion. We only have to pause and pay atten­tion. Yet, it helps to have knowl­edge of what’s going on with­in us because that insight makes us gen­er­al­ly more self-aware.

We usu­al­ly can’t con­trol what our heart is doing. But some­times, with prac­tice, we actu­al­ly can. With our breath, we can slow down our heart rate. Or even speed it up, if we so desire. Yogis have been prac­tic­ing this kind of self mas­tery for mil­len­nia. Con­trolled rhyth­mic breath­ing leads to many ben­e­fits for our mind and our body. That’s because con­scious breath­ing pro­duces a sen­sa­tion of calm with­in our cen­tral ner­vous sys­tems. And, with that slowed-down rhythm, you can lis­ten to the var­i­ous oth­er expres­sions of life (wind, birds, peo­ple, water, etc.) and cen­ter your place with­in the greater tapes­try of existence.

“We are drown­ing in infor­ma­tion, while starv­ing for wis­dom. The world hence­forth will be run by syn­the­siz­ers, peo­ple able to put togeth­er the right infor­ma­tion at the right time, think crit­i­cal­ly about it, and make impor­tant choic­es wise­ly.” — Biol­o­gist E.O. Wilson

Fac­ing an over­whelm­ing amount of adver­tise­ments from cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing, we can learn to reclaim our atten­tion by resist­ing the noise of those offer­ings. We have the choice—and the right—to say “no” to self-inter­est­ed com­pa­nies see­ing our engage­ment as a resource to be exploit­ed, and say “yes” to authen­tic exchanges in which we can increase our own agency. Our iden­ti­ties result from who we feel we are inside, and how we wish to present that exter­nal­ly. The more we rec­og­nize our own abil­i­ty to cre­ate mean­ing by pur­su­ing what makes us feel inspired or ener­gized from with­in, the more we will exer­cise the pow­er of our intu­ition to lead in the cre­ation of pos­i­tive realities.