Developing compassion for Congress and politicians is a good way to begin practicing the new social activism if you want to make effective changes in the world. Perhaps the most startling new insight of all is that there is no other way to effectively change the world.

A new understanding of power is replacing our old understanding of power as the ability to manipulate and control. The old understanding of power has become counterproductive to our evolution. What used to be good medicine has become poisonous. Pursuit of the ability to manipulate and control now produces only violence and destruction.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

Authentic power is the real deal. You can't inherit it, buy it, or win it. You also can't lose it. You don't need to build your body, reputation, wealth, or charisma to get it.

If you want to get anywhere in life, you have to make choices.

Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.

What I learned from my years in Silicon Valley is that design can have a primary role in how a business is shaped, how a company can be design-driven. In my experience of large industry in Europe, that knowledge has been lost.

The United States is no longer first in the world in upward mobility. We can reverse that trend by giving our young children an equal start in life as they begin their journey to fulfill the American Dream.