Celebrate!

A Half Birthday that Makes my Heart Whole

It’s a joy to be able to celebrate the half birthday of Rethinking Intelligence with you! I can’t believe we’re already halfway around the sun. It has been a rich six months full of some of the most memorable moments of my life. And all thanks to readers like you who are enriching the world with a new way of exploring, experiencing, and enacting intelligence!

 Normally I would wait a year to celebrate a birthday, but I just couldn’t wait. This book has entered the world and taken on a life of its own. With every new reading, it has evolved and grown. It continues to transform and become something bigger than the sum of its words.

Books are amazing like that. Sure, an author or set of coauthors write the words and a publishing press produces it into book form. But it is in the reading that books really come to life. Readers’ interpretations and applications generate more and more meaning such that each book becomes its own unique force in the world. 

It’s like, I did my part when I wrote the book all those months ago, and now you’ve taken it from there. My heart is full of gratitude for your engagement with my work, what is now our book, Rethinking Intelligence!

Celebrate Learning

I’m raising a virtual glass to you right now! I hope you can feel my gratitude wash over you. I hope you can also take a moment to think about one thing that you have enjoyed so far about the book. Now I want you to feel my gratitude again—that’s me commending you for taking the time to read and learn and think in a completely new way.

  When I am asked what Rethinking Intelligence is fundamentally about, I share my redefinition of intelligence. I say: Intelligence is learning from your environment. It’s a process that is in process…the complete opposite of IQ.

This is why today, as we celebrate Rethinking Intelligence we are really celebrating learning. We are celebrating our capacity to engage with our environments to learn things we never knew, to think things never thought, and to, as I say in the book, “Seize the learning moment.” It is our most essential human nature to connect with each other and our world and to learn it and from it, about one another and ourselves.