I turn 52 today 🥳 As a gift to myself I want to share the following with you: We are smack in the middle of a war of ideas, and I'll tell you why this is good. The battle is between us - the people - and the political class. And winning requires that we constantly learn new, actionable ideas. However, this isn't just an imperative. Once we throw ourselves into the battle, we develop a passion for it. You may have experienced it yourself: Meeting new people and sharing and developing new ideas together with them is wonderful. You discover that when positive, creative people get together, 1 + 1 is never 2. When we meet, physically or digitally or we just read each others' writings, we often identify ideas that the other person didn't have before, enabling us to create new knowledge and more understanding together. And sometimes, when you and I combine our ideas, we develop things that the world hasn't seen or heard before. It might not be a gigantic innovation, and normally it's just a very, very small thing. But it's our joint appreciation of the process itself that is so immensely rewarding. Because we realize that 1 + 1 in the social and intellectual domain more often than not is 3, 10, 1000 a million or more. Magical is the only way to describe this process, which is reserved to us alone, the humankind. When this happens, you also realize that there isn't any limit to what we can achieve with more knowledge and understanding. Immersing me in this form of social interaction gives me a constant dopamin rush. I'm addicted. Don't you ever force me into rehab. Have a nice day ❤️