LIT: Life Ignition Tools

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In an age of convenience and information overload, it’s easy to go through the motions, pressured, distracted, and seeking instant gratification rather than harnessing our potential for meaningful and impactful lives. When we’re accustomed to a low energy brain state and lulled by the comfort zone it creates, it’s difficult to rouse ourselves to act with intention and create the lives we truly want to lead. 

In LIT, Jeff Karp, Ph.D., professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and biotech innovator, helps us look to nature as a vital source of humankind’s best wisdom, most inspired action, and greatest good.

Diagnosed with learning differences at a young age, he persisted through nearly insurmountable struggles with support from his mom in developing ways to achieve hyper-awareness and maximize decisions based on his curiosity, passion, creativity, and connection to nature. As a student at McGill University and at the University of Toronto, as a researcher at MIT, and as a professor at Harvard Medical School, he evolved these approaches into LIT (Life Ignition Tools) —and road-tested these tools daily in his own personal life and with his lab team to innovate medical discoveries inspired by the “problem solving” process they find throughout the natural world.

LIT teaches us to:

• turn inward and connect with what is truly important to us
• turn outward to act on that, connecting with others and different ways of knowing
• question assumptions—break out of habitual thinking and other patterns to discover what really serves you best
• navigate multiple streams of sensory input and manage information overload
• recognize manipulative messaging that can throw us off course
• explore, experiment and discover fresh approaches to old challenges
• intercept routine patterns to actively think and decide versus just jumping in with habitual responses

LIT takes us off autopilot and helps us stay alert, present, and fully engaged in our lives. 

Dr. Karp also shares insights from some of the world’s most accomplished people, including Nobel Prize winners, the founder of an Indigenous wellness center, a visionary photographer, a social justice activist, a five-time US memory champion, an Olympic medalist, a neurosurgeon who founded a center for compassion, and numerous professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and members of his laboratory—all creatives in their own ways.

Using Dr. Karp’s principles, anyone can redirect their lives with energy, focus, creativity, motivation, intention, and impact to create the lives they truly want to lead. Learning to be lit is the ultimate renewable energy and is accessible to everyone, anytime, wherever you are.

About the Author

Jeff Karp, Ph.D., is a biomedical engineer at Harvard Medical School who has dedicated his lab to the process of medical problem solving. Dr. Karp is a Distinguished Chair in Clinical Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Professor of Anesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an affiliate faculty member at the Broad Institute and at MIT through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He has published more than 125 peer-reviewed papers (with over 26,000 citations) and holds more than 100 issued or pending national and international patents. His lab’s technologies include a drug treatment for the most common form of hearing loss, a tissue glue that can seal holes inside a beating heart, targeted therapy for osteoarthritis and Crohn’s disease, needles that automatically stop when they reach their target, and immunotherapy approaches to annihilate cancer. Dr. Karp lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, son, daughter, and two Cavalier King Charles spaniels.

This giveaway is a special one. The book won't be released until April, but we have advance reader copies for this week's winners.  We have 20 copies available, provided by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The giveaway ends on Tuesaday, January 15th.