Last Fall, this critical-thought community spent an entire week discussing practical next-steps for creating a human stock market. One in which you could invest in potential at the individual level. At the end of the week, despite great participation, I was still stumped.

But loyal reader and friend, Chris Stapel, came across a New York Times article by David Bornstein that highlights a company called Lumni, who is putting a similar idea into action.

In exchange for $8,530 in financing, [Columbian nursing student Jairo Sneider] agreed to repay 14 percent of his salary for 118 months after he graduated. At that point, regardless of how much he has paid, his obligation terminates. ... If he ends up earning the average salary for nurses in Colombia, he will end up paying the equivalent of an interest rate of 17 percent, which is the average rate in the country for a student loan. And if he ends up doing better, he will pay more, and Lumni will share in his success.

Lumni has made similar deals with 1,900 students to date. Fifty five percent of them are women and 90 percent are the first in their families to attend college. Most of these students would have otherwise been unable to pay for college. So far, the default rate is under 3 percent.

Francis Chan's "Crazy Love" recently provoked my friends and I to discuss the potential beauty of communal living. Mind you, this required a whole lot of conversation to get me there, so I will not presume you see this "beauty" initially, but rather the disastrous horror that would surely come from it.

In fact, I'm sure many of you can empathize with my hold-ups. One discussed benefit was the idea that we could share our talents to lessen our individual expenses. For instance, one of the girls in this discussion is a professional hair stylist. So, in this communal living scenario, we would never have to pay for haircuts again. My wife is a great cook. So, we wouldn't have to pay to go out to eat. And I could....create personal branding campaigns for these individuals and play devil's advocate during our lively political debates??

The idea of getting free haircuts for life is appealing. But even if my personal talents could offer a utilitarian consumer service in return, I still think I'd be doing the math in my head - keeping track of who's getting the best out of this deal.

The only way I could get past this is if I actually loved these people like they were my own family. Then, I wouldn't keep score. And perhaps we shouldn't buy neighboring houses until I do?

While listening to the radio this morning, I had an epiphany regarding just how good NPR is. I mean, it's really good. And I started thinking about what I was comparing its "good" against. National televised news, I suppose. (segue)

People always ask me why I hate Bon Jovi so much.

1) The man exudes undeserved arrogance. I can't watch him perform without getting physically nauseous.
2) He once claimed in an interview that he singlehandedly brought the acoustic guitar back to rock 'n roll. I There is ever so much wrong with this ridiculous claim.
3) Only "woo" girls like Bon Jovi.
4) Jeff Tweedy thinks Bon Jovi sucks, too. (Watch clip above)

Bon Jovi's music is insultingly awful to those of us who see music as communication. Now, as a businessman, I think he knows exactly what he's doing.

As soon as I found out Shaq had announced his retirement from the NBA, I immediately tweeted, "Shaq just announced his retirement. Hope that means he'll have time to take his martial arts movies more seriously."


Sure, I was tempted to go with a Kazaam reference, but I decided to stick with the lesser known, Shaq Fu (which I later remembered was actually a video game, and not a movie).


Still, I was pretty pleased with myself, and after a few minutes, decided to jump on Twitter to see how my message had been received.


Nothing. A little surprised, I typed "Shaq" into a Twitter search to see if perhaps the news of his retirement hadn't spread quite yet. And what did I see? Hundreds and hundreds of tweets with my identical joke.

1) Does my generation (raised on Seinfeld and Simpsons) all have the EXACT same humor?
2) Does this teach us how incredibly formulaic and unoriginal most humor is?

I've always been interested in fashion. Aware of clothes that looked good on others and why, yet, I never dressed particularly well myself. Until the day that the boss at my first job berated me via e-mail for my poor style and grooming habits.

I was mortified. Angry. Ashamed. And I called in sick the next day and went shopping for new clothes.

Ever since, I have been incredibly conscious of my appearance. And while looking back at that experience remains slightly traumatic, I am grateful for that wake-up call to superficiality. It was a reminder that dressing up isn't for you. It's for others.

If you don't care what people think of the way you dress, you should. Simply because of how powerful our blink judgments are. You are judged based on your appearance. You are treated differently based on your appearance. Your perceived intelligence is weighted based on your appearance. Whether you believe in the moral rightness of the fact doesn't change that fact.

Recently, I read an amazing editorial questioning whether or not the arrested development of this generation's males is caused by girls' willingness to have sex with them.

Here's the logic. Men want women, and do what it takes to get them. They dress nice, improve their grooming habits and obtain a marketable education to secure a high-paying job.

But, this only works in a competitive market. If girls are willing to sleep with guys regardless of merit - if expectations have lessened to the point where girls have sex without any prerequisites whatsoever - then a key evolutionary driver for the male species has been destroyed.

They're not lazy. They're simply getting what they want without the work.

Remember to comment on my post from Tuesday about figuring out what kind of intelligence I should be seeking, and where I should move to find it.

Tonight, the Bulls have their last chance to keep their hopes alive in the Eastern Conference Finals against the superstar-laden Miami Heat.

I have yet to watch a playoff game. This because I gave up cable. And while I love my Netflix and Hulu Plus via Roku, the Bulls games are only shown on TNT, not on local channels. This sucks.

If the Bulls happen to make the finals, I will get to watch the series on ABC. Until then, TNT has effectively monopolized the playoffs. At least during this series, they have been displaying the games online via TNT.tv. But, you are stuck watching a 4-camera angle (all of them bad) view of the game on your laptop. It's awful.

Can I call a Marx foul here? Should sports only be accessible by the wealthy? Won't someone think of the poor? Or at least the well off who thought they were being clever?

I've recently come to the conclusion that I'm not as smart as I thought I was.

In the past, I viewed people on a single-axis scale from dumb to brilliant. And that theory is falling apart, without a replacement. That's why I need your help.

I am a firm believer that the only way to get smarter is to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself. And in a mark of true arrogance, I have recently considered moving. After all, I have delusions of grandeur for my life, and I wanted to know if, by moving near a community of high-intensity thinkers, I would more quickly maximize my potential contribution.

But now that I am working in higher education, I am running into a whole new heap of brilliant people that are redefining my perception of what "smart" is. Because some of these people are absolutely brilliant. Yet, it's a completely different type of intelligence from my own - what I will temporarily label micro-intelligence. Not that their intelligence is limited to an individual specialty, but that they choose to harness their intellect in this way. They spend 16,000 hours of their life mastering the Greek written language, in order to gain insight into a single paragraph of a historical manuscript and shine a small but meaningful insight on the author's original intention. They sit in a lab all day long, every day for 20 years, documenting the generational effects of cancer in a single chromosome of fruit fly DNA. It's awe-inspiring. And I would be absolutely awful at both tasks.

I believe I possess, what I will temporarily label, macro-intelligence. A unique ability to see things broadly - to question the minutia by understanding the whole. It's why philosophy, psychology and behavioral economics are so interesting to me. It's why I work in marketing. I enjoy understanding human behavior. In fact, my interest lies in discovering the "Human Physics" equivalent of the 3 Natural Laws. A string theory for how the human world is designed to work most efficiently - socially, politically, relationally.

But, I don't know how many people think in this way, and how many "smart" people would be as bored investigating this as I would be learning Greek. I would venture that those like Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely would be mentor figures in this community? But is this type of intelligence much more unique than I think? Is that why I often feel so intellectually isolated? And what if I move to Manhattan or Seattle in search for this intellectual community, and run into a world full of smart that isn't my kind of "smart"?

Help me out here. What kind of smart am I? And how can I get smarter?

My neighborhood no longer picks up our recycling bins each week. This new bi-weekly schedule is specifically problematic for my household, since we recycle more than we throw away.

By the end of the first week, our 50-gallon recycling bin is full to the brim. Yet, there's still a week to go. So what have we been doing? Throwing that week of recyclables into the garbage bin, which still gets picked up every week.

Now, I'm sure they made this change for a reason. I'm sure our household is not typical. But, I hate it. Of course, I could buy an extra toter for $130. But,
A) I have nowhere to store it (you get fined if you leave it outside)
B) Screw you! Go back to an every week pickup!

You're the mayor of my town. Any solution?