LIT: Life Ignition Tools

Use Nature's Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action

By: Jeff Karp, Teresa Barker

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Radically simple experimental tools to help anyone tap into a high-energy brain state to fire up innovative potential and shape their lives with intention—by the founder of a Harvard biomedical engineering innovation lab.

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Jeffrey Michael Karp (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Wow!

Love love love! Every tool can be used today. I love Press Pause the most, I really needed to slow down to fully launch. Get LIT!

Do yourself a favor and read this book

An elegant, instructive, motivational, and meditative read. For far too long the endeavor of research has been industrialized, processed, and divorced from it's higher objectives. Jeff Karp beautifully outlines (through the LIT credo) why and how research must reconnect with nature-inspired mindfulness, curiosity, creativity, and purpose. In illustrating these points, the author does not spare himself from scrutiny and is candid about his own life experiences from a neurodivergent child, an ambitious workaholic professor, and a father and husband struggling to attain balance between career and family. The life lessons he learned are generously shared throughout the book.

Though this reads sometimes like a meditation, it also effectively motivates, outlines simple, practical strategies for fostering creativity, staying engaged, and navigating setback and success alike. In this book you will learn about how we can leverage our own neuroeconomics to ask grand questions and use bioinspiration to tackle them. Refreshingly he also discusses the role of spiritual intelligence and its too-often dismissed role in guiding the acquisition of knowledge.

Every first year graduate student should read this, as should any early stage investigator, or any scientist feeling dejected or losing sense of purpose. It inspires hope, optimism, and the truth that just each of us has a place on this planet, so too does everything else and we would do well to be mindful of that. True to form, I was left with questions; not ones that can be satisfied with answers, but ones that guide and provide bearings to an academic life well-examined.