From Lost Cause to Harvard Professor: One Man's Tools for Success

Jeff Karp shares 5 key insights from LIT: Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action.

Jeff Karp’s start in life was hardly auspicious. His teachers considered him a lazy troublemaker, and even after he was diagnosed with ADHD most schools didn’t know how to help him. So Jeff had to help himself. He developed his own learning methods, which he used to eventually become a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, a Distinguished Chair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Now, Jeff offers his tools to the rest of us in his new book LIT: Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature's Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. Our curator

Daniel Pink

says his book is “an essential toolkit for converting intentions into actions that matter.” Here’s Jeff to share 5 of his big ideas.

1. These tools are road-tested. They come from the lab of my own life.

As a kid, I used to sit in the back of my 2nd-grade classroom without a clue as to what was going on. I struggled to follow along. The teachers called me “lazy” and a “troublemaker.” It was pretty rough. I felt frustrated and totally demoralized. My mom tried everything: phonics flashcards — you name it. But it just wasn’t working. It got so bad that the school wanted to hold me back. One fateful day in summer school that year, I had an epiphany that became the underlying basis of all the tools in the LIT toolkit. The tutor asked me a question which I answered. Then she said, “Jeff, how did you think about that?” It blew my mind. It had never occurred to me that you could think about thinking. It was almost like the roof came off, and whoosh—suddenly there were no limits. There was an empty canvas and a freedom. It came from the liberating notion that you could observe your thoughts and think before speaking, before doing! It shifted the ground under my feet.