The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or not, “Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages…

The philosophies and ideologies themselves certainly left an impression on me. But the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that’s where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I’ve used it again and again – the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.

The intellectual process I learned in that class is also life’s process. Because every life is a Great Work, with all the richness of its gifts and the wealth of its possibilities.