Had breakfast with a dear alum this morning at M.B. Haskett, one of the world’s best third places.

My alum studied “wicked problems” with me almost a decade ago—a class that I designed to help first-year students grapple with complexity in human and ecological systems.

Now she is a fourth-year medical student, planning to be a child psychiatrist. I love seeing her joy in learning, and in studying the importance of kindness in medicine. Medicine is a complex system as well, after all.

When it was time to pay, I told her it’s not her turn yet, and I explained my 4/40 program

Twenty years on and it’s still going strong. My thanks—yet again—to Russell Frank of Penn State.