AdAge asked a bunch of really smart business leaders "how they continuously educate themselves to keep up with the shifting digital and cultural landscapes."

Check out the online article for the websites, blogs and print that feed the minds of the respondents (you’ll recognize some of them from our lists). And don’t forget to check in with the cultural experts in your own extended household (there’s no shame to learning from an 11 year-old).

Our favorite response came from Omnicom Media Group’s Europe CEO Colin Gottlieb:

I’m not trying to be clever but when you asked how people keep up with the changing digital world, it seems to me you then expected us to list stimuli, but didn’t raise the question of creativity. For me creativity is the ability to successfully connect one abstract thing with another to create something extraordinary. The ability to make these connections depends on many things but perhaps the most obvious is the desire (not the discipline) to observe the world around you. You see stuff, you like it and you store it for the moment the penny drops. The stimuli is not one thing or another — it is everything around you and everywhere you go. Executives in our business have the opportunity to ‘touch’ tons of stuff. They are paid to then make the connections. So, the answer to your question is attitude. You either have the hunger to make the connections or you don’t."

Now that’s worldview formation – an attitude of open-eyed curiosity that is always looking for connections, always seeking to understand, always making meaning – and it’s a key difference between thought leaders and everyone else.

• Even if you believe you don’t have time to read more, watch more or listen more, does that mean you don’t have time to be alert for connections in what you are reading, watching and listening to?
• Are you confident you’re reading the most useful things, watching the most stimulating and illuminating content, hearing from and conversing with the most challenging voices?

At the risk of prying this passage from its context, look at the way Eugene Peterson renders the words of Jesus in Luke 11:33-35:

“No one lights a lamp, then hides it in a drawer. It’s put on a lamp stand so those entering the room have light to see where they’re going. Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body. If you live wide-eyed in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. Keep your eyes open, your lamp burning, so you don’t get musty and murky. Keep your life as well-lighted as your best-lighted room.”

— Luke 11:33-35 The Message Bible

• Consider a vacation for your mind. Forego the familiar for a few days to visit mental places you haven’t been before. Revisit places you haven’t gone for ages. Read or listen or talk to someone you need a translator (literally or figuratively) to understand. Look around until you encounter something that causes you to live wide-eyed in wonder and belief and fills your body with light.