What Matters Now includes powerful ideas from bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O’Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, and other important people. It was meant for 2010, but it applies for 2015, and so on.
GENEROSITY
If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for.
Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better.
This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get.
~Seth Godin, author of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
DIGNITY
Dignity is more important than wealth. It’s going to be a long, long time before we can make everyone on earth wealthy, but we can help people find dignity this year (right now if we choose to).
Dignity comes from creating your own destiny and from the respect you get from your family, your peers and society.
~Jacqueline Novogratz, author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
ENRICHMENT
We are all on a search–a search for more meaning in our lives.
Through choosing to enrich other people’s lives, you add meaning to both their life and your own. Some simple steps to follow:
1. Commit: Commit to lifetime-relationships that span events, companies, causes and geographic boundaries.
2. Care: Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own.
3. Connect: Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other’s lives in equal measure.
4. Communicate: Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear.
5. Expand capacity: Aim to expand people’s capacity to help them give and get more from their own lives.
~Rajesh Setty, author of Beyond Code: Learn to distinguish yourself in 9 simple steps!
RIPPLE
Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.
Educate a girl, and you educate a her children and generations to follow.
~
John Wood, author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children
John Wood, author of 
NOBODY
Nobody has the answers.
Nobody is listening to you.
Nobody is looking out for your interests.
Nobody will tell the truth.
Nobody feels your pain.
Nobody will be your voice.
(…)
Nobody, but you, that is.
~Micah Sifry, author of The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet)
CONFIDENCE
The secret to unbreakable confidence is a lifestyle of emotional/mental diet and exercise.
1. Feed your mind good stuff. Stop reading negative information, listening to negative people or watching cable network news. You are loading up with fear.
2. Exercise your gratitud muscle. Gratefulness is a muscle, not a feeling. You need to work it out daily. Every morning, give thanks to two people that helped you yesterday and one person that will assist you today.
~Tim Sanders, author of Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends
LEAP
Show, don’t tell. To writer fiction and to have faith is to take an imaginative leap.
And because life is always full of doubts and fears, to act is to take that leap.
So leap.
~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun
More contribution from Seth Godin on When to quit and when to stick, and Transform your business by being remarkable.