When the government loses the confidence of the people, it loses legitimacy. 

When our institutions are weakened by greed, by corruption, by pandering to ignorance or fear, they lose legitimacy. 

Leadership is nothing without the consent of those who follow. 

The small rocks of your attention

Social media —Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, whatever your thing is— fit easily into life's interstices. It only takes a moment to check your feed, say something smart, chuckle at a joke.

But those moments add up. Together, they take up the space in your life that you could be using for thinking, dreaming, reading, loving. What projects, places, people are you missing out on because you don't have room?