Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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So, how’s your 2011 been? Mine: the proverbial best and worst of times. I had my first book published, finished my second, and made it (much to my own massive surprise) onto the Thinkers50 list. But I also lost, in the same month, two of the people I loved the most. That’s life: the act of living in the human universe — in the full ebb and flow of its deep tides of joy, sorrow, accomplishment, and grief.

All of which made me reflect on (if you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, perhaps even brood over) a Big Question: what does it mean to live meaningfully well? If you accept the less-than-heretical proposition that our way of life, work, and play, while materially rich, might be leaving us emotionally, relationally, socially, physically, and spiritually if not empty, than perhaps just a little bit unhealthy; that it might be optimized for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier over wiser, fitter, smarter, closer, tougher — how would we redesign economies, markets, and organizations to help us live better?

I ended up writing a little book about it — Betterness: Economics for Humans. It’s a five-step program for reimagining and redesigning prosperity — beginning at the biggest of levels, the global economy, through to the micro-level, the organizations we all spend most of our days in — that’s composed not merely just of more bigger faster, but of radically better.

But I also wanted to get even more micro, more immediate: how can each of us be a wholer, truer person, right now, today? In an era where the prosperity we once took for granted appears to be crumbling around us, when the plight of the present seems to be somewhere between facepalm, headdesk, and epic fail, when the great challenges of today are nothing less than rebuilding economy, polity, and society — here’s what I believe you’re going to have to get lethally serious about: your own human potential, and how deeply, authentically, and powerfully, over the course of your life, you’re going to fulfill it.

Hence, recently, I decided to ask my Twitter followers for three lessons they’d give people younger than themselves about leading a good life. The result was a global brainstorm of epic proportions — more insightful and interesting than anything yours truly has ever written.

So here’s my question. What are your three lessons for living a good life? What lessons would you give someone, say, in their twenties, today? Here [is one of my three]:

Cultivate (your better self). What’s the point of “education” anyway? One point of view says: to produce more STEM graduates. And to be sure, there’s a case to be made for those skills. But I’d say that, by and large, that case is founded on the deterministic assumption that the point of education is greater productivity; you study so you can be a faithful, loyal, unquestioning “employee” with the commoditized, routinized analytical skills to get the (yawn, shrug, eye-roll) neo-Fordist job done. I’d argue the reverse is true: the point of productivity is education — the “output” of authentically thicker value, greater social benefit, is a process that culminates in the act of being a wholer person. I’d argue, on reflection, what society really might have is a shortage of living, breathing well-rounded humans; with a moral compass, an ethical core, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and a long view born of historicism. What we’ve got plenty of are wannabe-bankers whose idea of a good life goes about as far as grabbing for the nearest, biggest bonus — what we’ve got less of are well-rounded people with the courage, wisdom, and capacities to nurture and sustain a society, polity, and economy that blossom. So put immediate gratification to one side and cultivate your higher sensibilities; learn the arts of nuance, subtlety, humility, and grace. I don’t mean you have to spend every evening at the opera — but I do mean you probably have to do better than thinking Lil Wayne is the apex of human accomplishment. Let’s get real: without a refined, honed, expansive sense of what great accomplishment is, you stand little to no chance of ever pushing past its boundaries yourself.

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Now, these lessons are far from the only ones, or the “best” ones. In our Twitter conversation, there were plenty that I thought were far sharper, more resonant, and just plain wiser. So rather than discuss my tiny, inconsequential lessons in the comments, let me ask again: what three lessons would you give people in their 20s — or anyone, for that matter — about what it takes to live a meaningfully, resonantly good life?

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To  read the complete article and then respond to Umair’s invitation, please click here.

Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50.

Follow him on twitter @umairh.