Think about your workplace. Your bosses, your employees, co-workers, etc...  Your workplace's culture.  Do you want to spend all of that time in a place that does not value your ideas, energy and input?

Or, rather, in an environment that does?

Of course you want to work where your best talents can come forward and help achieve goals, benefit the team, and benefit yourself in the process.

Or think of our famous Kentucky Basketball.  Do All-Americans like John Wall, Patrick Patterson and DeMarcus Cousins want to play for a coach who disregards their talents?  Or for a coach who MAXIMIZES their talents?  (I know if I actually HAD any talent, I'd play for Calipari any day!)

The same principle holds true for a community at-large.

Smart, successful people gravitate toward opportunities.  Opportunities to excel, to succeed, to benefit.  And while economic success at your workplace is directly tied to talent level - just as it is in basketball - the exact same truth applies to Lexington as a whole.

Lexington's economic success - or failure - is not something determined by the wind.  It is neither random nor uncontrollable.

It is directly tied to our use of our talent.  Our intellectual capital.  Our brainpower.

Which - as it turns out - just happens to be #2 and #11 in the entire United States, when we measure our education levels.

So if talent isn't the problem, where has the "drain" occurred?  Why are we near the bottom, economically, despite having all of this talent around us?

The problem is distinctly within our (in)ability to optimally CONNECT our brains together to create world-class economic results.

We must connect Innovators with Innovators, Resources with Resources, Experience with Experience.

To transform our cultural landscape, first and foremost - inviting our bright brainpower to the table - which will then open the opportunistic doors for ideas, businesses and results.