I’m in the middle of reading life coach guru Martha Beck’s latest book, “Finding Your Way in a Wild New World.” If you’re not familiar with her work, check out “Finding Your Own North Star” and her regular columns in O Magazine.

Though I’m halfway through the book, I keep thinking back to the opening chapter where she crystallizes the era we are living through in a way that makes sense to me.

Here’s how Martha Beck sums up several key trends for the future:

• Individuals like you and me now have the power to do things, such as getting information to billions of people, that only large organizations, like governments and corporations, could do at any earlier point in human history.

• Knowledge is no longer power, because knowledge is no longer scarce. What is scarce is human attention. Directing human attention is the way people trade goods and services – thus how they survive financially – in the wild new world.

• The qualities that capture positive attention these days aren’t slickness, blandness, and mass consensus (boring), but authenticity, inventiveness, humor, beauty, uniqueness, playfulness, empathy, and meaning (interesting.)

• The scarcest, most coveted resources aren’t high-tech machines or highly developed cities, but “unspoiled” places, people, animals, objects, and experiences.

What rings true for me is a greater value on beauty, play, authenticity and meaning. Companies and organizations that share these values (think Google, Apple and TED) capture our attention and imagination more readily and tend to be highly coveted workplaces. Seeing friends and colleagues raise thousands of dollars in a matter of days with Kickstarter campaigns and the like, it also rings true that the average individual has much more power to reach people today through technology than we even realize.

How can you use this information to shape your career, passions and mark on the world? It’s a big question which may not result in an immediate answer but is, nevertheless, worth asking.