Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: You're right. There's just a whole lot to unpack in this, and it does sum up a lot of what I'm trying to do. So the first thing is, I don't think I've met anybody who has achieved this. I have met a lot of people who are absolutely in that direction and are absolutely approaching that. It's like an asymptote curve where you never actually get there. There's always some way to get a little bit closer. But from a distance, you might say, well, you've arrived. And for most of us, this is a very, very high bar. Truly becoming yourself is an incredibly high bar because we are opaque to ourselves. We are just built in a way that we don't have immediate access, even with language, to what it is that we do and how we do it and our own motivations. And it's kind of like we're deliberately kept out of it, so we don't mess it up too much. This is a lifelong project for most people, is coming to understand what it is that's authentic about you, what it is that you do better than other people, what it is that you're about, what your purpose in life is. This is a lifelong project. And the best we can do is to say that we are getting closer. [00:00:00] S0: When did you awake to the idea yourself? When was the first time that you thought, oh, this is a quest that I could be on for myself, and now I'm curious about who I am and how I might become that fully?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I think it was actually fairly recently. You mentioned Joseph Campbell and the others of following your bliss and stuff, and those have been around. But the idea that there was something about realizing the essence of yourself, I think that's something that I began with or even had an early epiphany on. It is actually more recent, is to kind of reflect on things, like even writing this book where you have to articulate what it is. So I think I've been doing it but not articulating it, not aware that I was doing it. And it would have been easier if I had -- and this goes back to the subtitle of my book, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. I wish I had known this earlier, that that's sort of the framing of a good life, is to think about what it is that you're trying to optimize in your life, trying to articulate the purpose in your life and to come to some understanding of what it is that makes you unique and different among all the other 8 billion people on the planet at this moment, let alone who have gone before us and who may come after us. And so I think you could be on this journey and not even aware of that you're on a journey. And I think a lot of us may do it unconsciously where we're just trying to figure out what we can do well, what we can do that's valuable, what we can do that other people can't do. And we could be doing that every day and not even have this articulation of trying to come to some essence of ourself. But I think it's helpful if we can articulate it that way.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: If you had found and taken this idea really seriously, like really internalized it when you were 30, what would you have done differently, do you think, if anything? Like how would your behavior have changed?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: It's a great question. I haven't done that exercise, but let me think if I -- just take a minute now to try and do the -- this is something I learned at WIRED magazine. And then there is a piece of advice in the book. It's a little bit like this. It has to do with, there's a value in articulating what you're doing because -- instead of relying on other people to describe it. And so this is kind of a part of like branding exercise in marketing, which is that you actually want to control the message rather than have people interpret it. And so what we learned is at WIRED, we actually had to tell people again and again what it was that we're doing because we couldn't just sort of rely on them kind of figuring out from reading the magazine. And so we started to do these little tags on the cover each time saying, we're optimistic. This is an optimistic view. This is what we're doing. And so I think if I was totally new to this, I would have been -- spent a little bit more time in accelerating where I was going by actually going back to Tom Peters, the brand of view, like what is my brand? That's not kind of a selfish thing. It's actually useful to other people as well. This is what I learned with WIRED, is that you kind of want to be able to tell people what it is that you're about to help you become better at it. And I think when I was 30, I had no idea. I didn't even think of those terms. Maybe I would have thought it presumptuous or vain. But in fact, it would have been better all around for everyone if I had really kind of worked on, where am I aiming at or what do I think I'm about? And that sort of I'd never really done that very seriously. And I think that would have accelerated the clarity I had of the choices that we're going to make beyond that. So that's what I would urge to people, is to think about yourself and if you have to encapsulate what it is that you're about for other people to help other people understand it and therefore to help you realize yourself what your authentic self is.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I have sort of a wild follow-up question. So I'm an investor, and my focus is on investing in people that are doing what we call their life's work. And our definition is very simple: it's a lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are. And we were wondering, like what are the natural limits of this? Steve Jobs because he was doing his life's work and look at the impact that it's had. What is the highest form of self-expression? And I wondered if it was like Jesus and Buddha, the people whose ideas or work has reverberated most through history. And you said you had never seen anyone that actually got to this definition. Do you think maybe the only ones that have are like the world's religious historical figures or something?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: It's possible that of all the candidates that Jesus was one who, the day before he died, was most authentically himself. I think you're right, that would be a good definition or a good role model. In terms of what are the limits, your question was, would the ideal person look like that was doing that. And I could be wrong, but for me, I think what we will find is that they will be themselves unlike other people. Not like a Jesus, not like a Buddha because those, again, those are niches that are occupied by them. And the whole point of being authentic is it's going to be slightly different and weird. And the way I say is, do you want to invent a new definition of success? That's what your life should be. Your life should be inventing a new definition of success. That success should have its own metrics that are going to be different from then Steve Jobs' metrics. If they aren't different, then they haven't really achieved that thing of being authentically unique. Or what I would be looking for is looking for people who really had a completely different definition of success. What I tell people is that there are a lot of people whose definition of success are very different than what we normally associate with success. And we don't know about them, and that's part of their definition of success. They may be a huge success, and maybe people outside their family don't even know who they are, but they are just incredibly successful in their own lives because fame was not part of that definition. And so this doesn't mean that everybody has become famous and quite the contrary.