Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: Is that another cut at this -- your advice, sort of rather than like follow your "bliss," just master anything? Like when you're young, just like master something, is that the actionable way of doing what you just said? [00:00:00] S1: It's very close because follow your bliss, for most people, they don't know what their bliss is and it kind of is paralyzing. But you master something and that platform of mastery, of getting something done gives you that positioning, that ladder to stand on to start to move in other directions. So you have to have something to start with. So yes, you're right, that is another form of prototyping where you start anywhere, you master anything. That ability to get things done is the mechanism that you start to creep towards a more authentic place. You can't do it again by thinking about it, which is what people want to do when they're thinking about their -- follow my bliss, is they're trying to figure out and trying to think their way out. And I call that thinkism. And thinkism is just this very distracting idea that thinking is the most important thing in the world, and it's necessary but not sufficient to get things done. [00:00:00] S0: What in your life do you think you most mastered?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes, that's a good question. There are some small things. I am a really, really good ninja travel photographer. And I did 50 years of traveling in Asia in this book. And I have a nose, a really great nose for arriving on a place and being able to find something was happening. I land in a city, and I could tell, over here, there's going to be something interesting happening, just like the old Polynesian navigators that could see the waves intersecting, I could see ways of people moving in certain directions, I could just pick up little posters. Just like those GeoGuessr guys that can identify the location of any random photograph. They'd tell you where it is because of all these clues. I have some mastery in being able to photograph cultural things in Asia. That's a pretty obscure mastery, but from that photography, visual storytelling, that could lead to other things. It's a very rarified mastery. But I think more generally, I have mastered -- at WIRED and at Whole Earth and with the newsletters, I'm mastering a sense of trends, I would say, a sensibility of the future, a future sensibility. My mentors, like Stewart Brand was very good at this, and my partner at Cool Tools, Mark Frauenfelder, are very, very good at kind of saying, "Something really important is happening right here. These things are interesting and different, but they're not as important as this thing happening right here." And I think -- I've done that long enough that I think I also have a mastery in that as well. It doesn't have a real name right now. It's not predictions. It's not forecasting. It's in that general vicinity, but it's much more like a spidey sense. I wrote about e-money in my first book in 1994. I had a whole chapter on digital money. I gave that chapter to Steven Levy and the first issue of WIRED, and he went on to write the crypto stuff. And so that was like, whoa, this is -- I think this is really important. Here's these weird guys who are working on it. And I think that is one of the things that I have mastered over these 40 or 50 years, is that sense of there's something crucial happening right here.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: If you had to describe the energy signature of those things when you spot them or feel them, how would you encapsulate that in words?
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: One of the energy signatures is a depth to it. There's a sense in which you encounter it and then there are these partitioners, there are these people who are plumbing it, they're kind of going there, they're mining it. And when you have conversations or observing them or reading them, you realize, oh, this little mine could go pretty deep in many different directions. There's a depth and a breadth to them saying, there's lots of things that this could intersect with. I would say that's one energy signature, is like depth and breadth to the possibility space that it suggests. And secondly, I think there is some detection of how fast things are being uncovered, like a rate of discovery in that area. If you encounter some subculture or some little niche or some new technology or some research area, there is maybe one person working on it, and every year or so, maybe they discover something, and it's like, okay, it's not enough. But if there's a bunch of people and every week, they're coming with another something, that says that there's certain momentum or acceleration that's involved. There's a sense of, well, there's enough being discovered that we could kind of imagine this scaling up into something bigger. And so you're looking at the recent past to see what's the rate of new things. And then another metric that I use is how much new language in words are needed for what's happening. You want a true area like this will be ahead of language and having to create new terms, new words, new things. [00:00:00] S0: So you can't describe it well or easily.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: So you can't describe it well or easily. [00:00:00] S1: Right. And so that's another sign that is worth paying attention to. [00:00:00] S0: I love those ideas. They're beautiful. The other cut at this that I love, maybe my second favorite thing in the book after that opening quote that we explored, is this notion that the reward for good work is more work. When I read that, people are annoyed at me now for not shutting up about this idea. How did that manifest for you? Like where did you come upon that idea? What does it mean to you? Like how did it play out in your own life? Absolutely love that idea.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: I love those ideas. They're beautiful. The other cut at this that I love, maybe my second favorite thing in the book after that opening quote that we explored, is this notion that the reward for good work is more work. When I read that, people are annoyed at me now for not shutting up about this idea. How did that manifest for you? Like where did you come upon that idea? What does it mean to you? Like how did it play out in your own life? Absolutely love that idea. [00:00:00] S1: So it's related to another piece of advice in the book, which is -- I actually talked with this with David Allen, the Get Things Done guy, which is that there is a kind of a misappreciation or misunderstanding about productivity, which is that a lot of people who are productivity-focused will be trying to minimize the amount of time they spend on working on something. But actually, what you really want to be doing is you want to be finding things that you want to spend as much time as possible working on. That's this idea, like the reward for work is more work, is you want to be doing something where the goal is to spend more time doing it. Yes, productivity is fine. But what you're trying to do is actually move your time so that you are trying to spend as much time doing it and trying to find those kinds of tasks and those kinds of assignments and those kinds of jobs where you would almost pay to do it. And so in English, we conflate lots of things in the word work. [00:00:00] S0: Sounds bad.