Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: Sounds bad. [00:00:00] S1: Yes, that is often very negative, but then you have the great masterworks and great work. And so you have both meanings, sometimes conflated. Maybe we need some new words about what that other state is where you are working, doing, making, creating, and you want to spend as much time as possible. And the more you do it, the more you can do it. [00:00:00] S0: How do you think about money and thought so much about work and self-expression and all these things and not following others' definition of success? You already said money is like the #1 definition of success maybe that we've all accepted because it's a common unit. Say everything you can about money, the concept, the thing, how you relate to it.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Generally, I'm very bored by money. I find it very, very boring. One of my things about crypto, my son and my son-in-law, we're kind of into crypto for a while. And I would say, look, okay, I'm willing to have a conversation about crypto, but here's one caveat: you can't mention the word money. You can't talk about making money, saving money, whatever it is. Let's talk about crypto without talking about money. Those are very short conversations, okay? And that's the problem with crypto, is that it was only about money, which is only a single dimension. And so I find it just boring in that way. That wasn't true with the Internet. We could talk about all kinds of things with the Internet. We didn't have to talk about money. And AI is the same kind of thing. So generally, it's a tool. Money is a tool. I like Tim O'Reilly's little definition of what money is. It's like gasoline for your car, and the purpose of the gasoline for the car is to drive around, but you're not driving around the gas stations to see how much gas you can get. It's a means to do things. And for me, that's what it is. And I have had the privilege of hanging around billionaires, multibillionaires. And what I've observed is that in most cases, having money at that level is completely imprisoning and a burden. Basically, it's a burden. [00:00:00] S0: Because it ends up owning them or for some other reason?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: Because it ends up owning them or for some other reason? [00:00:00] S1: Yes, yes, basically. I would say right now, one of my pieces of advice to your listeners is that they should try as hard as they possibly can to never have $1 billion. I have a couple of hundred million. Just don't have $1 billion. [00:00:00] S0: What's the difference between those two?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Well, a lot of 0s, and the more 0s you have, the more weight it is. First of all, it's distorting for your kids and your families. It's just an incredible burden for children. And secondly, the weight of it just becomes something you always have to attend to. If you're a responsible person, you're going to take it seriously. And it just becomes something that you can never escape because you can't spend it. It's almost impossible to give away by yourself. So you're suddenly running an organization, and it's a whole another job, and they may not be the most authentic thing for you, right? I mean a lot of the billionaires I know, if you get them to be honest, it's a lot of luck. It's a good luck or bad luck. I like to ask young people, my kids' friends do the exercise of, okay, I have my magic wand. I'm going to give you $1 billion, which is what your wish is, right? And so what are you going to do with $1 billion? Tell me. Just make the list. And so they -- well, you know, maybe I'll travel around the world or I'm going to buy a boat or something or a house or whatever. I say, you haven't spent any of that money yet. Tomorrow it's all going to come back. You have $1 billion. You cannot spend it. So now what you're going to do with your $1 billion? And it turns out that their dream, whatever it is, can be accomplished for so little compared to $1 billion that in most cases, money is simply not the gating factor for what most people want to do. There was a great scene in -- I think it was the Wall Street where this guy joined the Wall Street and his whole goal, just a couple more years, going to make my fortune, and then I'm going to quit so I can buy the motorcycle and ride across China. And all of those travelers just laugh hilariously because you could work at McDonald's for six months, save enough money to buy a motorcycle to ride across China. You don't need to go on to Wall Street to make your billions to do that. And so I find that the focus, you certainly need to have enough to do the things that you want. But for most people's dreams, it's a misplaced hurdle, imagine didn't have enough money because in fact, what we know about innovation is that all the real breakthroughs come but in the places where there's not enough money, start-ups. The reason why a start-up can succeed is because the big company wants to buy their solutions.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
They've got money. They're going to buy their solutions. But the solutions can't be bought. They have to be invented. They have too much money to do the hard work of being ingenious and frugal and thrifty and all the other -- stubborn and persevering that a start-up can do. So the start-up doesn't have any money. So they're forced to invent the things in a way that if you had money, you'd never get to. And that's why all the breakthroughs happen at the edges, and they happen in start-ups. That lacking of the resources is actually the feature, is actually the benefit. And that's why when young people are starting off who have very little resources, they don't understand they actually have an advantage over the established companies. That lack of resource is an advantage to them. [00:00:00] S0: I'd love to talk about the relationship between creation and imagination. I wonder if in your experience, people are sort of naturally endowed with like a level of imagination or if it's way more changeable, that I can do things to expand my imagination because it seems so much like the people that I admire the most are creative and creators. Like they're manifesting something, maybe that's their form of self-expression, like we talked about earlier. But that requires tremendous imagination. Where do you think that comes from? Can you cultivate it?