Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: I'd love a case study on imagination. When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind? What was their story? [00:00:00] S1: I know some writers, some fiction writers, who naturally can just go off and imagine crazy things, and that's partly their ability to fill in details. And then I have other people that I know who are, what I would call lateral thinkers, and they have an imagination very much in this direction of overcoming the orthodoxy, overcoming the conventional wisdom. And they'll take something ordinary and just come at it in a slightly skewed direction like laterally on a very, very regular basis. And it's like, oh, I would have never thought of that. They are -- I believe, have trained themselves to do that. Like Marvin Minsky, who was a very imaginative guy, used to pretend he was a Martian or a robot. He would just approach everything as if he's from another planet, and he would be examining music, okay, well, what is it about music? Why are you people so affected by music? It doesn't make sense to me. And he would kind of investigate things, looking at them from this lateral position just as a habit. So that's a kind of imagination. [00:00:00] S0: I used to love the Nintendo idea. I think they had something like lateral thinking with withered technologies or something like new use cases for very old things or something like that.
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. So there are various forms of imagination. But the point is that the possibility space for ideas is very, very, very large. It's probably the largest possibility space that we can imagine. And we tend, as humans and living in our lives, to kind of retread the same ones. And so anything you can do to get out of those ruts is very powerful but not always useful. I mean if you can go too far, all we all know from start-ups and innovation and invention is that you want to be one or two steps away. If you're 5 or 10 steps away, it doesn't help anybody. There's nobody there. If you have some crazy idea but can't put it into words or pictures or communicate it, then it's lost. If it's an idea so far ahead of its time, it could be right. But if you can't get to it in a couple of steps from today, then it's not really useful. So like other things, there's an art to the imagination to being actually valuable to people, is constrained by how many steps away you are, it will take someone to get there. So if only you can arrive at that place, it's not worth anything. You have to get other people there. Either to see it and inhabit it with you, like in the story, to actually be able to replicate it in terms of making something, whatever it is, there's an art to this imagination because you can't be too far away because then it's not useful to anybody. You have to have this adjacent possible that people talk about. You want it to be adjacent but not so distant that, well, it may be true someday or we could appreciate it 100 years from now. It would be a lot more useful if you could do something that was more adjacent.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: When you study history and you think about the parts of life that have pulled some of these characteristics out of people that we've talked about so far, you come across rites of passage a lot. And it seems like the modern world is as low on different kinds of rites of passage as at any point in history and that, that is very strange and troubling and hopefully like a historical anomaly when we look back on it 1,000 years from now. Why do you think that's the case? And what would be your prescription for changing it?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I have three kids now grown young adults. And one thing that I know my kids, what I learned was that they crave when they're young, especially they crave reliability, stability. They rely on having something stable as they invent themselves. They're in the process from the moment they're born to inventing themselves in a very literal sense of developing their personalities. And that is a very uncertain process. It's very scary. They don't know what it means to be human. They don't know what it means to be a kid. They don't know what's ordinary or extraordinary. They have to accept everything is normal. And so the safer they can feel, the more anchored they can be in a family, the easier it is for them to develop their own identity and thrive. And so rituals and rites of passages are things that help that anchoring and something that they can return to, even when things get scary or uncertain or confusing, they can come back into and say, well, at least my family is always there. My family always does this. My family is about this. And these rites of passage and rituals, bringing them an ability to say, this is what we do. This is something I can rely on. This is a foundation to help me craft my identity, my personality, my contribution. And so rites of passage and rituals are something that have been embedded in religion. And when we throw out and get rid of religion, we're often undoing and surrendering and removing those things which need to be replaced in some ways. And so the thing about rituals is that they don't actually have to be about anything. That was the beauty of Burning Man. Burning Man as a ritual and a joke was always we burn it so that we can burn it next year, right? I mean it's like it's a ritual that doesn't have any meaning other than in itself, but it's very powerful because it's a ritual and you burn the man, the same man every time, okay? And so what we discovered in our family and other families is that if you have rituals, even if they're as simple as having pancakes on Sunday morning or pizza on a Friday night or birthdays, you always do this or 3 times a year, our family always does this thing at the beginning of the season and we change the sheets or whatever it is, something that you can count on, and if you do it 3 times in a row, it becomes a ritual.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And that ability of anticipating the thing, looking forward to it, relying on it, having it be there, and that is the foundation of a stable development in their own personality. And so rites of passage is another aspect of that. I think we found that just we have to invent them. You can use religious ones, which are fine, but we don't even have very many of those in America. So we just invented our own coming into adulthood, the passage that we did as a family, we had a bunch of rituals that we would do. And they became again another anchoring thing in -- or kids' understanding of themselves. [00:00:00] S0: If you had other exercises you would recommend families engage in, in addition to like, okay, we need to design rituals, we need to design rites of passage for our kids, let's say, parent for the kids, any other exercises for the family that you would recommend?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Well, one thing we do in our family and I highly recommend it is having meals together with no screens. And I make sure I pay attention to their definition of success. Their definition of a successful life, the people they most respect are those that are able to have every single meal with their children until their children leave. So they have breakfast and they have lunch and they have dinner together as a family. Lunch is the real ringer for most people because their kids are in school and they come back to the house for lunch. So that's something that is very, very profound, is having family dinners. We say grace before meals. We have Thanksgiving rituals where we do the gratitude rounds and things. There's a lot. There's actually a good book called The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler, that's really good on this, looking at the research that has been done on understanding the family identity. So one of the things I say is that you want to be able to have your kids be able to say, our family does this or doesn't do this. This idea of a family identity is something else that you cultivate of like saying, "Our family does this," or, "Our family doesn't do this. This is what our family does." That's fine with them. There's all kinds of things. We didn't have TV with our kids growing up in the house at all. Our family doesn't do TV. You're free to watch TV at your friend's house as much as you want, but we, our family doesn't do TV. And it's like, okay, that's fine. That's good. I understand that. That's part of my identity. And so you can do that.