Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What about in a marriage specifically? So setting aside the parent-child relationship, obviously, that's critical, but just purely at the level of spouses, in the same general vein, exercises, rituals, whatever, anything that you have done or would recommend people think about?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. I'm not very good -- I think you need to talk to Esther Perel in this couple's therapy -- actually, there was one thing in the book that I think came from Esther, which is the rule of three in conversation. And that's particularly valuable in a marriage, which is that when someone that you love or intimate with is telling you something in a very intense way, you want to be listening. And then when they're done, wait until they're done, and you say, is there more? And there's usually more. And then they go over it. Second round, you listen all the way through. And this is active listening, meaning that you are engaged. You are not just a recording machine. You're probing. You're encouraging. And then you wait until there's a third round of, is there more? And what's interesting about that is that because it's active listening, is that the other person needs the listener to help them say it. They almost can't say it without that active listening. And so you are able to arrive at understandings and truths and honesty that neither one could get to by themselves. And that ability to take the rule of three and say, "Is there more? Is there more? Is there more?" is very, very powerful. And oftentimes that explanation and going through that process to the third level is hugely benefit to the person talking because they needed that person to get it out of them and often is enough to actualize change.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: Speaking of three, my third most powerful takeaway from the book was this notion of the three gates, this idea of asking yourself three questions before you say something. Can you give us that incredibly cool and useful idea? [00:00:00] S1: I think I said it was a live person who said it. It was actually Rumi, the Afghan poet Rumi, which is that before you say something about someone else, particularly, is you want to ask yourself, is it true? Is it... [00:00:00] S0: Necessary, I think. [00:00:00] S1: Kind? [00:00:00] S0: Yes, true, necessary, and kind, right? [00:00:00] S1: Right. So if it's of those three, then you can say it. And there's a lot in the book about the virtues of kindness, that kindness is not a weakness but a sign of strength. And you can't really be too kind. If you have a choice between being right or kind, you'll be kind. And I have another bit of advice for people, which I have had the experience lately, which is attend as many funerals as you can particularly when you're young and listen to what they say about the departed. And the shock to me was that nobody was talking about the achievements, how many patents they had, how many companies they started, how much money they had, none of that. They were talking about what kind of person they were, how they made people feel, whether they were kind. It's like, wow, that's really powerful. That's what matters. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think that humans are naturally kind?