Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: When you were running WIRED, and WIRED obviously was like the expression of your taste and personality, what practices or what did you do to protect that, that seems incredibly desirable in any publication that it's like the taste of the person magnified or something?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. We projected about owning more than 50% of which we lost to a very terrible, terrible story. We lost control, and that's why we had to sell, and that's when we all left, okay? We left, not because it wasn't fun anymore but because we lost control of it. We weren't having to report to anybody. We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read. And it was totally fun because we could say anything. That was one of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, the ownership of it. And this goes back to what I was talking about articulating, for me, there was something that we were very slow to see it wire, but I did learn that. There's a bit of advice in my book about what we learned from the advertising people, which is to get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify and then exaggerate. There was a sense of like us coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to, again, articulate that to the people. So this idea of the optimistic view was not something that was so evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that, that was our role, that, that was what we were doing in part, that, that was sort of what we were about. And that helped tremendously in terms of deciding whether this is a wire story or not. There's tons and tons of direction to go. And so being able to brand it in that sense was us being partly enabled by articulating it ourselves and being able to do that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think then -- like it's so interesting thing across our conversation how maybe the meta piece of advice is don't be the best, be the only. It seems like in business, in creating, in family, in career, in spirituality, this is the advice to end all advice. Do you think that's right?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I think that's right. Again, that came from my time at WIRED. We have story meetings every month, and we were trying to make assignments to story ideas that we had. There were three editors. And I'd have these ideas like this is a really great story. We got to find a really great author, writer for this. This is a really great story. And then nobody else in the room thought it was a good idea. I was like, I don't know, or no or that's no, skip that. And so I would kill that idea and go onto the next idea. They got more ideas, okay? So we do more ideas. But then maybe a year later, that was a really good idea. I really think we should do this. It's still valid. This is really important. I think this would be a great piece. In this case, it was like, no, I don't get it. What's the point? If you came back a third time, I have me trying to kill it. If you came back a third time, I would say, let me try this one more time. And if it got killed the third time, then I would say, oh, I get it now. This is a piece that I have to do. I have to write this one. Because I can't give it away. I think it's really important. I'm the only one who kind of appreciates it. And so those are always my best pieces. It was like, oh, and then when I'm writing it, it's like, there's no competition, but I've been trying to give it away for years. There's no competition. So I can just do this, and it's easy because it's me. And so there was a sense of like, okay, I'm the only. And so when I go on from that, what I learned was to always ask myself, yes, this would be fun to do. Yes, I'm really good at this. Yes, I could get paid to do it, but is there anybody else who could do it? And that's true in business as well. Because if there's someone else doing it, then I don't want to do it. I want to go on immediately to the thing that no one else is doing. The only is in the best, it's highly competitive, the only one, #1 and you can easily be displaced and become #2 instantly. And so you want to be in this direction where you are working, doing things that you find easy, that other people find hard, that only you appreciate. And so that's true for companies, too. You really want to be doing something, not trying to become another OS, another social media app, come on. Those are occupied. Those are occupied by players with network effects. You're not going to work there.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You want to go in a direction that's the only and asking yourself, if you have competitors, they can be good establishing a field and bringing credentials and believability to -- in a market. But the advantage that we had at WIRED was that we didn't have any other. We were so only at the time, there was nothing else like it. And it was hard because trying to sell advertising was impossible in the beginning. And there was no category. WIRED didn't fit into any category. It was like an incredibly difficult sell. Newsstands wouldn't carry it because there was no category. Where do we put this magazine, computer? No, no, it's not a computer magazine. It's technology lifestyle. Like what's that? There's no category for there. So it's hard. It's really hard to be the only in that sense. But if you can, the rewards are very, very high. And I think that's where you want to aim your life, your family, your company, the country. [00:00:00] S0: I think it's amazing that the advice in the book is somehow both counterintuitive and obvious. And just like to sum up, what I'd take from this is the smartest strategy even if you're trying to be selfish is to be generous and unique. And almost everyone does the opposite of those two things, which is totally bizarre. It's also a wonderful excuse to ask you the same question now I've asked, I guess, approaching 500 times now, I've asked every single guest I've ever talked to. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: When I think of kindness, I think of a moment many, many, many years ago when I was traveling in the Philippines, when the Philippines was an incredibly poor developing country. There was not even a good map to the country. There was no guidebook, literally nothing. And I was traveling, exploring there, and I arrived somewhere -- and like no idea where I was going here. I don't even remember why I arrived there. But what happened was some family living in a grass hut waved me in. And I remember that they won't give me dinner, and they sent a kid out, which I saw, to buy some canned food somewhere because they didn't have food themselves, and they took some very, very precious cash, I can just see, to buy food for me. It was for me unbelievably kind. It was like, I don't know, like some random person walks by your house, and you're going to empty your life savings to give to them. So obviously, I had far more than they had, and I could have bought my own food though there wasn't really much for sale. There was like a little tiny canned fish, but it was incredibly precious. And this is what they're giving me, is they're giving me like canned tuna fish, the fork. They're feeding me, unbelievably kind. I just still remember that because they were giving not out of their surplus but out of their basic needs. So it was not a luxury. It was really, really powerful. And they had no reason to do it. It was just hospitality. It was really incredibly kind.