Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I think that the #1 thing is following other people's definition of success, is being swayed by other people's definition of success. And that's so hard to let go of. It's so hard to surrender the idea that unless you have $1 million by the time you're 30, whatever it is, that you're not successful. That's a very narrow, well-trodden niche and is likely holding you back from your true greatness and your true benefit and your true authentic self and your best self because it's probably going to look very different. And so we have these role models like a Steve Jobs. So a lot of people want to be Steve Jobs. Wrong. So -- no. So first of all, he was a jerk. Having met him a couple of times, he was a jerk. He was a brilliant jerk, a genius jerk. You don't want to be him. And I think just trying to let go of and overcome the cliches, the assumed cultural biases that we have on what it is, that, to me in my opinion, has been what I see is the largest impediment to people achieving this because a lot of really authentic success may not look like that to us, to everybody else around you. You don't own a car. You're walking everywhere, whatever it is. And you're saying, I don't think that's successful. And part of it is you're educating people about that, other people so that you have the kind of support that you need or else ignoring it. But it's a very, very difficult thing to let go of and to surrender the assumptions and the prejudices that we have of what that looks like.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think that -- surrender is a powerful word. Do you think that surrender is a big part of this, that the key step is accepting the things that you want may not be the things that other people want, and that's hard? [00:00:00] S1: Yes. And I have a little bit of wisdom in the book saying, the thing that made you weird as a kid, it'll make you great as an adult if you don't lose it. And the problem is that most of the time, you're losing it, you just beat it out of you. You're weird. Who wants to be weird, right? I think surrendering is one aspect of it, but I would say something else, and this is the paradox, that you cannot truly become yourself by yourself. You can only become unique with the help of everybody else. That is the paradox, all right? It's like it's not like you're going to become unique on your own. No, it never happens. It takes everybody to make you unique. You can't do it by yourself. And that is, again, because we are opaque to our own selves, and we need the friends, family, clients, colleagues, customers to show us what we are becoming, to show us who we are. We can't see it by ourselves. We can't get there by ourselves. We need this help. So that is, again, the paradox. The paradox is the only way you can become somebody unique and different from everybody else is by relying on everybody else to help you do it. And so this is not a matter of, okay, you're just going to ignore everybody, that anything says, and you're on your own. You're not going to get there.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. And I have a little bit of wisdom in the book saying, the thing that made you weird as a kid, it'll make you great as an adult if you don't lose it. And the problem is that most of the time, you're losing it, you just beat it out of you. You're weird. Who wants to be weird, right? I think surrendering is one aspect of it, but I would say something else, and this is the paradox, that you cannot truly become yourself by yourself. You can only become unique with the help of everybody else. That is the paradox, all right? It's like it's not like you're going to become unique on your own. No, it never happens. It takes everybody to make you unique. You can't do it by yourself. And that is, again, because we are opaque to our own selves, and we need the friends, family, clients, colleagues, customers to show us what we are becoming, to show us who we are. We can't see it by ourselves. We can't get there by ourselves. We need this help. So that is, again, the paradox. The paradox is the only way you can become somebody unique and different from everybody else is by relying on everybody else to help you do it. And so this is not a matter of, okay, you're just going to ignore everybody, that anything says, and you're on your own. You're not going to get there. [00:00:00] S0: Why do you suggest that people prototype their life versus drawing up grand plans?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: There's a bunch of reasons, but the primary one is that plans are ideal and perfect. And to be real, it means you're imperfect. And you want to take an ideal, perfect thing and make it as real as fast as possible and that making it real means that you want to do a prototype, you want to make it real, and that will expose all the imperfections. But that's good because reality is going to be imperfect. And so you want to take it from the perfect, abstract realm and start making it real as quickly as you can, and that will inform and improve it because you can't improve abstract perfection. You can't improve abstract things very well. You can only kind of improve things that are real. And so that's one of the reasons, one of the many reasons to prototype. And the second one is that very complicated things, whether artificial things like a robot or an AI or technology and ourselves and our lives, the shortest way to arrive at seeing what they are that's reliable is actually to run it. There's like a computational compression that very, very complicated things can only be seen and only be understood by having them run all the way out. You can't like simulate them. If you simulate them, you make a toy model, you abstract them, you're losing too much of it, of what actually happens. And so it's very hard to predict with any kind of accuracy what will happen. Most of the inventors of these great technologies have no idea how they're actually going to be used. And until people start using them do we see what their strengths and weaknesses are. And you can think about this all you want, but it's just not going to match what happens when people actually use it. And the same thing in your kind of life, you can have a plan, but the only really way to get there is to go step by step. And so you want to start that as soon as possible.
· 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.