22 Habits To Follow For A Happy Life - Kevin Kelly

Your new book feels like it was purpose written for me. Massive fan of aphorisms, massive fan of pithy short life advice. For the people that haven't read it, I notice a trend throughout the entire book, which is one of optimism and hope. And at the moment, I notice on the internet a uh current um rhythm of serious cynicism. People believing that the world can't improve, that the people who hope that it can are the ones that are genuinely the problem. What's the case for optimism? Why should people be optimistic at all? I think there's um three reasons uh why you should be optimistic as you possibly can, understanding that it's somewhat a temperament, but actually, I think it is a skill. And um the first reason is is that um if you read any history at all, you soon and and look at the evidence and actual science, you have to conclude that progress is real and that the conditions that generated that progress are still working at work in the world and that this will statistically probably continue for a while. That's one reason. The second reason is that um we know from the work work of child psychologists that people who are optimistic thrive better. That and that and they they they understand they the psychologists understand that one of the ways you teach children is called learned optimism. To be more optimistic is to have them come to understand that setbacks are only temporary. They're not They're inevitable, but they're only temporary. And then the third reason is is that um uh it's the optimists actually are creating all the cool things that we need and that there is making our lives better. All the um the optimist is someone who envisions a world or something that they want to have and can believe believes that it's possible. And that that belief in that envisioning help make it come about because the really good things that we want are so complicated they're not going to happen accidentally, inadvertently. You actually have to imagine them and have to believe that they're going to happen and that requires optimism. And that's why basically it's the optimists who are shaping our future. How much do you think that people can nudge their disposition? One of the easiest ways is to change your time horizon. If you look out beyond just next year or the year after, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it becomes much easier to be optimistic because that that slow growth, that slow compounding of progress can overwhelm even fairly serious setbacks and downturns and disasters even. And so um which are hard to kind of accept or even to to confront with the short term, but if you take a longer term view, a long horizon, then um you have the ability to kind of see that they can be overcome. And that goes back then that the setbacks are just temporary. I suppose this stops you from confusing noise for signal. That you have little ups, little downs, but you're trending in a direction over a broad enough time horizon, the trend is obvious. Right. And it's also has to do with just the supreme power of compounding interest, compounding things. So even if you are only increasing or improving or creating a few percent more than you destroy, if you compound that over time, it becomes a very, very large, consistent force. And then I guess the fourth thing I would say is um I am optimistic and I think others should be too. Not because of um disregarding or dismissing our problems. We we have to be real. There there are problems and there will be even new problems that are even more powerful. I'm optimistic not because the problems I think are smaller than we're aware of, but but because our capacity to solve the problems is increasing even faster. So we're not being Pollyanna in dismissing the the problems when you're optimistic, you're just saying no, our we're we're trusting the future and the future generations and our own skill for solving problems continues to increase. That's an amazing case for it. I'm really trying to rail against this trend, this sort of uh fashion of cynicism on the internet at the moment. And I really, really want I've called it toxic positivity uh because I needed to come up with something. And um I call it rad radical optimism. And um yeah, radical optimism is my term for it. Or militant Actually, my friend Lewis says militant optimism, which I thought is even cooler. That is cooler. Yeah. Right, okay. First one, don't be the best, be the only. What's that mean? This is sort of at the core of of the book and maybe my own philosophy. Um it suggests that achieving the best is kind of what we're taught to do is to be the best in things. But the best by definition is a very narrow very narrow niche. There can really only be one. And you're kind of limiting um the numbers and and your chances of actually achieving that. And also because it's basically it's someone else's definition of success. It also um excludes most likely you and your own particular set of abilities and capabilities. And so um if you uh head towards becoming the only, that's a much wide open area that is potentially full of a billion different onlys, all of them pursuing something different in in in a certain sense what you are getting to do is to invent a new definition for success. All right. There's a There's a famous Naval quote where he says, "Become the best at what you do. Keep defining redefining what you do until this is the outcome." Exactly. Right. So so you're you're you're kind of coming up with your own definition of success and aiming at that. And and and by the way, um it most likely should not include a billion dollars. Right? Because um you actually don't want a billion dollars. I mean literally, this is my other piece of advice not in a book. If whatever you do, try your hardest not to have a billion dollars. Because it's going to ruin your life. And um a couple million, fine, but not a billion. Why? Oh my gosh. It's imprisoning. It's a burden. It's terrible for your kids. It's um it becomes it overtakes your life. Uh it becomes never present. You can't actually spend it um as fast as you it'll earn it money back. And um and then you're the only thing you can do with it is give it away and that's now another whole another job and for all its own complications. And it become takes over your life. And so you're now kind of a slave to to the billion. I have a friend who owns a very big sportswear company. His net worth is three times Drake's net worth. So the one of the most famous rappers on the planet. net worth? Okay. It's It's like over two I think it's he's worth two two and a bit bill, right? Okay. Um I went to a place called Nando's in the UK with him, which is a famous chicken chain that exists. We sat down for dinner on an evening time, 5:00, and he was sat playing on his phone and his EA and his EA's PA was sat a few tables across and they were working away on their laptops. And I remember thinking as I was sat with him, imagine the problems that Drake would have encountered if he'd tried to come for dinner at Nando's with me. He wouldn't have been able to get within two miles of this location without being absolutely mobbed. And yet, the guy that sat opposite me is sat there with no security. He's sat there, no one hassling him, no one really even paying attention to him. And what it got me thinking about was the price that people pay for the level of wealth that they have and that there are differing prices that people can pay. Maybe a billion full stop, regardless of your level of scrutiny, is something that you shouldn't try and aim for, but there's within that, you think about Drake, he would be mobbed by by paparazzi and press and people be coming up to him and he wouldn't be able to get any peace and he'd need a million security guards and he'd have to speak to the restaurant beforehand and there'd be crowd control. And this guy that sat opposite me gets to just uh play Sudoku on his phone or do whatever he's doing beforehand. So the price that you pay for the wealth you have is something that I'd never considered before. Well, yeah, I mean there's a little bit of conflation between wealth and fame. So it's not your Drake's wealth, it's his fame. And fame is is you something you definitely do not want to to aim for at all. Some people are famous inadvertently like, you know, like Obama. He can't really help that. But aiming for it is is is crazy because it is imprisoning and completely debilitating for the very reasons you say. So um so that's something that you think you might want, but you really don't. Um and and my advice on that is read a book about any famous person, really famous person, and you'll see what the consequences of that is. Um it only begins in where you're describing and extends even further. Um but wealth i- i- is is is equally not equally, but there's another kind of tax that you pay for it. And that's maybe the best way to put it is that there's definitely a tax for that wealth and it will be paid out in other things. All this to say that when you're defining your success, it should certainly include other things than money because that's just simply not the most important thing. And um it's uh you know, your success and and and having been around the people who have a billion dollars, it's really funny because the billion they're asking the same questions that all of us are asking, which is what do I do when I grow up, right? No matter how old you are. And the billion dollars doesn't give them the answer to that. Okay? It actually contributes to the problem cuz like where do I go from here? And so um um that definition of success and and and and that's for me the joy of seeing people who are pursuing their own definition. And it might be that they um they have total control of their time, which I think is one of the highest forms of wealth rather than much of money is that the most abundant thing. Money is is abundant but the scarcest thing is our own time. And having control of that is my definition of true wealth. In your opinion then, should people take most of the opportunities that they can to trade wealth for time? Yes, absolutely. In fact, that's what really rich people try and do although not very successfully, but yes. And and and and it's much easier than you know, I I say you know, one of my bits of advice is that you know, the rich have a lot of money, the wealthy have control of their time and it's much easier to be wealthy than rich. Okay? So I like to boast when I'm with among my my billionaire friends that I'm the wealthiest there because I have total control of my time. I don't have to worry about my entourage, the EAs, the personal assistants, whatever it is. It's like no, it's I I have I have my time. What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days. For sure. And um that is uh going back to the kind of basic understanding we have now of habits and that um what you um want to do is is have something that will get you through the bad days because everybody will have them. And if they stop you or impede you, um that's something you want to overcome. You want to be able to just kind of like absorb them to to to to understand that okay, today was a bad day. I didn't get much done. Or you know, whatever I was working on failed or I was rejected, whatever it is. But tomorrow, I get to try try again and do I'm going to do again. I'm going to make it I'm going to make some more. I'm going to try another idea. And um so your how you deal with the bad days is really the um the secret to kind of moving forward. Tim Ferriss once said uh he wanted to design his life to be able to crush the average Tuesday. And I just thought it was such a lovely way to put it and I I spoke to a friend, Rob Dyrdek, recently and he said he wants his average Tuesday he's optimizing for the normal Tuesday. He just wants the normal Tuesday to be as enjoyable as possible. That's okay. Let me think about that. That's that's that's an interesting way of um Right, so the average Tuesday is your best day? I don't know if you're you say optimize. So um he he wants it to be that an average Tuesday has as much enjoyment in it as possible. Right. Doesn't need to be spectacular. Right. Just needs to be normal. As good as it gets is your average Tuesday. Um yeah, that would be um or or yeah, I'm just you know, I you've got me now trying to think about how I make this into The aphorist the aphorist is coming out. Right. Yeah, so so but but the the the impulse I think is is correct. And that is um you know, your life basically is what you make on your average Tuesday in a certain sense. That Yes. There are way more average Tuesdays than there are peak experiences. Right. The um I love the idea of a good bad day as well. That you get out of bed and oh, there's a been a some sort of nightmare at work or there's a flood that the toilet's backed up and everything goes out the window and yet when you look back at the end of the day, you still consider it a success or you you are fulfilled or you feel Right right right right. Yeah, so there's something yeah, making that your your worst day still an okay day or the you know, something that you can feel good about. Yeah, you're sort of that's interesting is you're sort of trying to elevate not your elevate your highest day, but you want to elevate your worst days so that they're not so bad. Correct. Bringing that Bringing that safety net up. Right. That's interesting. Although yeah, I mean there are disasters and things that can be your new worst day, you know, you having three kids and getting older been around. There are you know, there are just unexpected days are way beyond your control. Yes. a bad day. I suppose what you what you're trying to optimize for is on average higher lows rather than higher highs. Exactly. You want your average bad day to be Yeah, okay. Okay. Um the thing that made you weird as a kid will make you successful as an adult. Why? I have seen so many people like this. Oh, I think you forgot the last part, if you don't lose it. So so the idea is is is is that a lot of people were kind of weird as a kid and they kind of put that behind them, but you want to keep that thing. You want you want to to nourish it in some way and cherish it. And it's not just the child-likeness, it's the fact that um there's something in you that's inherently different than others and it's that difference that we're trying to accentuate and emphasize and grow and cultivate because the difference is what makes the wealth and innovation and all these other things possible and the reason why we're not being duplicated by robots. The more the more special and unique and weird you are, the less likely you're going to be replaced by AI. So um so that kind of weirdness in them is is often a suggestion, a reflection of your inherent makeup and dispositions and tendencies and abilities. And we tend to get them beat out of us as we go through school and looking for a job and trying to be the best in something. Um and so if you can retain some of that or return to it, I think you have a higher chance of being the only rather than being the best. I love that. I think it's a more pure view into or a clearer view of your passions before they become molested or perverted by other incentives, by money, by status, by prestige, by sex, all those things. I I remember reading this amazing story about one of the world's most successful color pickers. So this lady would choose color wheels for the best fashion houses in the world, the best interior design companies in the world. There was an interview that was done with her and she was asked, "How is it that you're so good? You've been the best in your field at this. What's your training been like? Talk me through your process." And she said, "Well, to be honest, I I'm not formally trained in this, but when I was 9 years old, my parents bought me the biggest Crayola crayon set that was available and I used every single one of them down to the nub. And I thought that is somebody who was weird in childhood and didn't lose it when they got to adulthood. Exactly. And there's tons and tons of stories. I'm counting people like that all the time. Um and and and you know, a lot of people I mean basically you you ideally you'll have a business card and your occupation should be pretty unique to yourself. And that is happening um all the time. Right now today, that's the to me the the beauty of technology and why I'm a big booster of it is that it gives us more and more options. It permits more and more people to find their genius and share it in ways that you could not do before the invention of you know, the symphony or or cinema or um laser uh all these enable um new ways of expressing and somebody somewhere is born with that right combination if we can get them matched up. A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others. Mhm. Yeah, there's a little bit of um if you find it irritating, it's a signal that this is resonating with you in a certain way and it doesn't mean that you were like that. It just means that you have something in you that's particularly attuned to this and that you should investigate it to be sure that you are not like it, but even if you are not like it, it that is indicating that something about yourself that you haven't really kind of explored yet. And and and I think my basic premise, I know this from the quantified self movement which we started, is that we're opaque to ourselves. We're kind of like the last to know about ourselves in many ways. Both collectively as humans, we don't know how our brains work and why we do things, but even individually, we have um we're blocked in some ways from accessing our true understanding of ourselves or even our memories, our motivations and we need a lot of discipline as well as outside help to understand ourselves. And this is another tool in that toolkit of trying to come to understanding about ourselves. There is a when you see somebody else that is being irritating, it activates inside of you. It triggers something inside of you, which resonates with with part of your own makeup. Yeah, I am I I totally totally agree. I think that it's so interesting to consider how self-deceptive we are. You know, evolutionarily it makes total sense. If you need to kid everybody else that you're not a complete freak that talks to themselves in the shower, Right. Right. does all of the myriad weird idiosyncrasy stuff that we do. Right. Right. Right. The best way to convince them that you're not mental is to not believe that you're mental yourself, which means that you are the easiest person to fool by yourself and the last person to know. And and also there's also another evolutionary advantage, which is you really don't want the ego to be able to mess around too much in in your fundamental operating system. Absol- Oh, the base the base code should not be tinkered with. Right. And and so you don't really want to have easy access to that because you'll be messing around with it otherwise. And so there is a kind of a deliberate distancing that we do just to to to keep operating. Protect the vital systems. Exactly. I love Yeah, I'm Well, I mean, imagine to take it to an extreme, imagine if you had to consciously think every time you wanted to breathe or every time you wanted to digest food. You know, it's just a a difference of degree to roll that up toward your view of your own status or what you find attractive or etc. etc. Yeah. You can ignore any website with the word truth in its URL. Yeah. Uh and then the email with with something similar with with a with a really good bargain. Um Yeah, it's it's Most of my knowledge has been channeling the ancients and the stoics and the Bible. This is not one of them. a much more contemporary one based on my own experience and what I've seen in the world. So, um I could be wrong about that, but generally that's a good heuristic and rule of thumb. What do you think about the you can ignore any science that's got the word science in the title heuristic? I haven't heard that one. Social science. Like Christian science? Um Yes. Yes. Social science? Uh yeah. Um I don't I wouldn't say you could ignore it, but um Yeah, that there is a parallel. I had not thought about that. Um What it what it means is that um you need a lot more evidence. So like any kind of even whether the social science, but even in medicine, you we can't really make policy based on just one or two studies. We need You need hundreds of studies. Be And that's because the body and sociology is so complex that even unlike physics where one or two experiments can tell you a lot, in these arenas, you need hundreds of experiments. Multi- more multivariate. Right. Just over time all kinds of uh variables diluted. And so by the way, this is why I'm very very reluctant to make policy now based on social media because we haven't done the hundreds of experiments. There's one or two experiments about the consequences of social media. And it's just like it's like having one or two medical studies. You you just should not be making policy based on just a handful that have been done mostly in the US and not even around the world. So, um so I'm a big advocate of more and more constant testing and knowledge and um investigation. Um and and and and and persistent doing it again. Un- unlike the FDA where they do it once and then they approve it and then they never tested again. That's also not really um modern. And so uh So right now, we just And AI will be a whole 'nother thing because we've done almost zero. And it's like a year old. Who knows anything? So trying to make policy based on whatever might have come up is just completely ridiculous. We just don't know enough yet. Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 90% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it. Right. So so I was a kid who sat in class up in the front row and I I asked all the stupid questions. And um people would come up to me all the time saying, "Thank you for asking that question. I was too embarrassed to ask it." So, um And for some reason I wasn't embarrassed to ask the stupid question. Why do you think that's the case? How can people become less embarrassed to be stupid? I don't really know the answer to that one. Um I've never lacked self-confidence and that's another question people have is where does it come from or where do you get it? And I don't know. Um I I I think it may have something to do with a lack of empathy, meaning that I kind of didn't care what other people thought. Like full stop. Yeah. He really does care. He's thinking about other people and I was not thinking about other people. It was like I wasn't asking the question for their sake. I genuinely had the stupid question. That was my question. And so it wasn't as if I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm going to ask a question because for the benefit of others." No, no, no. It was like This isn't altruistic. This is completely selfish. I was just a stupid guy who was naive enough to say, "I don't know what you're talking about." Nailed it. So a a good parallel to what I've done on the show, I ask, you know, thousands of questions a year to people on this podcast. The questions that get the most uh praise or thanks in the comments are when I'll say, "What's that word mean?" Someone someone used the word uh bivalve the other day. And what's that? And you go, "It's like an oyster." Oh, thank you. Um those are the the most stupid I I I I thought that I didn't know what a bivalve I was the only one that wasn't bivalve pilled on this podcast. And it turns out it turns out that other people are as well. So yeah, I you know, it this goes all the way up. It's outside of school. It's outside of everything. Right. Right. And and by the way, you know, I I'm a born editor rather than a writer and I edited magazines and Wired. And this is something that I was doing that I would do when editing is I am representing the reader at that point, but mostly again it's for for me. And that it was if I did not truly understand something, it was like you got to explain it to me cuz I don't mean by that? What do you mean by that? Because I don't understand it. And you And so But there was also a balance by the way because there's also a tendency in journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, to have to explain everything over and over again aiming to the kind of 11-year-old. Mhm. Where for a while in the '90s, if you use the word DNA, you had to explain You had to say, "DNA, that thing that you know, whatever." It was like, "I know what DNA is. I don't need to hear that." here's an interesting insight there. As new fields open up, the conceptual inertia hasn't propagated sufficiently quickly, which means that you end up with much more clunky articles for a short period of time until the whatever cultural Overton window has caught up and now everyone's back in. Right. So it would be like here's here's the kind of test. You're going to write an article about something like So you mention the word chat GPT. Do you need to explain it or not? I depends who you're writing for. You're writing for your mom? Right. So so my advice to the people at at Wired writers, this is my standard advice to the writers. You're not writing to your mom. You're not writing to the 11th grader. You're writing to me. I am your audience. I am bored. You have to amaze me. And so if it's something So you're trying to guess what is it that I know, of course, right? And so I know about chat GPT, so that in for Wired it would definitely would not be explaining it by now. Um transformer model, large language models? Probably not. I don't know. But But this is a balancing act between, you know, bivalve, would I um have to explain that in an article for Wired? I want to know what the article in Wired is that's talking about oysters. Yeah. Um yeah, it's that's fascinating. You know, I think about it a lot on the show as well. How much how how much brevity can I get away with? How much is too much? How much color brings people along for the ride? How much patronizes them? Um it's a real a real balancing act. And some days, you know, you come in and you think, "This is the first time that we have ever spoken about the evolutionary basis for bullying." I had this guy called Tony Volk on the show recently. Okay, I need to hear your definition. I need to hear why it's adaptive. I need to hear who does it, what whether it's heritable, da da da da da da all the way down. And then you as your learning goes on. But that's the perfect way that you said it. If you presume that you are somewhere close to the aggregate avatar of the audience that you're speaking to, would you need it ex- When you learned it, did you need to explain it to you? Right. Did you need to go and do tons of research? If so, you may need to pass that on. If not, if you thought, "Yeah, of course I know what that is." Maybe, you know, if you become intimately familiar with bivalves, you're probably fine. So, so when we were doing Wired, we had the advantage that we were starting Wired, and basically there wasn't an audience. And so, we said, "We are making a magazine that we want to read, and basically we're going to find other people who you know, are like us. Right? That that That's what we're doing. We're writing an article, so we're going to attract the people who are like us. Okay? So, so if you talk at my level, we're going to attract people that are interested, and it turned out to be a lot of people wanted to have that kind of a conversation at our level. So, we found them, or they found us, because they they they would open up the thing, and they would hear this conversation at our level, and they would go, "I That's me. That's my tribe." This is my tribe. Yep. You're talking at the right level that I'm at. Yep. Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans. So, this is really the subtitle of my book, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. It just took me way, way too long to kind of get there. There's a very in um What's the word I want? Literal meaning of prototyping, where, you know, I I do I make a lot of stuff. I can't show you, but I make I've been a maker all my life. I'm making things still, and it took me a long time to get to understand that you can only make a really great thing by prototyping it along the way. This even this I've now taken it to heart, and even this book I I prototyped. I made little versions of it, bound books. These happen to have doodles that the publisher rejected, but but um excuse me. Um So, I I think um that's the literal sense of actually, you know, when I'm making a writing a book, I'm going to literally write a first draft all the way through to the end that will kind of be thrown away. The builder people call build one to throw away. You And then that idea of like making a chair all the way, and then just to kind of discard it to make the better one, that was just so that was just so hard for me to kind of accept as a as a efficient way to do it, or as as as because making one thing anyway to the end was such a such a challenge, and so hard that, you know, just doing it to throw away seemed crazy. But that is really what I discovered the only way you can make something really great. And so, um uh this idea the expands to beyond just a project is to if you're trying to start a business or something, rather than quitting your job, and hi- getting a lot of money, and making a 5-year plan, you prototype it by trying something for a 3 weeks, or just see how far you can do with the with 10 products, or 10 items that you're trying to sell or make. Or you do what the Airbnb guys did when they were prototyping Airbnb is, you know, they had some air mattresses, and they were going door to door taking pictures of people who were having the air mattress in their house, and it was a prototyping stage. So, that's it's low commitment, high leverage, learning um experiment, where you're iterating your way to a greater success. And that's I think the approach that works in life as well. Um I can't tell you the number of people that I've met who went through school, did a graduate degree, and wanted to become a lawyer. So, they they learn law school, and then they graduate, within 5 weeks of working a law firm, that they realize they hate it. They never once like did an internship, or or volunteered at a lawyer just to hang around to see what it was. You want to prototype. You just don't want to go that way. That's Stress test your assumptions. Yes. The whole way. Your assumptions, try out something, do a version of it that's a mock-up. When we did our kitchen remodel, I did a full-scale model of the um remodel in cardboard from refrigerator cardboard with duct tape. And then you can learn an incredible amount of seeing the real-size thing. It's like, "Oh, this shouldn't be here. This should be over here. This should be a little bit higher." And um that's the best approach, I think, to both projects and life. I've got one of my favorite ones I came up with a number of years ago, which was a a note to myself, which is perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control. That's probably true for some people. I think a lot of people uh optimize for perfecting rather than shipping at a pace required to work out what works, because they never have to face real-world rejection, failure by keeping everything behind the scenes. Right. And and that's also something that I've learned again from blogging and being at Wired was um this idea of sharing your work really early before it's done in order to get feedback, because once it's done, it's really hard to change. And so, there's this idea of that I do now of writing out loud. I call it writing out loud, writing publicly, and versus I mean I'm again I'm always impressed by the fantastic musical Hamilton, the way that they workshopped that for a decade, just trying and trying in live, and getting the feedback, and changing it. And so, that is that's when that's the best time to get feedback is before you're done. Here's the other thing as well, involving somebody in the process of a creative work gets them to be more bought in than you can imagine. So, I'm doing some live shows solo live shows towards the end of this year. I'm going to do some work in progress shows between now and then. I need to get in front of a room of 20 to 50 people before I stand at Leicester Square Theatre on a Sunday night sold out in London. Um and I'm going to have probably a laptop or an iPad attached to my hand. You know, it's going to be messy, there won't be music, it'll be blah blah. The money will go to charity for the people that come along. But I would wager that the people who get to say to their friends, "I went to go and see Yeah. progress show, you know?" And it was actually really interesting, cuz I got to observe it out loud, and blah blah blah. Uh you know, we used to do this with um with club nights, too. So, I ran nightclubs for a very long time. Before we released the brand, what we would do is we would involve the most influential guys and girls that go out and party in town in the process. What, you know, if the room two music upstairs, do we want to go sort of more tech house, or do we want to go more tropical house? We didn't care about their feedback. We wouldn't take their feedback on board. We knew what we wanted to do with regards to this event. But they would feel when the night was finally announced that they had almost a sense of ownership, they were emotionally invested. So, yeah, I think asking people for feedback and you'll have seen Jonathan Haidt is basically writing his book on Substack, and you know, this is the the most direct example that I could think of to what you're saying. I wrote my book on my blog. Um and and so, uh it's the the smart authors realize the value of this. And here's the thing you get. You get all the all the mistakes and corrections corrected very early, because the internet is really good at correction, right? And so, and then you get extra ideas of "Oh, did you think about that? Did you know about that?" No, I didn't. Thank you so much. Um and it's much more embarrassing to get that later on when it's published. So, yes, that that aspect of of writing out loud, of um creating it collectively, creating with your audience, co-creating things, it's just super, super under under appreciated, and the often the hesitancy for people is they're afraid someone's going to steal their idea. And this goes back to um don't be the best, be the only. When you're the only, that's not a problem. Okay? So, I came to this kind of realization myself through my efforts at Wired, where I was trying to assign story. We had story ideas, and we have Here's a great story. We find find writers to write these ideas. And I'd have an idea that I thought was really great, and I just simply could not give it to anybody. I could not sell it to them. For years, I'd try again and again. Try to kill off the idea. There's no good. Then it come back, and I think it is good, but I just can't get anybody to write it. And then eventually, I'd realize after years that, "Oh, I have to write it." And while I was writing it, I didn't wasn't There wasn't any competition. There wasn't I could take my time, because I had been trying to give it away for so long. So, this idea of like I now when I'm working on something, I talk about it to everybody, hoping that someone will take it. Cuz if they take it, it means I don't have to do it. That wasn't for me. All right? And so, you can be generous if you're really trying to do something. You can be generous in sharing your work early, because no one else is going to take it. And if they do, good for them. So, you should over- overcome the hesitancy about sharing things if you're really working on something that's only you. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Yeah. We under- You know, humans I think animals feel pain. We don't think that they suffer very much um in the way that we do. So, it's sort of uh Yeah. We feel pain. That's inevitable, but we can turn it into suffering by What's the word? By being victimized by it. And so if we decide that um this is pain and we will try and deal with the pain. We don't have to suffer and I think the difference is um Here's what it is. I think pain is outside. Suffering is internal. Pain is a is an external thing and suffering is more of an identity. And you don't want that pain to become your identity. You want it to be something that is a trait, something that you are something that surrounds you rather than something that's integral to you. One of the ways you learn optimism and teach optimism to kids, and optimism is a skill you can learn, is to understand that um as a kid that setbacks are only temporary. They're not your identity. You're not saying, "Oh, I am an unlucky person." And suffering has a little bit of that sense of uh an acceptance of a fate of an identity rather than um the pain which is external and can be overcome. You can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into. So I have an I have another aphorism that I'm working on that I haven't actually published it and so I don't have the words down. But um most arguments are not about the argument. They're usually they're usually uh just they're usually about something else at an emotional level, something else at an identity level, something else at a sub sub subconscious level. And so that's where a lot of our views come from. Most of the our views are inherited, they're given to us. We kind of accumulate them without even being aware of it. Um and so trying to get out of that through a logical process is just simply usually not going to work. And that's why I say one of the best ways to change someone's mind is to listen to them very carefully and try to understand why they believe what they're believing. You actually get more you get further along in helping them change their mind that way than actually by arguing with them. Yeah, it's uh it also probably saves you an awful lot of time. Right, from trying to uh drowning yourself while trying to save somebody else who refuses to swim in in whatever argument they're doing. I have a friend who's got a Gwenda's theory of bespoke [ __ ] Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim and half-remembered hearsay before deciding that this 2-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on. Right. Well, somewhere else I give advice that um you have you can get more respect for your opinions if you're able to be able to state the other side as well as the other side could. And that you really shouldn't um be offering your opinions unless you are prepared to kind of be able to explain it to that to that level of understanding the other side. And so that's a again, that's a very high bar and and it should be a high bar for for pontificating on say controversial things is that you should be able to state the other side to the satisfaction of the other. Along now we ran a debate series. And that was one of the conditions of the debate was once I would state their um premise or their idea and the other side had to restate it to the satisfaction of the first one before you can move on. And that's by the way, that's a that's a pretty big hurdle for a lot of people. Well, this is the thing about being convinced by anything. You don't really get to choose what you're convinced by. There are degrees of self-deception that people can go through and sort of willful self-deception as well, I I I suppose. But if you were convinced by the thing that the other side is convinced by, you would also be convinced by it. Right. So it is very important and I it's such a good tool, steelmanning is such a good tool to turn down the volume of antagonism and adversarialness that occurs. I'm currently writing a book at the moment and everything that we're doing in it is to give theory of mind from one group to another group. Right. Like have you ever considered what it's like to be this person? Have you ever considered what it's like to be the other person? Right. Here as soon as you do, you just realize, "Oh god, yeah, maybe maybe it's not overblown. Maybe maybe they genuinely do have a case here. Maybe they do genuinely suffer in ways that I couldn't foresee." Yeah, absolutely. Um and and usually it's not a lack of information or or information itself that that is changing people's minds. And so um yeah, so you so you don't have to attend every argument that you're invited to. Trust me, there is no them. Yeah. That one's a little hard to explain. But that's born out of my own experience in working with my kids, too. Um There's no them because most people are not because of incompetency rather than anything else. Right? I mean, they're just the the them that you would imagine requires a degree of competency and collaboration and whatnot um to work and that's why power, you know, being paranoid is not really useful because the universe isn't really conspiring. They're just not capable of it. Um and so uh that them doesn't I I want to be sure to indicate that there is there are systems that have a prejudice. There is systematic racism in the world. So there is a there is a a system that will be biased. But there's still not a them there because because the people involved in that system are not even willing and not necessarily collaborating, they're not being deliberate. So there are So the individuals are not the them. There can be certainly a system that is biased. But when you meet someone it's not the them and there's no real there's no real ability to conspire against you in the way that you might imagine. I've come upon the exact same thing. I've just given it a different name. So Andrew Schulz, comedian from New York, very funny guy, uh he taught me this lesson and I renamed it Schulz's razor. So it's not coordination, it's cowardice. Schulz taught me a great lesson during our episode. This is him, quote, "A lot of the time we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group. From the outside it looked like a coordinated assault, collusion orchestrated by some malign overlord conspiracy. But on the ground it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house they can barely pay the mortgage on and a wife who wants a new car and private school for their kids. It is much easier to just adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about children or ban somebody for saying something innocuous from a platform, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan. The incentives encourage execs, influential actors, and the people in power to behave in particular aligned ways, but their coordination is not consciously conducted, it's just the path of least resistance for each person." Yeah, I I agree. That's that's a very good description of it. Um So all that's true and then I would reduce it to there's no them. There's no them. I should have just said there's no them. That would have been quicker. Uh tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than mountains. And by the way, there's again too literal things of this. I I do these walk and talks where we invite people and we walk and um there are people who are very fit who are very healthy um and they could climb a mountain, but they are just brought low by a little tiny blister because they have bought new shoes. Don't ever buy new shoes for a long hike. And so um so yeah, the small things metaphorically um can bring down. So you you do want to make sure that you pay your taxes, right? And you do want to make sure that your bank accounts are balanced and all that kind of stuff in order to to do the really great things that you are called to do. I often think about the um very normal everyday things that the most excellent people have to do. Yeah. And um this really sort of points the finger at it quite nicely. There's another one here and this I think might be the one that resonated with me the most despite the fact that it's the least applicable to me. You lead by letting others know what you expect of them. Which may exceed what they expect of themselves. Provide them a reputation that they can step up to. I thought that was very very interesting. Yeah, I I I I think I got that a little bit from um Steve Jobs in his attitude of of leadership of really and and I had a I had a track coach that was the same thing. It's like he led by leading me to believe in my capabilities beyond what I believed myself. And he kind of pointed to this things and believe that I would get there and I did get there. Um even though that I didn't see that. So he kind of led me into stepping up myself. And and I see that in great leaders and people who work with them getting their best. And there was this belief and the person seemed unreasonable at the time who demanded a certain level of excellence and performance that the employees at the time didn't really think was possible, but this person knew could see in them that they were capable and led them by expecting it from them. Mhm. How can people become better uh either as recipients or as broadcasters of finding that balance between tyranny and inspiration? It is you're right. It is a balance because by the way Steve Jobs was a really mean guy who certainly went overboard with this in his demands. Um Uh I think you I think you have to look at the people that you are guiding whether they remain healthy. If they're if they're truly if their marriages are suffering, if their children are complaining about them, if other things in their life are not working, then then you're probably pressing too hard. The if you're really the this works and enlarges the wholeness of a person at its best. If it's not doing that, then it's probably too much. So I think we this was the Amish the story of the Amish who when are still deciding about new technology and which to accept it. And they will let the early adopter Amish there are early adopter Amish adopt new things, but they were saying we're watching you and your family and how you treat people and what you're doing with your day as an evaluation of whether we you should continue to use this stuff. And so that idea of um you know Steve Jobs' is weakness was probably not in paying attention to that whole person. Just looking at their performance at work and forgetting the fact that this would be having an impact on the rest of them. If they were paying attention to that, he could see whether or not this was a positive for them or a negative. Right now, no matter your age, these are your golden years. Yeah. The good stuff will yield golden memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons. Yeah. These are your golden years. It's not when you're 70. It's like right now. You are living in your golden years. This is it. And um that is going back to your kind of like your best bad day. These are your best bad years in a certain sense. It's like yeah, no, you want you want to celebrate this year because this is as good as it's going to get. And which will be true for next year, too. But um this idea of kind of celebrating the present as as the best. And um I have a friend who well, his name is Hugh Howey. He's now uh this week last week his new story was put onto Amazon Prime, the Silo stories. Oh, one of my friends has told me that I need to watch that. listen, but it was written by Hugh and he started off writing he's a bookstore clerk and he started writing little chapters that were all put on Amazon and he made it succeeded beyond his dream. But the thing was was optioned and um taken through many many steps. And it was like each time it would go through and then it would be fail and then that someone else would pick it up and then there'd be you know, casting and would collapse there and there was this thing and and he was saying what he learned to do was that each time it moved a step ahead, he would celebrate as if that's as far as it was going to go. Mhm. Like it was optioned. Okay, we're going to have a celebration cuz it's probably not going to go any beyond that. And so at every moment he's celebrating the thing as if that was the victory. Yeah. So you do the sense of these intermediate victories become you accept them as a well, may not go any further than that. So we're going to celebrate this. And I think you can then do the same thing with your years. It's like you may not have additional years. So why not celebrate this as the best year of your life? I think a lot of people presume that if they give themselves an out in some regard, if they celebrate too much that it's going to kill that drive. But if you look at the relative balance between how much people over celebrate and how much people over uh whip themselves, flagellate themselves because they're not if they're Puritan work ethic, uh it's way more on the other side. There's a related concept that I learned about called deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. Yeah, I think you're right. There's no prelude, right? This is it. And um that that's another piece of advice that I wrote recently that's not in the book, which is um don't save the best China and the best wine for some day that's never going to happen. You use them as much as possible now because this is this is the time to celebrate. Scratch the Rolex. Yeah, I agree. Um whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions. Don't confuse kindness with weakness. Yeah. Yeah, so you can't be too kind. That's that's true and that's um it's related to another piece of advice I have about attending as many funerals as you can and listen to what people say. Um my observation was having done this recently is almost nobody talks about the achievements of the departed. They talk about what they were like, how they made them feel, whether they were kind or funny or helpful. And so those are the qualities that we remember and that means in a certain sense they may they become the most important qualities that we have and um kindness is always at the forefront and it's a kind of empathy and a kind of um uh it's an acceptance of the general I think it's it's it's it's being realistic about the actual state of humans, which is that we tend to be at our heart kind-hearted, helpful and selfless given all things being equal. And what we're taught in school that we're selfish as a premise is wrong. And if you accept the fact that kindness is uh always a coordinate, people will be kind to you in return, which is really weird. But there is this weird paradox, which is that the more you give, the more you're get. And that's true for everybody. And mathematically that does not add up. But that is the foundation of the universe. And when you're kind, it's the probably the most selfish thing you can do. Correct. People are going to treat you their best. And so weirdly, paradoxically, the selfish thing you can do is to be kind. What would be a scenario where you need to make a choice between being right or being kind? Oh, all the time. Um Particularly you like I don't know. If if if there's a um you told someone you tried to help someone they didn't do what you suggested and um it didn't work out. Being right would be reminding them about that that you were right. Being kind would be not to mention that. Um that's just one kind of trivial example, but um there is uh uh all the time I I I see this in marriages all the time where you can be like yeah, I can be right. Um this is this is the thing to do, but the kindness would suggest um you do it. So so my wife and I have this thing where we can all rotate in them always being right. And so this idea is like you're always right. I'm going to what it's right. And that's kindness and not rightness. We cuz we're not saying whether they're really right. We're saying we're treating you as if you're right. So that's that works. That that it works very very powerfully because because basically it is in alignment with the general drift of the universe of human-ness, which is that we are basically kind. The other thing it does is it accounts for our irrationality. You know, we're not utility optimizers. If we were, then you would always want the most right answer at all times. Right. But you're not you're emotional and and you're you're going to take things not based on the facts, but based on the way that you feel. There's another a really great quote that I love that says, "Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve." Well, C.S. Lewis talked about his definition of heaven and hell. He said heaven and hell are basically taking take you as you are right now and what you're becoming and just make it infinite. Right? So, wherever you are. So, if you're a kind of a person who's been cheating people and is just kind of out for themselves and it's like, "Okay, you just keep extending that infinitely." That's hell. If you're a person doing your better and going a little bit better, that's heaven. So, it's it's it's your current trajectory just multiplied by infinity. Kevin Kelly, ladies and gentlemen. Kevin, I really appreciate this works fantastic. As like I say, the fledgling aphorist in me is really really impressed by this. Excellent advice for living. Everybody should go and check that out. Is there anything else anywhere else that you want to direct people? Um not really. I I I appreciate the attention. People can find me at my website, which is my initials, kk.org. I'm on the socials as well, where I publish my art every day. Um I do have a recommend a newsletter, which we've done for 6 years. It's free every Sunday and it's the recommended stuff is one page. Um and you'll So, people can sign up for that, but mostly um take a look at the book. And by the way, the one thing I've learned about doing this recently is that um if you have kids, generally the kids won't pay any attention to the advice you give, but you can point them to a book the other expert and they'll pay attention to that. So, um it really works great in that respect. Kevin, thank you very much for today. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.