Tag: kevin kelly

Five articles to recommend: Diamonds, Surveilled cities, Zero to One, PG, and Kevin Kelly’s countdown clock

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? [The Atlantic]

Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship

The most surveilled cities in the world [Statista]

The Chinese city of Taiyuan, located in the Shanxi province roughly 300 miles Southwest of Beijing, tops the list with 120 public CCTV cameras per 1,000 inhabitants. The highest-ranked non-Chinese city is London, also notorious for its strict surveillance of public spaces, with 67 cameras per 1,000 people, with Los Angeles the highest-ranked U.S. city in the ranking with 6 cameras per 1,000 inhabitants

What makes Zero to One a masterpiece? [Ellen Fishbein]

A great company: a conspiracy to change the world.
(A company’s) secret: a specific reason for success that other people don’t see.

Early Work [PG]

But even if Silicon Valley’s encouraging attitude is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a sort of benevolence.

My Life Countdown [Kevin Kellyy]

My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

Just a special book: “There is no limit to the most complex things we will make.”

I’ve read Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants two times now, and often re-read highlights from the book, and I’m always discovering new things I missed before.

I think one reason – among many – for the wonderful breadth and depth of his insights, is his ability to analyze technology as if it were a living, breathing, evolving super-organism.

There is no limit to the most complex things we will make. We’ll dazzle ourselves with new complexity in many directions. This will complexify our lives further, but we’ll adapt to it. There is no going back. We’ll hide this complexity with beautiful “simple” interfaces, as elegant as the round ball of an orange. But behind this membrane our stuff will be more complex than the cells and biochemistry of an orange. To keep up with this complexification, our language, tax codes, government bureaucracies, news media, and daily lives will all become more complex as well. It’s a trend we can count on. The long arc of complexity began before evolution, worked through the four billion years of life, and now continues through the technium

Here are more of my highlights.

And here are Derek Sivers’s highlights from the book, too.

One more mind-blaster:

There is nothing we have invented to date about which we’ve said, “It’s smart enough.”

2020 Personal Bible – updates and excerpts (The Onion, startup pivots, Price of Tomorrow, Octalysis, and Kevin Kelly)

My personal bible is a pdf doc where I save my favorite article excerpts, book highlights, and wisdom notes. I try to read a little bit of it every day.

Here’s an explanation of why I do this. And here’s the latest copy you can download.

Below are all of my recent additions to the bible since the last major update.

—

The Onion founding editor’s writing rules [source]

1. Concept is king

“Your concept — and I would equate that with your headline or title — is the flag you’re raising, it’s the shingle on your door. And if it’s not a good concept or the right concept, then you’re sunk before you’ve even written a word.”

2. The key to quality is quantity

“This is how professionals work,” said Dikkers, “because they understand that most of what they write is dreck.”

[…]

4. Ruffle some feathers

“Thing is, Horatian satire isn’t really remembered because it’s toothless,” said Dikkers. “It might get a lot of laughs today but it’s not going to live in our cultural memory. Only satire that angers or offends people will be remembered.”

—

from Roger Dickey’s blog [source]

Unsurprisingly, many great consumer products were experiments, side projects, or pivots:

Twitch spun out of Justin TV

Slack was an internal tool for a game called Glitch

Twitter was a podcasting network called Odeo

Zynga originally wanted to be a toolbar company

Instagram was a Foursquare competitor called Burbn

Youtube started as a video dating site

Pokemon Go was originally Field Trip, a startup within Google to test location based functionality

Facebook evolved from FaceMash, a “Hot or Not” for Harvard college students

—

The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth [highlights]

As my friend Thuan Pham, the chief technology officer of Uber, recently said to me over breakfast, “I am a firm believer that talent is distributed evenly around the world, but opportunities are not.”>

The only thing driving growth in the world today is easy credit, which is being created at a pace that is hard to comprehend.

Deflation, put simply, is when you get more for your money—just as inflation is when you get less for your money.

As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, “we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.”

Deflation is being caused by technology and, because of that, it will ride the same exponential wave that technology does. That means that the rate of deflation (without printing more money) will only accelerate from here.

The government doesn’t actually have more assets; it’s just representing its assets with more units of currency, which means each unit of currency is worth less—like cutting a pizza into twelve slices instead of eight, or dividing an estate between ten heirs rather than nine.

—

Octalysis gamification framework by Yu-kai Chou [source]

1. Epic Meaning & Calling – the feeling of being chosen to do something greater than yourself 

2. Development & Accomplishment – when you’re challenged to develop skills and make progress

3. Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback – the infinite creativity and possibilities of Legos

4. Ownership & Possession – the drive to collect, accumulate, customize 

5. Social Influence & Relatedness – the need to meet and impress people 

6. Scarcity & Impatience – when you want something because you can’t have it

7. Unpredictability & Curiosity – surprise & delight, variable rewards 

8. Loss & Avoidance – fomo, fear of something gained being taken away

—

8 bits of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice [source]

Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person. 

8 bits of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

Source: Syfy.com

A great list from a great writer and thinker. His book What Technology Wants permanently re-framed how I understood the internet and tech innovation.

Original article here.

Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

Recent additions to the Personal Bible: Kevin Kelly, Eckhart Tolle, and Steven Pressfield

Below are the latest additions to my Personal Bible.

Here’s an explanation of what the Personal Bible is and a past update to it.

You can download the latest version here. If you create your own, would love if you shared it with me!

Example highlights:

Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (I summarized this book a few years back)

  • We have become deeply dependent on technology. If all technology – every last knife and spear – were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.
  • In one year 1 eagle eats 100 trout, which eat 10,000 grasshoppers, which eat 1 million blades of grass. Thus it takes, indirectly, 1 million blades of grass to support 1 eagle.
  • Each new technology creates more problems than it solves.

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art (already in the Bible; these are additions)

  • Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
  • Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn’t go away.
  • The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (which I haven’t finished reading; for me, it’s been less inspiring than The Power of Now, but still a good read)

  • The first part of this truth is the realization that the normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or even madness. Certain teachings at the heart of Hinduism perhaps come closest to seeing this dysfunction as a form of collective mental illness. They call it maya, the veil of delusion. Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest Indian sages, bluntly states: The mind is maya.
  • Throughout history, there have always been rare individuals who experienced a shift in consciousness and so realized within themselves that toward which all religions point. To describe that non-conceptual Truth, they then used the conceptual framework of their own religions.
  • When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.