Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

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Kevin: Well, so I have some other advice in the book about kind of the journey, which I think is close to last week, which is like basically, your goal is to be able to say on the day before you die, that you fully become yourself. Most recently, Kevin has a new book out, which I recommend: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.

It's harder to think different when we're connected together. And I find that traveling, it being physical, having those hurdles that your body has, and being outside of your head and actually immersed in the world, and using your hands to do things, it ignites different ideas. It ignites ideas that you can't get just by thinking about things. I'm a more natural editor than a writer, let me put it that way. My natural tendency is to edit. I'm comfortable editing. I am just in pain trying to write that first draft, and it's just excruciating. Just a few simple questions about that. Two hundred thousand photos: Where in Asia do people most like being photographed, and where do they like it the least? And why? You’re absolutely right in saying that storytelling is a potent medium for conveying information. Libraries are brimming with shelves of advice concealed in stories, because that’s an effective way of transmission. We are made up not of atoms, but of stories. However, I confess, storytelling isn’t my forte. I find joy in creating these compact, telegraphic parcels of wisdom, that’s where my skills lie.

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It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. It’s much cheaper to buy cloth. That’s one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money, is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. If you’re not taking the homemade cloth and making it into your native costume, and you’re buying a shirt — it’s just easier to put on a cotton T-shirt, which you can almost get for free. The costumes just disappear because they’re not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand. I’m reluctant to assign any large general thesis to all the things I’m interested in, because I think it’s just a pure reflection of my own idiosyncratic interest in the world. I’m not sure that there’s a bigger thing connecting them all together.

I would say one thing, one piece of advice, is — if your kids don’t seem to appreciate it, it doesn’t matter. They’ll probably appreciate it later on. COWEN: We’re very similar in this way, but I sometimes think most people don’t actually enjoy their so-called vacations more. They don’t enjoy it when they travel. They may do it for social bonding, or they feel they’re supposed to, or they don’t know what else to do with themselves, but it’s a funny thing to spend so much money on something that makes you less happy. That’s what I observe.I think I’d be very hesitant to use certain kinds of genetic germline alterations. I’m not sure I would say no, but I would certainly be very, very, very hesitant about that. I think we have to be very cautious. So there are things that I’m cautious about, and I would say, “Well, let me see how — ” The second influential group were the Amish and church communities. Interactions with these communities highlighted the importance of unchanging values and the crucial role of community. A principle I’ve recently emphasized is the journey towards authenticity, towards becoming the best, most genuine version of oneself. However, there’s an intriguing paradox here: you cannot fully realize your own self in isolation. It’s a collective effort; your uniqueness is essentially shaped by everyone else in the world. It’s not a solitary, self-reliant endeavor, accomplished on your own. Everyone else plays a role in sculpting your distinct identity. This understanding was a crucial takeaway from the Amish and church communities. They emphasized that individuality is essentially a community project.

In a world that’s rapidly evolving, it’s essential to anchor ourselves to elements that are stable, or at least not subject to frequent changes. These elements are our values and character, the principles we uphold. These principles dwell in the same realm as wisdom. Over time, I'm not sure how I would say it's changed. So maybe, one, is that kind of appreciating the distillation process. It's a piece of advice which I put into the book, which is this idea that all professional writers get to where you have to generate lots of bad stuff, first drafts that you're going to throw away, but know that. And I didn't know that in the beginning. I didn't realize that you would do that.

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Then, secondly, there’s very little projects that might take 25 years or more to do, whether infrastructural or otherwise, and more of those — garnered by the number of people who understand that there’s a benefit to having payoffs come not just for the current generation but future generations — would allow longer-term, maybe even bigger projects to become more normal and conventional than they are right now. KELLY: I think what it matters is a way of auxiliary — I don’t think it’s going to necessarily replace typing, but I think it’ll be another way of interfacing with the technology that we want to do. One of the dreams that Jaron Lanier and others have had with virtual reality is being able to create — paint — things as fast as we could think of them. There could be a way in which we are generating content faster and more easily than the laborious way we have right now of having to put things into language — there may be some way to post-symbolically skip some of the language framing that we do to make, say, an image. KELLY: They are adopting cell phones. Let me caveat that. The Amish decide to use technology parish by parish. It’s a very decentralized way, and there’s many different varieties and many different sects. Generally, the most liberal ones are more at the core of Lancaster County and where the Amish began. Some of the most rigid and ones that are more old-fashioned are actually further away, like in upstate New York or other places.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast appor read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. If you don’t find at least seventeen golden nuggets of advice from Kevin Kelly’s list, you’re not awake.”—Daniel Pink When you forgive others they may not notice but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves. KELLY: One way to answer that is where have I returned to the most. And that would be Rajasthan. That was because it was the most colorful, photogenic, (in some ways) intact of the places. My second favorite is Kerala, for a similar reason. Those two areas I’ve returned to the most often because there was, photographically for me, this little bit of a kind of a vanishing Asia: the intact traditions, the culture, the ceremonies, the festivals, everyday dress was supreme. Kevin Kelly]: Reflecting on my personal journey, there are four influential communities that have significantly shaped my experiences.I think one of the things we see the trends in Christianity is an increasing number of sects and divisions and schisms, and so it’s possible that there could be a sect derived around AI and the ability of making and guiding and creating other beings. So yes, there’s two things going on. There’s this huge commonality and then there is this difference that we find important. If you don't find at least seventeen golden nuggets of advice from Kevin Kelly's list, you're not awake." --Daniel Pink