[The Knowledge Project Ep. #166] Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living

Shane Parrish: Where I want to start today is: on your 68th birthday, you wrote down 68 bits of advice for your adult children about what you wish you had known. I read all of your advice across 68, 69, 70. I want to dive into some of this advice and go to the stories behind them that created this pithy wisdom that you espouse. Let’s start with “Learn how to learn from those you disagree with or even [those who] offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.”  

Kevin Kelly: Just to back up: the general thing of what I was doing was in a curious way; I was writing these bits of advice for myself. I found that I could make a habit out of something by reducing the idea of it to a little capsule and [giving] it a handle so that I could repeat it to myself; I could remind myself of it. And so I wanted some way to take a lot of big, witty, large advice and reduce it into a proverb that I could repeat. So that’s sort of the origin; I was doing that in my head. I would hear something and I would repeat it to [myself] to remind myself of it. And so these things have their origin in a sense of “Did they work for me?”—“Do they work for me first?”—and then this idea of “I should pass it on.”