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

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That kind of advice I’m very reluctant to give, and almost never answer, because I don’t feel I know that person well enough. I can give them a platitude (like my book is filled with), saying, “Here’s my piece of advice for a young person who is setting out — ” Excellent Advice for Living is aimed primarily at young people, but speaks to all ages. This is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to navigate life with grace and creativity. Book Details I would say that’s one place you might be looking for things that could happen kind of suddenly, even though the research has been going on for decades. And that would really shake things up if that was to happen. COWEN: They’ve said it already, right? I don’t believe them, but they already say it if you ask them to. Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

That seemed kind of like a waste, or a failure or something, that you would generate stuff that you would throw away, knowing that you're going to throw it away. I mean, that's the difference. And so now I understand that I'm just going to write a whole bunch of stuff that I'm just never going to use, and that's sort of the point of it. 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. KELLY: [laughs] People that I have known. I know Jerry Brown a little bit, and I’ve been very — I was very impressed with him. He was in the leadership in California and was doing well. Seeing how high all this AI could work is really hard to see. How is there a world in which we have ubiquitous AI, ubiquitous genetic engineering, constant surveillance — how is that a world that we want to live in? I’m trying to imagine what that is with a set of scenarios that would say, “Here’s a possible future of this high tech that could work,” and I call it the Hundred-Year Desirable Future or Protopia.

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KELLY: First of all, the kind of photography I do is sometimes called street photography. It’s candid. There are some portraits, but most of the time, people are often not even aware that I’m photographing them. Other times, when I ask permission — although I would often shoot first and ask questions later. I would say, places — KELLY: Because here’s what it is: the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. The traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom. Joanna: Some people in the writing community call them ‘pantsers.' And that is a very American word, obviously, because in England, pants is underwear. So we kind of adopted the word ‘discovery writer,' because you know, that's better than pants. COWEN: I also find after I’ve been to a place, when I then process subsequent news stories about that place, I just remember them much better. So one reason I go places is to be able to read news about those places and have it make some sense. I think the hardest place to photograph people certainly were in some of the Islamic countries, where women were off-limits, basically, for most of photography, and even where men were shy. Or there was some kind of a civil unrest, and so there was suspicion there. I’m thinking of eastern Turkey and some other places — northern Pakistan, at one point, where there was a suspicion of anybody with a camera.

Kevin Kelly]: I wish to offer another piece of wisdom. Even if it’s not your mistake, it could still be your responsibility. That’s one element of maturity – owning up to things even when they weren’t caused by your actions. Life throws curveballs. Your body might fail you, and while it’s not something you caused, it’s still something you must handle. This is one of the important lessons. I prefer to see it as the creation of your own life story. A thought I’ve been expressing more often is how entrepreneurs tend to measure success in monetary terms. This can be quite limiting. What you should truly be striving for is creating new standards of success. That’s your mission as an entrepreneur, to not only succeed but to redefine what success means. And this redefinition should likely involve factors beyond monetary wealth. Which I really love. So how have your travels in Asia, in particular, being so many different cultures, helped you think outside your brain? How has Asia changed you? The idea is, “Well, I might study accounting, but I intend not to dwell there for very long, because I want to head out into the frontier where there’s something.” I would say it’s an ongoing process where you’re asking yourself, “Is this someone else’s idea of success? What’s buried in me that I can do that may be a little bit different than others?” COWEN: Now, my favorite creation of yours probably is this three-volume set: It’s called Vanishing Asia. If I understand correctly, it was a 50-year project based around roughly 200,000 photos; it’s three volumes. It’s one of the greatest picture books ever produced, possibly the greatest. That in turn makes it one of the greatest books ever produced.

Presenting wisdom in this form enhances their memorability. It’s often said that one tends not to remember entire books but rather distinct sentences within them. My work here is akin to a compendium of such memorable sentences. Inverting the equation and echoing Maimonedes’s wisdom on repentance and repair, he maps the noblest path to seeking forgiveness when you yourself have erred: So yeah, I could have been satisfied, my wanderlust could have been satisfied by reviewing all these images, some of which were taken almost 50 years ago. So that could have been a large part of it. 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.

COWEN: Christianity in particular: How will it change? The idea of a demiurge will become more important?KELLY: GPS is better. I have a drawer full of fabulous maps that I don’t even take with me anymore — paper maps. Then I went on to make a nature museum when I was 12. I found a book at the library about how to make a nature museum. And I was doing collections and making exhibits, and I went on to make other things like that. I don't know, it was just something in me that wanted to make stuff. Here’s somebody. I know Jeff Bezos, and I’ve actually been very impressed with Jeff Bezos. The more I know him, the more I admire him. I think he’s very fast to own up to mistakes and to take responsibility. I think he is very aware and sensible. In my own observation, I think he’s working very hard to deal with the responsibility that great power comes from. And so I would say Jeff Bezos. 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.

I worked at University of Georgia in the science lab, and there was an Apple IIe there that was used in the lab for data stuff. I got a modem for it and I started to send information from the little catalog I was making to a local newspaper to have it typeset. But I discovered that there was this bulletin-board world on the modem. There was this online thing happening. I used the computer to telephone the modem into these bulletin boards where there was these conversations happening. For the first time, I felt that there was this organic technology. There was something very community-, Amish-barn-raising-like about it.This is the Amish. This is the Amish take on how you do it. “Let me see how other people are doing it and how it affects their lives before I decide to do it.” And If there was generally positive results in their own lives and around them as society, then I might adopt it. Echoing William James’s insistence that habit is how “we are spinning our own fates,” Kelly writes: