📚 Kevin Kelly: Focus on the biggest opportunities, not the biggest problems

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450 excellent pieces of advice for living

Kevin Kelly is out with a new book: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. It has 450 short pieces of advice in it.

Kevin Kelly has written Warp News' most-read article ever: The Case for Optimism. It was also turned into a TED talk, now with over two million views. It drills down to this, which is also one of the pieces of advice in the book:

"The future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves."

Here are some golden nuggets from our chat. You'll find the whole interview at the end of the article.

Opportunities, not problems

Advice: "For maximum results, focus on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems."

"The problem is the spark that might ignite the fire. But the fuel is the opportunity."

"The thing about problems is that they are limited by definition. The thing about opportunities is that they are unlimited. So it is that open-ended aspect. They have no boundaries. Which gives you far more room to maneuver, and far more upside."

Next project: Protopia – the hundred-year desirable future

"I'm taking my own advice and trying to imagine a world, on this planet, that is full of all these technological inventions. Like ubiquitous AI, cheap working genetic engineering, constant monitoring of ourselves to put ourselves into these metaverses – and imagine all of this in a place that I want to live in."

"Not a scary, dystopian hell, but a place that we can't wait to get to."

"It is not a prediction. I'm not saying this is what's going to happen. I'm saying this is what I'd like to happen."

"To make it plausible, I'm putting it into ten-year increments. So all the in-between steps that would happen would be clear. I think that one mistake of scenarios, or even of science fiction stories, is that they have a world that doesn't make much sense. Because the intermediate steps are not present."

"If it does work, I hope it will be useful for science fiction authors, to write stories in this world. Stories that are not dystopian, but would be protopian. This would be kind of like the background. A complete world that would be ready for them to write stories in."

This is your vision of the future, and not crowdsourced. But that feels like a natural continuation, right?

"Absolutely. I don't know yet what it is, what format. Is it a book? Which I don't think it is. Is it a world, a game? Is it a database? I don't know. Once when we know what it is, then we can make it crowdsourced."

Kevin Kelly's advice for me, and Warp News

Warp News has a nice little engine running. When people discover us, many like what they see, sign up for the free newsletter and a high percentage then convert to our paid tier, Premium Supporter. But, we are growing too slowly.

So I asked Kevin Kelly for his advice on this.

"Wired was very much cast in the same mold, of wanting to be optimistic and play a role in the world. One of the geniuses that Louis Rosetto brought was 'wrapping it around people and their dreams'."

Louis Rosetto was the editor-in-chief of Wired. Kelly compares the Whole Earth Review, where he worked before, and Wired.

"You talk about these things and what their dreams are, and what they want. And that is what moved it to a different level entirely. A much larger audience because of that people component."

"So what you might consider is doing what Wired did, wrap it around people and their dreams."

Our version would then be that we would warp it around people and their dreams.

Watch the entire interview with Kevin Kelly on his new book, Excellent Advice for Living.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Also, don't miss Kevin Kelly's essay, The Case for Optimism, here on Warp News.

💡 Kevin Kelly: The Case for Optimism

Kevin Kelly is the founder of Wired Magazine and author of several books, among them The Inevitable. For Warp News he presents his case for optimism.

Warp NewsKevin Kelly

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