Tag: kevin kelly

Happy Birthday to Kevin Kelly

70th birthday that too!

Who is Kevin Kelly, you ask? Lots of ways to begin, but my favorite learning from Kevin Kelly (so far) has been the idea of 1000 true fans:

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I cannot for the life of me remember where I read about 1000 true fans first, but it most likely was via Tim Ferriss. (As an aside, Kevin Kelly has advice about this as well!) The extract above is an assertion, and if your reaction is along the lines of “but why is this assertion true?” – and I hope that is the case! – you will want to read the rest of the essay. It’s got spin-offs too, this essay, which only drives up my opinion of the original.

But Kevin Kelly is a person who you should spend time learning more about. Start with his Wikipedia page, listen to his multiple episodes with Russ Roberts over on EconTalk, visit the Cool Tools section on his website, subscribe to his related newsletter, listen to his podcasts with Tim Ferriss, and as a bonus, listen to Tyler Cowen’s podcast with Stewart Brand. And read his books, of course.

Long story short, he is a person worth knowing about, and trust me when I say we’ve only scratched the surface, if that. But today, I wanted to point you to his birthday gift to all of us, a lovely set of 103 observations that he has called “103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known“. It goes without saying that all 103 are worth a ponder, but I’ll list here ten that especially resonated with me right now:

  1. About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
  2. Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
  3. 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.
  4. When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
  5. It is the duty of a student to get everything out of a teacher, and the duty of a teacher to get everything out of a student.
  6. Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
  7. The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
  8. Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
  9. When you have some success, the feeling of being an imposter can be real. Who am I fooling? But when you create things that only you — with your unique talents and experience — can do, then you are absolutely not an imposter. You are the ordained. It is your duty to work on things that only you can do.
  10. Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
  11. It’s possible that a not-so smart person, who can communicate well, can do much better than a super smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
  12. For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
  13. Don’t bother fighting the old; just build the new.
  14. You are as big as the things that make you angry.
  15. Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

The observant among you might have noticed that I ended up picking fifteen rather than ten, but why short change myself and my readers? I didn’t bother culling out five – and to be clear, this is not to imply that the other eighty-eight are somehow inferior. These fifteen resonated the most with me, and I sincerely hope that your list is completely different from mine.

Note to self: of the ones I have selected here, the fifth one is the one where I really need to pull up my socks.

And speaking of hope, it would be nice if this list sparked conversations and your own lists!

Past mentions of Kevin Kelly on this blog are here.

Zach King’s Illusions

Via Kevin Kelly, and the excellent Recomendo newsletter:

Five Articles/Posts for the 3rd of July, 2020

  1. “Accordingly, antifragile systems and organisms tend towards a common theme: bottoms-up decision-making, rather than top-down decision making. Antifragility requires real options, and real options are low-cost. Antifragility is only successful if you can actually detect, react, and grow in response to deviations from your present state in real time; the only way you can feasibly do this is for disorder detection and response to take place at a small enough resolution, and tight enough turnaround time. Top-down systems have a hard time with antifragility, because for them, all options are costly.”
    ..
    ..
    I’m late in posting this, having read this a while ago, but a useful essay by Alex Danco on how to think about anti-fragility, the term coined and popularized by Taleb. There are a lot of very useful ways to think about anti-fragility, but this essay explores immunity and how to think about our bodies immunity from the prism of anti-fragility. I found it especially useful to think about our bodies (which are at risk from the virus) and our governments (which are supposed to help us protect ourselves against the virus) and ask which is more anti-fragile, and why.
    ..
    ..
  2. Kevin Kelly (a man worth learning more about) recently posted “68 bits of unsolicited advice“. Each advice is worth reading – here’s one that is easy to understand, difficult to implement on a sustained basis. Ask me. I should know.
    ..
    ..
    “Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.”
    ..
    ..
  3. “Grades destroy curiosity. Too many kids learn for the sole purpose of raising their GPA because that’s what the system incentivizes. From an early age, I observed that my success in school depended more on my grades and less on how much I learned. In college, even though I wrote essays on my own and worked as an intern in New York City for companies like Skift, I was almost kicked out of my fraternity because my GPA was below 3.0. Likewise, my college counselors evaluated me on two metrics: grades and SAT scores. Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: “When students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system values grades more than students value learning.””
    ..
    ..
    Read this essay by David Perell. Please. Read it.
    ..
    ..
  4. This link came to me via Recommendo, which is a newsletter I have subscribed to about a month or so ago. Worth a ponder, it is about the art of critical thinking.
  5. Great visualizations, as always, from the NYT. This one is about the spread of the coronavirus in the USA.

The Return of Protectionism, Writing Better Papers, 100 True Fans, Corona Virus and Classics on the Kindle

Five articles that I enjoyed reading this week, and figure you might as well.

 

Vivek Dehejia raises an uncomfortable question: are we more protectionist now than at any point of time since 1991, and examines some of the possible impacts.

Even the most well-inclined observers can no longer palm-off previous tariff increases by the current government as mere one-offs or aberrations. It is abundantly clear now, unfortunately, that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in its second innings even more than the first, has abandoned an almost three-decade commitment to trade liberalization, going back to the initial liberalization impetus of 1991. Notably, even governments that did not further liberalize, at the very least refrained from sliding back into protectionism. No more, though—we are now witnessing a more or less explicit embrace of import substitution, which had been thought abandoned in 1991 and beyond.

Useful advice for writing academic papers on development better. Even if you don’t write these yourself, this article might have useful advice about selecting which ones to read.

You win or lose your readers with the introduction of your economics paper. Your title and your abstract should convince people to read your introduction. Research shows that economics papers with more readable introductions get cited more. The introduction is your opportunity to lay out your research question, your empirical strategy, your findings, and why it matters. Succinctly.

Some years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an article called 1,000 true fans (he does a lot else besides, by the way, and learning more about him is worth your time). Li Jin has written a follow-up piece that I hope rings true in the years to come.

Today, that idea is as salient as ever—but I propose taking it a step further. As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success. I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans—not 1,000—paying them $1,000 a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans.

I have so far resisted linking to or speaking about the Corona virus, primarily because I don’t know enough about the topic to speak responsibly about it. That, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t changed, but reading this article was helpful for me, and hopefully is for you as well!

The next two months will be critical, and it is important for all of us to do everything in our power to minimize viral spread. The simple stuff includes washing hands more frequently, greeting others without handshakes, getting a flu shot (if you haven’t already), and cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched objects. All of these actions are recommended by the CDC. Hopefully, through behavioral changes such as these, we will be able to keep R0 below 1 and prevent this virus from becoming a pandemic.

A random question asked in class this week spurred this search, and maybe you find this list useful yourself? I certainly did! Free classic literature on Kindle.