The Power of Being Lost | Kevin Kelly on Impact Theory | Transcription

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Introduction

Intro (00:00)

You can't be a scientist that's 100% efficient. If you're a scientist 100% efficiency, that means you're discovering nothing new. You're not making any experiments that fail. It's through that failure that we learn. It's the trial and error. The error part is hugely important. And so the challenge for me is that you don't want to over-specialize. You always want to be testing yourself and trying to go wider to make sure that you are not optimizing prematurely. - Everybody, welcome to ImpactCue. You're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potentials not the same is actually doing something with it. So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is the legendary futurist who co-founded Wired Magazine, a multiple time New York Times best-selling author his stunningly accurate take on the intersection of humanity and technology, have made him the de facto gravitational center of the very culture of tech. Silicon Valley have called his books, "Must Reads" and "Hollywood has leaned on him heavily for the creation of believable futures."

Understanding Self-Made Life And Lifelong Learning

Whats the difference in building your life vs uncovering? (01:09)

His work deciphering macro trends in technology cannot be overstated, and as the executive editor and self-proclaimed senior Maverick at Wired, he twice led his team to winning the prestigious National Magazine Award for general excellence. Additionally, his own writing has appeared in many distinguished publications, including the New York Times, The Economist, Science and the Wall Street Journal. Pretty amazing if you ask me for a college dropout who traded a formal education to spend roughly a decade roaming the deepest recesses of Asia photographing nearly forgotten people and their disappearing traditions. And at one point, making ends meet by running a newsletter in Tehran, Iran. But this hands-on approach to life is what ultimately put him at the center of the then-emerging world of technology. As a rule, he does not just read about things he experiences them, and usually long before anyone else. He was deeply immersed in the internet by 1981. He co-founded the hackers conference in 1984, launched CyberThon, the first round-the-clock VR Jamboree in 1990, and wrote a treatise on the biological nature of technology in '94 before most people even had computers. Outside of technology, he's also a founding member of or involved with some of the most profound non-profits around, including the Long Now Foundation, the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and The Last, which is exploring how to revive or restore endangered or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. So please, help me in welcoming the man that Tim Ferriss called the real-life, most interesting man in the world, the best-selling author of The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly. - That's great. - Good to have you. - Wow, what an intro. - Writing the intros is a lot of fun for me. It's where I really find the guest, obviously. I've been very aware of your work and what you've done, but I didn't know anything about what you were doing traveling Asia. I didn't know about your love for photography. So in putting those together, I'm really trying to get inside what makes you you, and I would say you've lived a really atypical life. What are your thoughts on building a life versus finding it or uncovering your passions inside versus creating them? - I think there's really no difference between inventing something and discovering it, the steps that you take are almost identical. So the language is really not so important, but the main task that you wanna have is to understand that you have to make it happen, that you have to uncover it or discover it, that this is something that is an option for you. And even for people who may not feel as privileged as I was in growing up, I think that there is far more choice in how they come to what they wanna do and how they find themselves than they think at first. And it's a long, long process. I think I'm an older guy, so I have a nice, big, long resume because I've been around a long time. And so I think that's the benefit of keep going where I've been going, which is mostly trying to find out what it is that I can do, the only I can do. That's the real challenge. And that is something that I think takes your life to figure out.

Foundations of self-made life (04:40)

- What I find really fascinating is that you talk about process and the notion of doing things that only you can do, but at some point it's having to learn to learn. It's getting good at something. It's investing the time to build a skill set. And what did that look like for you, especially when you did it, it had to have seemed so counterintuitive to drop out of college after a year. And I think you said one of your only regrets in life is that you actually went for a year. - Exactly. - So how is that a regret? And then what did it look like to go explore? - Yeah, so I grew up in the '50s and '60s. And there was a little bit more of a sense of a plan to life. There was a sequence, a ladder that you went through and expectation. There weren't things like gap years or internships. You were kind of just a little bit on a theme ride where you just couldn't go to the next station. And so I had kind of more of a binary choice of you go to college or you don't, dropping out was not as cool as it is today. At the time, this was a little bit more of like defeat than it was an exercise in self-expression. So I dropped out after, instead of studying for my finals, I was reading Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead where there was this architect who was doing his thing. And I was susceptible to the whole earth cow log which said you should basically invent your life. And I decided to try and do that, to try and see how far I could go in, trying to assemble something that seemed to me to be worth giving my energy to. There was very little sense of success at that point. You know, in 1969, 1970, the prospects of not going to college was, I mean, you were going to a different track, right? This was, you were not ever going to be rich, you were not ever going to be really successful. But that was okay with me because I just felt that it was kind of like the Henry Derry throw idea that you would find yourself and that was enough of the achievement in life if you could find yourself. And so there was a sense of like, I'm going to do things because I was passionate about it and I was passionate about photography. I decided to follow that where it went with no expectation that that would ever be a career or lead to any kind of success. And so I have to say that, you know, it looks kind of cool in retrospect, but at the time it's kind of like, you know, I'm a kid with no prospects and it's no money, a lot of time. But that actually in retrospect was probably the best place to be. - One of the things that I cling to, I don't know, because I didn't have the fortitude to go against the grain like that when I was younger, when I find people that did, I really want to understand, like because I think people watching now live in a different world where they are going to have to create their own life, but they still have the familial pressure of following a traditional track. So how did you have the fortitude to look at your parents who were saying, think of the example you're setting for your siblings and face that down? - Well, I have to say, so as a kid, even though, I was a little, I was always very self-motivated person. So as a kid, I had a Delta Chemistry Lab in my basement, I had a Nature Museum as a little kid, and I had kids in my neighborhood recruited collecting stuff for me. And so I had a little bit of like, I was doing things on my own to begin with. I was a maker in that sense. At a time when maker wasn't really, again, cool or admired, in the 1960s and even the 70s, if you told someone that you were working at a startup, that was a way of saying you were unemployed. The whole point that people wanted to do is to go work for a big corporation, go through college, and arrive at a place that had a brand name. And so my efforts to kind of do this, again, there was no big plan. It was more temperamental orientation that I would like to be motivated by the things I was interested in. And I sort of didn't care about success at that time. That was not, I would never describe myself as a successful person when I was younger. I was influenced in kind of finding me and maybe that was my measure of success. And I didn't feel I had found it, so I was on the process, but I would never have ever told anyone that I was trying to be successful. That was not in my vocabulary. And I think that's maybe a more recent framing of things where we can actually tell people that you are successful because you have found yourself, that it's independent of how much money you make, it's independent of how many followers you have. It's really about whether you have come to find out what it is that you can contribute, what impact you can have that no one else will have. - What I love about your story is looking back on your life, knowing how successful you become and how you find your way to the absolute core of what most people think of now is like the center of coolness.

Premature optimization self-made (10:09)

- Right. - Technology, the center of wealth creation, technology, the center of America's power Silicon Valley. Like you've got this concept of premature optimization, which I found so interesting. What is it and how do you think that helped you? - So the concept of premature optimization is a very technical fancy term that comes from biology of all places. And biologists like to think about the evolution of a species of an organism over time as what they call hill climbing. So you can imagine a picture in your mind of a landscape with hills and stuff that over time a species is sort of climbing the hill and at the top of the hill is maximum adaptation. It's kind of like perfection. It's sort of like the giraffe in the savanna or the starfish underwater who has found the perfect place to be for that environment. So they are climbing the hill. And the problem is of course in the real world of evolution, those hills are going up and down. They're changing as one organism adapts to another. There's co-evolution going on, which means the hills are changing. And so what can happen with an organism is that it becomes perfectly adapted to that hill. It's on the top of the hill, the summit is optimized. But there's a bigger hill that's growing up over here because things have changed. And suddenly they're not on the bigger hill anymore. They're on a false summit. They've optimized prematurely because they can't get to the big hill. And that's true for companies. Companies like Olivetti, the Italian typewriter company could optimize typewriters. But then the word processors came up which were even a bigger hill and they're stuck. They're prematurely optimized on mechanical typewriters. And the challenge is for organizations, for individuals is that the only way you can get up to the bigger hill is to go down. Is to go back, down, that devolve, become less perfect, become less optimized, become less profitable. What all the things that you don't want any company or person to do. And so you have to have this period where you're kind of going backwards, letting go. And so the issue always is that you, as you're climbing the hills, you always want to be surveying this landscape more and more to make sure that you're not prematurely optimizing that there aren't bigger mountains to climb. Or if you're skill wise that you are not perfecting a skill that's going to be obsolete, that you are going wider and wider as you climb up so that you don't get stuck on a false summit. And so the challenge for me and for others in this world where things are changing so fast is that you don't want to over-specialize. You always want to be testing yourself and trying to go wider to make sure that you are not optimizing prematurely. - I love that so much and I really hope people are listening to that.

Lifelong learning (13:29)

And that certainly has been true in my life. So I start my entrepreneurial journey anyway in technology. Discover I do not enjoy that. Start over after almost a decade in nutrition, have massive success after almost a decade again transition out of that and into media. And so always it is this starting over and you've got a powerful notion about how useful and powerful unlearning is. What does that process look like? How do people do that in their life? How do they stomach the downturn and believe that they can go back up? What's that process? - Yeah, so part of the general lesson I would say from the kind of digital ferment that we're in right now, this kind of constant upgrading, the speed and acceleration of new things, is that all of us are gonna be perpetual newbies. We're all new. You know, the millennials these days kind of rub their hands, oh, we're digital natives. It was like, yes, this year. But in 10 years from now, you're gonna be a newbie like everybody else and have to relearn everything and unlearn what you already knew. And so there is a sense in which constant lifelong learning is the main node that you have to be in. And that's part of learning that people study, it understand is that a lot of it is unlearning what you already knew, kind of forgetting or trying to overcome ingrained patterns of thought previously. So you have to sort of like, you have to think differently about things. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why I travel a lot, because I find that there's almost nothing that forces me to unlearn and think in a different pattern than traveling in a real sense of kind of being on the ground and confronting things that I don't understand that everybody else understands. - You talked about the shifting peaks and unlearning, but you've also talked about, okay, in a world where all this stuff is moving, the thing you have to get good at is learning to learn and that really learning a specific skill may not be as useful as it once was. So what can people that are in the thick of the job market now that are gonna get slapped around by robotics and AI, like how should they be thinking?

How to learn (15:36)

- So a very common question, really related that a lot of parents ask me, "Well, you know, here all this stuff is coming, AI and VR, "what should my kid be studying in school?" And I think really there's no language that's gonna survive very long. There's very few, even skills, that aren't gonna be obsolete by the time you graduate. So most of the jobs that you will have, I'm talking to somebody maybe who's in the high school right now, are probably jobs that don't exist right now. And so then this idea of, well, the only really skill you wanna learn in, say, school is the metaskill of how to learn and what's really interesting to me is that that's almost taught nowhere. And it turns out that almost nobody, including me, really knows how we learn ourselves. So it's not just how to learn, how to learn, but how you learn best, how to learn. That's a high bar. And to do that is not gonna be something you're just trying around. You need to have teachers, you need to be tested, you need to be scored, you need to practice. There are lots of different ways to learn. So each variety you have to test yourself and become better in that. And so to actually learn how to learn would require years of discipline improvement. And we don't have that. So that means that neither I nor you really have learned how to optimize our own learning. But that should be the general common thing that you're gonna be taught in school. And that when you graduate, you have a metaskill of knowing how you learn and whatever kind of problem comes up. You least know your best method for learning that. - I think that idea is so powerful. And one of the coolest things that I came across while I was researching you is the book that you referenced Art and Fear and Pottery class. Tell us that 'cause that hit me like a type of right. So the idea about art is that only flawed people make art. And that the way that you want to do art and the only way you're ever gonna make great art is to do it a lot. And this is true for science, for innovation, for business, is that you have to make lots of it. You have to do it again and again and again. Because that's really the only way to get to these optimization points is by doing again and again. And the great example to kind of prove this point was this professor, Art Professor who had a pottery class. And he gave his students two choices to be graded. In one choice, they could submit one or two pieces and get their grade evaluated on those one or two pieces. They could put all their effort into making these as great as they could and they would be graded on the worth of those two pieces. The other one, he says, "You can just do it by weight. "I'm gonna grade you on poundage. "How many pounds of stuff that you make every year "by the end of the year?" And he said what the remarkable thing was that at the end of the year, almost invariably, the best piece came not from the people focusing on the few but the people who are making lots of the pieces. Okay, so the best piece, we always come out of that lot. And I think there's lots of lessons for us in culture and in business. And just in the sense that you have to kind of come back and repeat and repeat and repeat because you don't know what works. Whatever you're gonna do, you just have to do it lots of it. And that kind of goes back to the 10,000 hours of practice. And this idea of becoming a master by doing it a lot of times. - And what I think makes that story so powerful is putting you in context a bit.

What I think makes that story so powerful (20:01)

Wired, certainly when you were in charge, wasn't so much about the technology itself as it was the culture around the technology. Which then makes me think how much of wired was influenced by this period where you're finding your voice, right? So when I think about somebody watching this and I think about how many of them feel lost and they have no idea what to do with their life, your story is this incredible beacon of, there's a process, there's a process, don't optimize too early, go get lost. You've said that optimization is overvalued, success is overvalued, wealth is overvalued. I mean, you've got like this whole list and all the things that we all think are like, the things we're supposed to strive for. So what does it mean to find your voice? - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm taking it to your heart 'cause I have my son, he's just graduating from college. Next, in May, right? And he's been working very hard, he has good grades. All the way through school, he always worked hard, studies are hard, he has internships this every year. And so my advice to him graduating was, look, you need to goof off for a couple of years. Don't try to get a job. Live in starvation ways, just have enough money to have beans and oatmeal, whatever it is. And goof off, just play around. Imagine you were a billionaire, and you're taking a sabbatical or something. Just play a little bit. And I think part of this finding yourself is playing with no goal, that's what play is, is you're busy, you're doing stuff. The reason why the young is always discovering new things is they have so much time to waste. I'm a big believer in in inefficiency. I think efficiencies for robots, efficiencies for the AI's and the robots and machines. And I really think that people should be inefficient, deliberately, productively inefficient, playing around, trying stuff, mastering some video game, it takes 50 hours just because it's fun. I think that's where the new ideas will come. That's where the new direction. So there is a sense in which I really value that kind of goofing off playing, trying hobbies, exploring just because you can. And if you read the biographies of anybody who's successful, they all have that period of time in their lives when they were lost, didn't know it. So I embrace that sense of being lost. - I love that. And I really think that people don't take the time to do that. And I wanna put it in the context of innovation. So you've talked really powerfully about this. What's the secret to innovation and how does play and getting lost and taking chances and failing all feed into that? - Yeah, so the first thing, I would say, but innovation, this is respect to my current interests and artificial intelligence and what we'll do as humans when we have lots of AI. All the processes that we most value, like being creative or exploring art, even human relationships, all inherently inefficient. You can't be a scientist that's 100% efficient. If you're a scientist, 100% efficiency, that means you're discovering nothing new. You're not making any experiments that fail. It's through the failure that we learn. It's the trial and error. It's the error part is hugely important. The really big innovations are always coming from outside. So that sense of kind of like what I wanna, nurturing the edges, trying to be at the edge of things, which again, is not the natural inclination if you want success. You wanna be at the center, you wanna be where it's happening, you wanna be in the room where it happens. But in fact, you don't wanna be at the room, you wanna be at the edges because that is where it's gonna happen. However, the edges is where all the failure happens too. Right, so in order to support innovation, you have to be comfortable with failing. You have to be comfortable with things networking out. You have to be at ease with the long term, saying, "I know that most of these "are not going to work out, "and I'm gonna just accept it." That was the Thomas Edison's great insight when he made the first idea factory, which was that most of these are gonna fail. But each time I make a failure, I know something that I didn't know before, and that's an advance. And so I think part of the innovation process is understanding that most of the time is gonna fail, that that is the price, and you have to be really comfortable with trying things that don't work. So putting that into your belief that you're always looking for something that only you can do, what does that process look like for you? And quite honestly, why is it important to only do something that only you can do? - It's a really fair question. So I thought that I think there's kind of like stages that a normal person who's in, say, the workforce entails. And the first one that I was in, most people were in, is when you get your first job, you were really concerned about doing the job right, doing it well, making sure you don't screw up. And after you accomplish that and you're at ease with that, you then say, well, I'm good at this now. I think I'd like to go on and start to do things that are fun, okay? And then you can do that. And then after a while, maybe, well, they're fun, I can do them well, and they pay a lot. So that's like success for most people. It's like, okay, that's, well, how can it be better? I have something that I like to do. I get paid, do it, and I do it well. And then what happens though is that there's gonna be maybe more opportunities for you to do something well and get paid and have fun. And then you need another criteria to decide, well, how do I decide what I'm going to do? And the answer there is that you really wanna look for the things that no one else is gonna do unless you do them. So in other words, if someone else is gonna do it, you don't have to do it. And so for me, that came from my experience at Wired, that this insight, where as an editor, mostly what I'm trying to do is give assignments to writers to write stories that I come up with. And oftentimes I'd have an idea for a story that was really good and I couldn't sell it to any writer.

You often have an idea for a story that nobody else would take (26:47)

And I said, okay, it must have been a stupid idea. But then the idea would come back a year later and I would try to give it away to someone else and nobody would take it. They were saying, that's not a very good idea. And I'm thinking, I thought it was a pretty good idea. I guess not. And then they'd go away. And then if it came back a third time, I would try it. And then I was like, you know, this is a really good idea. I can't get rid of it. I can't kill it. No one else wants it. I have to do this idea. And those are always the best ones for me because it was obvious no one else was gonna do it. I couldn't even give it away. I couldn't even pay people to do it. And so those became the best story. Those became the best writing because there was no one else who was gonna do that. - I think that idea makes so much sense when people understand about you that you use, I know I'm going to die as a way to like raise or sharpen your decision making.

Knowing death as a way to sharpen your decision making. (27:43)

Two things I find utterly fascinating. One, you have the clock that based on actuarial tables. I'm not mistaken counts down the number of days that you're expected to live, which is unnerving I think for most people. Future Rama Basin episode on your clock. Very interesting. But the thing that really captured my imagination was when you decided to live, truly live, like you only had six months left. What was that? Why did you do that, first of all, and what was that experience actually like? - It's kind of complicated about why I did the only six months to live. I would do better by referring listeners to one of the first episodes of this American Life podcast, where I told my story for the first time. And it has to do with a religious experience in Jerusalem, where I had an assignment to live as if I'm gonna die in six months. And I was very healthy 20 year old. I knew there was very unlikely, but I also knew that I absolutely had to do this. And so I took it seriously and I went through the whole thing. What would I do if I had six months to live and I did that? And I was surprised by what I did, but the important thing of course is that I didn't die and I came back and I had a rebirth on that. On the moment when I woke up after the six months, 'cause I was fully 100% prepared. I did everything, gave my money away, all this other stuff and I was totally prepared for it. And when I woke up the next morning, it was like I was reborn. It was like I had my entire life in front of me again. And so I think that was the part of the exercise. But the thing was I have already kind of rehearsed that and tried to live since then without any regrets, with trying to minimize the regrets that I would have when it came to die. And so that would not have things to repair. Part of what I did in preparing for that was to go back and try to make up, apologize, do all the kinds of things that you would like to have done if you were gonna die. And now I try to do that kind of like as I go along. And I have a clock to remind me of, you know, to kind of focus my efforts during the day, because if you, it translates the time left that I have in today's. Okay, again, these are just based on actually a row table. Maybe I'll live longer, maybe I won't, but that'll be a bonus. When you look at the future of your life in days, there aren't that many days. And I find that that helps me decide, you know, what do I want to do today? Because I have 7,820 days, which do everything I want to do. That's not very much. - One thing that I found really interesting going into that story was originally you were like, oh, the six months to live story. I want to go back and spend time with my family. You do that, but after a couple of months, you realize you need to do something different. What was that process? What did you want to do? - Well, so I spent a lot of time in Asia, traveling all around Asia at that point. But when I had six months to live, part of what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters who lived across the US and had never seen the US. So I row my bicycle from San Francisco to New York via Idaho and Texas. And in the end, it was really a kind of a 5,000 mile bike ride. And I just bought a bicycle, a random bicycle. I had no training. I had no special equipment. There were no other bicyclists riding cross country in that year, in the '70s. I mean, I was by myself. There was, again, there wasn't cool to be riding bikes. And I was having a laugh at it with my brothers and sisters. And then I decided that I really wanted to kind of like do ordinary things for my parents. My mother had to back problems at the time. So I wanted to kind of like take out the trash for her. It was like-- I was really surprised by that, because I thought, in fact, six months to live, if you'd asked me earlier, I'll climb the Everest. I want to go caving or kayak down the Amazon. But actually, I wanted to do the ordinary things. That's really interesting.

The future. (32:04)

All right, I can't have a renowned futurist on the show and not ask, what do you think is going to happen in the future? What does the future look like? How afraid or excited should we be? And what should we be thinking about? That's-- I like that one. Each new technology, every new technology, will create almost as many new problems as it does new solutions. And so we're going to hear about the problems that all these new technologies have from social media, to AI, to VR. And I think my job is to really talk about the unexpected opportunities that these are going to bring, because everyone else is going to be talking about the unexpected problems that they'll have. And part of my challenge is that Hollywood and science fiction writers today almost universally are painting and promoting dystopian stories, how terrible it will be. And there's not one single movie that I can think of, or even a science fiction story, where it depicts a future in the near future, even, that I want to live in, or that you'd want to live in. They're all dystopian and horrible, because they make better stories. The thing about storytellers is they have gotten so good, they understand that a happy future is boring. And so they're all depictions of terrible futures. And so are all our images about robots and AI's are all tainted with this idea that they're going to be terrible. And what I'm trying to do is to present an alternative future that has ubiquitous AI and pervasive virtual reality and total tracking. That's the future that we want to live in, because I think that's where we're going. I think we will have a place that is better than today, and even better if we had a vision that we're working towards. And so part of what I would talk about now, how we should feel about it, is that we should be excited by the whole new opportunities, most of which are going to be very hard for us to even visualize right now. Just as 150 years ago, when there were 75% of the Americans were on farms, and now there's less than 1%. If you went back in a time machine to those farmers and say, here's your pink slip, because your grandchildren, none of them are going to be on this farm.

Grandchildren Jobs (34:29)

And they would say, well, what are they going to do? And you'd say, they're going to be mortgage brokers, web designers, and yoga teachers. And they would say, that's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. And they are ridiculous, in a certain sense. And so most of these jobs that are coming are also going to be totally ridiculous to us now. They're going to sound like implausible. And I think most of those opportunities are going to surprise us. They're going to be new. They're going to be hard for us to visualize right now. But I think we can try to prepare ourselves for those opportunities. That's what my thing would be. It's inevitable that artificial intelligence will come. It'll be pervasive. It's not inevitable what kind of AI we have. Who rules it? Who owns it? What governs it? What the character is? Those are completely up to us. We have no choice. The AI is coming. It's inevitable. We have a whole lot of choice in what kind, how it's regulated, et cetera. And so it's by engaging it, though, that we can steer. It's by actually using it that we actually can find out. So we don't want to prohibit it. We want to be slow to regulate it. We want to embrace it and use it as a way of steering it. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? My initials, KK. So I have a website, kk.org. My email is kk@kk.org. I tweet at Kevin2Kelly. Facebook and the Kevin Kelly with a laughing face. There are a lot of Kevin Kelly's. By the way, I have a newsletter that I'm really proud of. Every week, we send out six recommendations of cool stuff to people. It's called a recommendo. Kind of like really six brief things of great things to listen to, people to follow, movies to see, destinations, places to go, tools to use, apps, books that I've read. So it's called recommendo. Try that. I will definitely be signing up for that. Final question. What's the impact that you want to have in the world? Yeah, so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to increase learning, increase the joy of learning, helping people to stay lifelong learners. And my sermon is about the necessity of remaining young, playing, trying, and learning. And I think that if I had an impact in increasing, giving people confidence that that's something that they can indulge in, something that they should devote resources to, that they should be slow to ossify what they know, maybe slow to become expert in something, that they would take more time to try stuff, to explore and play. And to embrace the technology that allows and increases our choices and possibilities.

Being Young, Learning (37:32)

I love that. Kevin, thank you so much for being upset. You were doing great. That was incredible. Thank you. Absolutely. Guys, I'm telling you right now, this is one of the most incredible examples of a human being that really found his voice that went on a journey of discovery, cultivation, creating something in himself. And the fact that he does that finds something authentic is always trying to focus on what he can do that other people can't do, what he loves, that it doesn't matter whether other people respond to it or not.

Be Indulgent (38:19)

It speaks to him, and he wants to indulge in it more. In doing that, he's not only become insanely successful, he's really become meaningful at the center of something that all of our lives are built around. It's incredible that that tale is a dropout hippie who wandered around Asia for almost a decade, taking photos of beautiful things and heartbreaking things and uplifting things. I mean, it's just incredible.

Concept Of Human Becoming

Human Becoming (38:46)

And if you ever get the chance, just type in Asia Grace into a search engine, and you will get to see some of the miraculously beautiful photos that he took with those 500 rolls of film that he carried on his back. It is a journey of human becoming. It is the easiest way that I can say it. And you can swap out in your own life. Technology was what ended up being his, but yours can be anything. But to see that it is a process, a beautiful process of not becoming a master too early, if you heard what he was just saying, to not think about becoming a master, not overly focused on becoming successful. And he said some of the people that he respects the most in life, as they approach 70, are still asking themselves the question, what am I going to be when I grow up? And he said that life is about answering that very question. Guys, dive in. You will not regret it. It will shape your life if you let it. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. - Y'all ready? - Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.