Forget Being the Best. Be the Only.
Lessons from Kevin Kelly's Prototyping Mindset and how it can empower your personal growth
Those of you who have been hanging around here for any period of time know that I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss and his podcast. I think one of the main reasons that Tim’s conversations resonate is that his guests often give me some new insight into the prototyping mindset and their unique spin on embodying a bias toward action.
Last week Tim had a conversation with Kevin Kelly. Kevin has been on Tim’s podcast several times (I counted 5?) but somehow this was the first time that I’d heard him. After hearing this one, I’m adding all the previous ones to the queue.
Kevin is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine which he co-founded in 1993 and the author of several books, the latest of which is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. The conversation with Tim covered a wide range of topics, but the discussion about Kevin’s latest book was what has been really stuck in my head over the past few days.
While the conversation and Kevin’s book are themed around advice, I couldn’t help but remember the line from Tim's conversation with James Clear earlier this year that questions are more robust than advice. So in that vein, I’ve organized my reflections on Kevin’s advice in the form of 5 questions:
What is your unique niche?
How can you prototype it?
Who are you going to spend your life with?
What is really meaningful to your kids?
What does it look like for you to rest?
I hope that these questions spark your curiosity and encourage you to go listen to the full interview!
Advice Reframed as Questions
1. What is your unique niche?
Don’t aim to be the best. Be the only.
There is only one #1. I’ve been acutely aware of this mathematical fact in my experience as a graduate student at Caltech and as I watch students adjust to life at Harvey Mudd. Thinking in terms of rankings puts everything in a competitive frame and in most scenarios that’s just not helpful. Rankings often focus on a narrow set of criteria and don’t do a good job of capturing the unique aspects of what each person brings to the table.
This isn’t to say that the pursuit of excellence or being your best isn’t important. It is. But, it’s important to think critically about what it means for you to be your best. It might mean that you want to excel at a certain skill, but thinking of your achievement in comparison to someone else’s is bound to make you feel vulnerable and apt to waste time watching your back to make sure you don’t get caught. It’s an exhausting way to live.
Trying to be the only is a much more generative framing. There are lots of ways to be the only and thinking in this way helps to emphasize our unique strengths and weaknesses. Even though we may learn the same skills or get the same degree as our classmates or colleagues, we all have unique perspectives because of our different experiences and ways of seeing the world. These different perspectives are valuable. Focusing on finding where you can be the only helps you to find more meaning in your work and to bring out the specific aspects of who you are that can help others around you.
2. How can you prototype it?
Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans.
It’s no surprise to anyone that this one resonated with me. Kevin Kelly gets the prototyping mindset. There are so many things that you can learn by trying things out that are nearly impossible to learn by sitting and thinking about them.
In this vein, he also had some suggestions for prototyping in your twenties.
When you’re in your twenties you should spend a little bit of time doing something that’s sort of crazy, insane, unprofitable, unorthodox, orthogonal, because that’s going to be your touchstone and the foundation of your success later on. Try and deliberately — don’t try for something successful or creative. Do something very, very strange and weird. It’s kind of like to the other bit of advice of the thing that made you weird as a kid can make you great as an adult if you don’t lose it.
This reminds me of how I spent my summers during undergrad managing a snack shop at Camp-of-the-Woods in upstate New York. Those summers on the lake scooping ice cream, managing orders, and working with a team taught me a lot. While it wasn’t directly connected to my work as an engineer, I learned a lot about how to work with people, engage with customers, and think like a salesperson.
3. Who are you going to spend your life with?
You don’t marry a person, you marry a family.
This is true on many levels. When you marry someone, you are not only committing your life to who that person is right now but also to who they will become. And so much of who we are and what we will become is influenced in the early years of our lives when we are being shaped and formed by our families of origin.
This is also one of the sweetest parts of marriage. While family is always complicated (whether blood-related or not) I’m thankful to have gained an extra set of parents and siblings. We don’t always see things the same way, but wrestling with another viewpoint and family culture is helpful as you forge your own.
4. What is really meaningful to your kids?
Spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
As a young parent, this one really resonated with me. The most valuable thing you can give anyone today is your time and attention and so often this is what kids really want. Sure, a new toy or a trip to Disneyland is lots of fun and can be memorable, but the real meat of the memories is the time spent together, not the things, places, or experiences themselves.
I was also inspired by Kevin’s advice to make stuff with your kids. This is something that I’ve thought about a lot but haven’t quite figured out yet. After hearing Kevin’s stories about making art and Styrobot (a nine-foot-tall robot made from recycled styrofoam) I’m inspired to find ways to do more of these projects with my kiddos.
5. What does it look like for you to rest?
[W]asting time, sabbaticals, Sabbaths, taking a Sabbath, are all essential to the creative life. They’re absolutely, it’s almost like sleep.
As the semester draws to a close I’m also reminded once again about the importance of rest. Life is inherently seasonal, particularly for an academic. It’s easy to just go, go, go all the time but we’re not built to thrive that way. As I shift gears into the summer seasons of a more open-ended work schedule I’m thinking about how I need to embrace rest and ultimately the way that resting well helps to build a firm foundation for me to do my best work.
What questions help you to live a wise life?
I hope that these questions help spark some curiosity for you this week. If anything in particular resonated, drop me a line to let me know and share your insight with someone you know who might get something out of it!
The Book Nook
I’m only part of the way through Parker Palmer’s book To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey. It’s a combination of being late in the semester with lots on my plate and the fact that I am stopping every other paragraph to highlight and sit with some of the beautiful ideas he is sharing.
His writing so far has been just what I need at the end of the semester. While the book was published almost 30 years ago, many of the themes and ideas resonate deeply with me in our present moment.
A few quotes to share
Some thoughts that resonate with my general approach to education in response to ChatGPT: redouble the emphasis on the student-teacher relationship.
But what scholars now say—and what good teachers have always known—is that real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject. We cannot learn deeply and well until a community of learning is created in the classroom.
On the importance of learning in community and interacting not only with others but with the material itself.
We do not learn best by memorizing facts about the subject. Because reality is communal, we learn best by interacting with it. In the practical disciplines, this may mean working with materials, creating artifacts, and solving problems. In the more abstract disciplines, it may mean learning how scholars generate, criticize, and use the concepts and data of their fields. In a wide variety of ways, good teachers bring students into living communion with the subjects they teach.
On the impact of Palmer’s Christian faith on his view of education.
In Christian tradition, truth is not a concept that “works” but an incarnation that lives. The “Word” our knowledge seeks is not a verbal construct but a reality in history and the flesh. Christian tradition understands truth to be embodied in personal terms, the terms of one who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truth. In this education we come to know the world not simply as an objectified system of empirical objects in logical connection with each other, but as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion. Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part.
The Professor Is In
Last Friday Caltech hosted a talk and panel discussion on the societal impacts of generative A.I. It was fun to hear Kevin Roose speak in person. You may have heard of Kevin when he shared his two-hour-long Valentine’s day conversation with Bing’s GPT-4-powered chatbot in which it revealed its alter ego (its name is Sydney apparently) and where it tried to convince Kevin to leave his wife. Wild stuff.
I’m excited about the new Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy (CSSPP) at Caltech and look forward to seeing how they continue to engage with A.I. in future events.
Leisure Line
Last Monday we enjoyed our last day of the discounted 3-day Southern California resident Disneyland tickets we bought earlier this spring. Had to grab a photo of this poster as I passed it in line for Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
The poster even features a typo which perhaps hits a little close to home. Hopefully I’ve caught them all as I polish off this week’s newsletter!
Still Life
These flowers bloomed in our neighbor’s front garden beds a week or so ago. A beautiful, vibrant purple. From some research on Seek it looks like it is Delosperma cooperi.
As always, there is A Lot here to unpack. Thank you for compiling and sharing. Some of my thoughts and observations FWIW --
I like the insight about asking questions over giving advice. Invitation and openness...
Focusing on rankings and comparisons is like always looking backwards... which is no healthy way to live.
Thinking about the prototyping approach and wondering about some dark sides. If iteration is the name of the game, what does that say about what is left behind, discarded, trashed -- literally and figuratively. Is iteration truly the sustainable approach we hope it is?
Delicate work to cross the streams of Prototyping and Relationships. People and Styrofoam don’t share too much in common.
Lots to keep thinking about...
(didn’t notice any typos; good work!)