Words of Wisdom from Kevin Kelly

May 8, 20201 Comment

A friend of mine sent across an article titled, 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice, a couple of days ago. I managed to read it only today. It’s actually a list of advice by Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine. The list contained 68 points, a number that Kevin had chosen to be in parity with his age (68 years). I was thinking of writing a blog post about my favorite ones from Kevin’s 68 points of advice. However as I started compiling a list, I realized that reading through the list and grouping them to relate to broad areas was difficult; to start with the list was not even numbered. So I have grouped Kevin’s 68 points of advice into broad categories (pretty subjective) so as to make it easy to understand and refer back. So given below is my classification of Kevin’s 68 Maxims.

Collaboration:

Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.
Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn’t know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you’ll almost always get your answer.
Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.
Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

Communication:

Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.
Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.
Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.
How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

Creativity:

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.
Art is in what you leave out.
Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

Interpersonal:

Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
Treating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.
Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kick-start their imaginations.
The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.
Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.
The Golden Rule (Treating others as you want to be treated) will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.
Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
This is true: It’s hard to cheat an honest man.
Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.
To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.
When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.
Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.
Promptness is a sign of respect.

Learning:

Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.
Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.
There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

Life-Hacks:

The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.
Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.
When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.
If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.
When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.
If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.
For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.
On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.
When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.
Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.
Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.
Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

Success Tips:

Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.
Don’t be the best. Be the only.
Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.
You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.
The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia.
If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.
When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.
You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.
You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.
Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

Wisdom of a Lifetime:

Trust me: There is no “them”.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.
Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.
Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.
A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.
I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.
Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.
Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.
When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

Hope you find my classification.

Do book mark Kevin Kelly’s website. It has a treasure trove of articles on a host of subjects: https://kk.org/

Oh, I almost forgot.

Belated Happy Birthday Kevin.

Thanks a lot for sharing your words of wisdom.

Image Source: Flickr
Image by: Christopher Michael

The Rich – Poor Divide: Growing Inequality

January 23, 2015January 22, 20152 Comments

About a couple of days ago I came across a news article and a blog post that serve as the inspiration for this post. The news article is by non-profit organization Oxfam and it says that the richest 1% of the world is most likely to control 50% of global wealth by 2016. The report is interestingly titled: ‘WEALTH: HAVING IT ALL AND WANTING MORE.’ The executive summary of the report reads:

‘Global wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite. These wealthy individuals have generated and sustained their vast riches through their interests and activities in a few important economic sectors, including finance and pharmaceuticals/healthcare. Companies from these sectors spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying to create a policy environment that protects and enhances their interests further. The most prolific lobbying activities in the US are on budget and tax issues; public resources that should be directed to benefit the whole population, rather than reflect the interests of powerful lobbyists.’

One key finding of the report caught my eye: ‘The very richest of the top 1%, the billionaires on the Forbes list, have seen their wealth accumulate even faster over this period. In 2010, the richest 80 people in the world had a net wealth of $1.3tn. By 2014, the 80 people who top the Forbes rich list had a collective wealth of $1.9tn; an increase of $600bn in just 4 years, or 50% in nominal terms. Meanwhile, between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current US$ had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires; however since 2010, it has been decreasing over this time.’ It seems to me that the global recession and country specific recessions since 2008 have not had much impact on the wealth of the global superrich. Another interesting information from the report: ‘In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to equal the wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population; by 2014, the figure had fallen to just 80 billionaires.’ The wealthy are getting wealthier by the day.

The report also finds that, ‘Companies from the finance and pharmaceutical sectors spent millions of dollars in 2013 on lobbying.’ All these lobbying has resulted in favorable results for the companies in these sectors at the expense of tax payers. Again to quote from the report: ‘While the financial sector has recovered well as a result of this bailout, median income levels in the USA are yet to return to their pre-crisis levels. The ongoing cost to the tax payer for “systematically important financial institutions‟ – in other words those that are too big to fail – has been estimated by the IMF to be $83bn every year.’ The report goes on to say, ‘In the US, the two issues which most lobbying is reported against are the federal budget and appropriations and taxes. These are the public’s resources, which companies are aiming to directly influence for their own benefit, using their substantial cash resources. Lobbying on tax issues in particular can directly undermine public interests, where a reduction in the tax burden to companies results in less money for delivering essential public services.’

Another interesting observation from the report: ‘The three pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis) that are members of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) have made the largest contribution to the Ebola relief effort, have collectively donated more than $3m in cash and medical products. But the amount of money that has been spent on Ebola and other activities that have a broader benefit to society needs to be looked at in the context of their expenditure on corporate lobbying to influence for their own interests. These three companies together spent more than $18m on lobbying activities in the US during 2013.’ Did I read that right: $18 MN for lobbying in U.S. but only $3MN to fight Ebola, a disease that was killing roughly 1 in 2 of the infected people in the current outbreak?

Some of the remedies suggested by Oxfam to alleviate such extreme inequality include:

Make governments work for citizens and tackle extreme inequality
Pay workers a living wage and close the gap with skyrocketing executive reward
Close international tax loopholes and fill holes in tax governance

I was interested in looking at examples of difference in tax rates between the wealthy and the rest when I ran into a videos in which none other than Warren Buffett, one of richest men in the world, had claimed in 2007 (if I’m not wrong) that he is taxed at a lower rate than people who work for him!!!

Looks like things have not changed since then, a proof for which I came in the blog post ‘The Taxman Cometh’ by ‘I Pledge a Fallegiance’. He quotes the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy study on taxation in the United States that finds that: ‘in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1 percent will average 5.4 percent.’ The author concludes that: ‘It seems that States and localities have regressive tax systems because they tend to rely more on sales and excise taxes (fees tacked onto items like gas, liquor and cigarettes), which are the same rate for rich and poor alike. Even property taxes, which account for much of local tax revenue, hit working- and middle-class families harder than the wealthy because their homes often represent their largest asset.’ All this makes the author conclude: ‘poverty is a waste product of wealth.’

Years ago when I was chatting with some of MBA batch mates, one of them said that USA has made an important contribution to mankind by introducing the concept of wealth creation to the world. He said that because of this contribution by USA, accumulation of wealth is no more a zero-sum game and one person does not have to plunder another person to increase his wealth. He claimed that this concept of ‘wealth creation’ is the fairest system possible. Looking at the findings of Oxfam and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, it doesn’t look the current world’s approach to wealth creation is fair by any yardstick.

I have always found it interesting that the government would let corporations to deduct their expenses first and then levy income tax on what is left of their revenue but would not follow the same taxation approach when it comes to individual tax payers. Clearly just like in a corporation, some of the expenses for an individual are also mandatory/ inevitable. So shouldn’t they be deducted first before levying any income tax? I am starting to wonder if transaction taxes would be a fairer taxation system (on the common man) than income taxes.

World Development Report 2015: Understanding mind, society and behavior

December 15, 2014December 15, 2014Leave a comment

“My only worry is that it will be read more diligently by private marketers selling wares and politicians running for office than by people designing development interventions.” This is what the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, Kaushik Basu had to say about the World Development Report 2015 published about a fortnight ago. The full report can be downloaded from the World Bank Site. The report is interestingly titled “Mind, Society, and Behavior.”

The central argument of the Report is that policy design that takes into account psychological and cultural factors will achieve development goals faster. The two main goals of the report are:

To change the way we think about development problems by integrating knowledge that is now scattered across multiple disciplines such as behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and political science.
To help development practitioners use the richer understanding of the human actor that emerges from the behavioral sciences in program design, implementation, and evaluation.

The report has some interesting finding including:

Poverty constitutes a cognitive tax that makes it hard for poor people to think deliberatively, especially in times of hardship or stress
An experimental cash transfer program which automatically saved a part of the funds on behalf of beneficiaries, and then disbursed them as lump a sum at the time when decisions about school enrollment for the next year were being made, resulted in increased enrollments for the following year
The likelihood of default on loans became three times less likely with a simple change in the periodicity of meetings between microfinance clients and their repayment groups to weekly rather than monthly.
Boys from backward classes were just as good at solving puzzles as boys from the upper castes when caste identity was not revealed