Kevin Kelly - Success Secrets

Full transcript: Kevin Kelly on London Real

0:11 Brian Rose: Is there anything you’ve formed over the years that you found that when I wake up in the morning and do X that my life is significantly better or different physical or thought or diet practices that just allow you to do what you need to do every day?

0:26 Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I take, well, this is a little bit later in life, but I guess it maybe started in my 40s. I take a nap, a 20-minute nap, and I have some weird thing where I lay down and I wake up exactly 20, 21 minutes later.

0:38 I do it in the middle of the afternoon, and that allows me to basically only sleep for six hours every day at the most.

0:45 Brian Rose: Okay. Is that something you read about an engineer?

0:48 Brian Rose: No. Or you just stumbled on it?

0:50 Kevin Kelly: I just sort of stumbled on it.

0:52 Brian Rose: And you do that without fail daily?

0:54 Kevin Kelly: No, I don’t do it without fail because I have, you know, when I’m traveling, because I’m like, you know, I’m adjusting my clock by 24 hours when I go to Asia, whatever it is. Like India is really weird because it’s exactly 12 hours different, so you have to just reverse everything. And so that disrupts the kind of nap thing because I have to, but it also helps me adjust to the time zone changes very quickly.

1:19 So for me, that was just getting more hours out of a day because I’m only going to sleep for six hours. I tried polyphasic sleep for a while as an experiment, and I have to say that polyphasic is where you only sleep for a small 20 minutes every four hours or something. And it does work, but if you miss one cycle, it kills you. It kills me anyway.

1:48 Brian Rose: Okay. You just go into this.

1:50 Kevin Kelly: You’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m going to die.

1:53 Brian Rose: How long did you keep it up for?

1:55 Kevin Kelly: Well, I mean, I kept it up for, I don’t know, I think it did it for a month and a half or something. But you also need to have this, you also need to be able to then therefore to sleep every four hours. It’s like that was just really hard to do if you’re traveling or something.

2:13 And so that was the problem was that you can’t miss any of those. But on that you sleep only for a small amount of time. Yeah, right. There’s a very minimal time in total. But don’t miss one of those things.

2:25 Or you turn into like a grandma. So anyway, so that’s not what I’m doing. Other things, well, I am, the thing that gives me the most pleasure that I, you know, they talk about flow state. The thing that gives me the most pleasure is actually photographing and processing photographs. I can enter that and like come out eight hours later, whatever it is.

2:52 I spent a lot of time walking and photographing. I can just do that. And I just perfectly be here now in the moment, conscious, aware, happy, focused and productive.

3:09 Brian Rose: And do you use anything, a specific camera? Do you use old technology, new technology?

3:18 Kevin Kelly: I use point and shoot. I’ve always, I’ve never had state of the art cameras. I’ve always had the kind of what I would call highest common denominator consumer level. So I use a point and shoot Lumix and I kind of repeat the Lance Armstrong’s response when he’s asked about which bike he uses. It’s not the bike. It’s not the pots. It’s not the camera.

3:50 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s your eye.

3:52 Kevin Kelly: It’s, yes, everything else. And so I use the good enough piece of equipment. And so over the years I’ve used various kinds of them and I’m using for the past eight years I’ve been using the Lumix and they’re super zooms and I’m happy.

4:15 I think Chase Jarvis says the best camera to use is the one you have. And so I do enough on the iPhone but it doesn’t zoom, which is a big thing for me.

4:28 Brian Rose: What makes a great photographer?

4:31 Kevin Kelly: It’s seeing. It’s just, it’s a way of seeing, it’s being able to see things differently.

4:38 And that’s basically, that’s the entirety of it, I believe, is to see it differently. And when you look at the great photographers who have a style or something, they’re seeing the world differently. Freelander, Edward Weston, and so Adams, they saw the world differently. And that to me is what, if you can transfer that sight into something physical and do it again and again and again, then you’re a great photographer. And Eliebowitz, they’re seeing it in a different way than someone else.

5:15 And, you know, it’s hard. I think thinking differently, seeing differently is becoming more difficult because we’re all connected. So the chore, the job, the wealth and innovative generator is to think differently while you’re connected. It’s actually not so hard to think differently if you’re disconnected. If you’re in some tribe in the Amazon, yeah, you’re going to have different ideas.

5:44 If you’re the Amish, yeah, you’re going to have different ideas, but you’re not connected, so it’s not as valuable. If you’re connected, you’re just swamped with this group mind, the hive mind.

5:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, and the memes are everywhere.

6:00 Kevin Kelly: So if you can think or see differently while connected, that’s the gem. That’s the mother load.

6:07 That is the source. That is the engine. Think differently. See differently while you’re connected. Communicate that.

6:14 Come back and think to it. And so that becomes increasingly a challenge of how to do that, of how to kind of keep, and that’s, by the way, why I travel. I travel to keep my mind flexible. I travel to see differently. I travel to have an other encounter with the otherness because it forces me to see differently, to think differently.

6:36 To me, it’s the most powerful stimulant. It’s the most powerful nutritional supplement for seeing and thinking differently is to go somewhere very, very different.