Kevin Kelly Quotes

A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea.

In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.

You are what you do. Not what you say not what you believe not how you vote but what you spend your time on.

We have been surprised that coders still code without actually coding, mathematicans do not do math proofs, and writers who write without actually writing words. Our future is not job replacement but a kind of new work we have trouble imagining only a year ago.

It is easy to get trapped by your own success. Say no to tasks you probably won’t fail at and say yes to what you could fail at.

Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.

You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third.

Following the free also works in the other direction. If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now free may contain potential value not yet perceived.

The first thing the network economy reforms is our identity.

Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.

If you are stuck in life, travel to a place you have never heard of.

In the garden, dig a $100 hole for a $10 plant.

This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles and turns superficialities into careers. Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, famously complained that the “best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” This waking dream is viewed by some as an addictive squandering. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one of the greatest things this new invention has done. Isn’t the whole idea that in a highly evolved advanced society work is over?

Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

In the network economy, ever-less energy is needed to complete a single transaction, but ever-more effort is needed to agree on what pattern the transaction should follow.