Kevin Kelly: 'The thing that made you weird as a kid can make you great as an adult'

If you have a job that's difficult to put into words, you're on a good path into the future, says American tech pioneer Kevin Kelly.

"If it'll take a half hour to describe to your mum, what it is that you're doing, that's a good sign. Because that means that you're much more likely to be working at the frontier, working where there isn't as much competition," he tells Jesse Mulligan.

Kevin Kelly, now 71, is "senior maverick" at the award-winning tech magazine WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993.

His new book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier features 450 proverbs he's gathered from a wide range of sources.

"There were things that I would learn, in my experience at work or among friends, that I thought 'Gee, I want to remember that because I want to do that, I want to be like that, I want to make that my habit. And I would jot something down and try and put it into my own words, and compress it in some ways so that I can remember it."

Paying attention to advice can help us live better lives, Kelly says.

"The whole point of advice is that you can gain things without having to make all the mistakes yourself … You don't have to make all the mistakes. It's inevitable that you're going to make mistakes. And making mistakes is a great way to learn."

The wisest people he's encountered borrow advice from previous generations, and over the years he's used advice to help move towards his own dreams.

When it comes to failure, Kelly says we can take good and not-so-good approaches.

His advice is to "fail small in order to fail forward and fail better".

"What you don't want is to never fail at all. So that when the failure happens that it becomes all at once big, catastrophic."

The real test of a person's character is not how they deal with adversity, though, it's how they deal with power, Kelly says. The powerful people he most admires acknowledge the role of luck in their lives, as does he.

"I'm here, mostly - although I worked hard - because I was lucky, I was at the right place at the right time. Wired came along and just [emerged in synch] with the things I was doing. At that moment, we were doing exactly the right thing at the right time.

"I'm the beneficiary of luck in many, many, many ways. And I think, most powerful people, if they were true and honest, would have to admit the same thing, although most of them don't."

Even up until the early '90s, it was hard convincing people the internet was "more than teenage boys on bulletin boards", Kelly says.

Something very similar is now happening with the emergence of AI, which Kelly says has actually been around, and somewhat ignored, for years.

"Now you can converse with these APIs (application programming interfaces) and suddenly it's the big bang again. There's this amazement and people are tripping over each other trying to figure out what it means. Because for the first time, they can see it, they can use it, they can converse with it. Humans are just really biased towards the conversational format so it feels very natural and powerful to us."

Just as our "most beloved stuff" - smartphones and social media - weren't around 20 years ago, Kelly says the things that will dominate the culture 20 years from now have not yet been invented.

He predicts AI innovation won't be led by the big corporates, though: "Already the most popular AI is not from Google or Microsoft or Facebook or Amazon - it's from a startup ... 20 years from now, they'll look back and say 'there were no AI experts in 2023, there were no generative art experts in 2023.'"

One upside of the 2020s is we're living in a great time to become experts in brand-new things.

"If there's no label or there's no language for what [what you want to do], if it'll take a half hour to describe to your mum what it is that you're doing, that's a good sign. Because that means that you're much more likely to be working at the frontier, working where there isn't as much competition."

We each have a unique combination of experiences and interests that make us truly special, Kelly says, although it's very hard to personally arrive at that understanding and express that: "The thing that made you weird as a kid can make you great as an adult - if you don't lose it. It's not losing it, that's the really hard part."

Devotion to our devices doesn't help the process.

"We're connected so much that it's really hard to let go of what people are hoping for us or expecting from us, or the roles that we have or the movies that we've seen or the types of successes that we've been told about.

"If you can you want to invent your own way of being successful. And money should only be part of that definition. You want to be on the path where you're not just the best at something - you're the only one who could do a certain thing or the only one who really cares about it a certain thing or the only one willing to do a certain thing.

"That difference is incredibly valuable in this current economy. It's thinking different, being different. That is really the power. And I think AI can help us all think a little differently because it's not human-like thinking … it's an alien kind of intelligence. So therefore you can also use AI to help you be a little different than everybody else."

On a global level, there will be problems in the future but we will also have better tools to cope, he says.

"That's what we get out of technology and progress. I think it allows more of us, born and yet unborn, to be able to find our own unique set of talents and to share them with the world."

Optimism requires taking a longer view, and we should aim to get a little better every year, Kelly says. 

Over time, these "tiny little increments" can accumulate and become significant enough to overwhelm even fairly large setbacks and downturns.

"If you can increase your degree of betterment even by 1 percent a year, that can be compounded over decades. So if you take a longer view of things, it gives you permission to kind of trust the future.

"That's my mission - to help everybody in the world work on moving in the direction of being their best version of themselves."

Three pieces of advice from Kevin Kelly:

The quickest supermarket checkout line will be the one with the fewest people - no matter how full their carts are.

When you get an invitation, imagine it's for the next day: "Today, when I'm invited to do something in six months, I ask myself 'hm, would I do that if it was tomorrow morning?' And usually, the answer is no. So I can make it decisive."

If you find a lost thing at home, don't put it back where you found it - put it back where you first looked for it: "It's almost always within arm's reach of where it was last seen. So the trick to finding things is really to kind of hone in on when it was last seen ... That's the secret to finding things that are lost."