Tag: Kevin Kelly

Categories
Travel

The Geometry of the Right Question

The heavy brass key lands on the polished mahogany desk with a satisfying clink. The concierge, impeccably dressed and professionally warm, pulls out a crisp, glossy map. With practiced efficiency, a red felt-tip pen circles a restaurant three blocks away.

It is an interaction defined entirely by transaction and expectation. We arrive in a new city carrying the coiled tension of the unfamiliar, desperate for a good experience. So, we ask the professional where we should go, and they give us the answer specifically engineered for people exactly like us. We want to pierce the veil of the tourist economy, to find the authentic pulse of a place, yet we instinctively rely on the very instruments designed to insulate us from it.

Kevin Kelly offers this approach to wayfinding for bypassing the polished veneer of travel:

“Don’t ask the hotel concierge where to eat. Ask almost anyone else, including drivers, and when you ask, don’t ask where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?”

Notice the subtle geometry of that shift. When you ask someone “where is a good place to eat,” you are asking them to play the role of a critic. They instantly, often subconsciously, filter their response. They calculate what they think you can afford, what they assume your palate can handle, or what they believe is socially acceptable to recommend to a visitor. They hand you an idealized map.

But when you ask “where did you eat last,” you are asking for a historical fact. You are bypassing the curation of stated preferences and accessing the raw truth of revealed preferences.

I have spent too many evenings in unfamiliar cities eating perfectly fine, entirely forgettable meals at the places circled in red ink. I suspect many of us have. We hold onto the belief that authority figures hold the best secrets.

The architecture of our choices often limits the quality of our experiences. Kelly’s advice isn’t just a clever hack for finding a better dinner.

It is a fundamental truth about how we navigate the world at large.

We constantly ask the wrong people the wrong questions. We ask financial experts for their market projections instead of asking to see their personal portfolios. We ask successful people for their sweeping theories on productivity rather than asking what they actually did between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM this morning. We ask for recommendations, which are inherently performative, instead of asking for evidence, which is unavoidably real.

The map is never the territory, and the concierge is rarely the guide. The unvarnished truth of a place—or a life—doesn’t live at the polished desk in the lobby. It lives out on the street, in the messy, uncurated reality of what people actually do.

Categories
Art and Artists Living

Occupying the Artificial

There is a distinct texture to the modern shopping mall – polished tile, recycled air, and the relentless, humming promise that satisfaction is just a credit card swipe away. They’re designed to be transient; a place of movement, transaction, and eventual departure. You are not supposed to stay. You are certainly not supposed to live at the mall.

But recently, I came across a recommendation from Kevin Kelly about the documentary Secret Mall Apartment (currently on Netflix), which chronicles a band of artists who did exactly that. For years, they maintained a hidden sanctuary inside a busy mall.

“It is way more interesting and inspiring than first appears. It was a bold work of art, and I came away seeing art as a way of life.” — KK

This was art as an act of occupation. These artists didn’t just build a set; they altered their reality. They took a space designed for public consumption and carved out a private, human intimacy. They looked at the rigid architecture of the commercial world and saw a loophole, a blank canvas hidden behind the drywall.

Perhaps we should ask: Where are the secret apartments in our own lives?

We live in structures—both physical and digital—that are designed by others. It is easy to feel that our role is simply to navigate these spaces as they were intended. But the artist looks at the “mall” of daily existence and asks, “Where can I build something that is solely mine?”

Art as a “way of life” means we stop waiting for permission to be creative. It means we stop waiting for the studio or the gallery. For that “special” time or place. Instead we find the hollow spaces in our schedules, our environments, and our relationships, and we fill them with intention.

The sheer audacity of living in a mall was about a refusal to accept the world merely as it is presented – a reclaiming of individual agency.

Perhaps the most inspiring art in our lives isn’t what hangs on a wall, but how we choose to inhabit the “rooms” we walk through every day.

Categories
Living Work

Always demand a deadline because…

“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.”

Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

Ah, the deadline. That looming specter, the bane of procrastinators, the secret fuel of creativity. Kevin Kelly’s musings on deadlines strike a chord – not just with writers and artists, but with anyone who’s ever grappled with the allure of the indefinite.

Think of it this way: an open ocean without a compass invites aimless drifting. Sure, you might stumble upon hidden islands, but you’ll also waste months circling the same currents. A deadline, then, becomes the wind at your back, propelling you towards a specific shore, even if it’s not the one you initially envisioned.

The magic of the deadline lies in its harsh efficiency. It cuts through the fluff, the “good enoughs,” the endless tweaking. It forces you to confront the essence of your idea, to distill it down to its potent core. Under its pressure, extraneous details fall away, revealing the unique, the daring, the spark that makes your work stand out.

But isn’t perfection something to strive for? Kelly challenges that very notion. Perfection, he suggests, is often an illusion, a mirage shimmering on the horizon, forever out of reach. It can paralyze us, holding us back from the messy, imperfect beauty of “different.”

Embrace the different, Kelly urges. It’s in the unexpected twists, the bold strokes, the willingness to be unconventional that our work truly comes alive. Deadlines provide the crucible for this transformation. They push us beyond the familiar, beyond the safe, into the realm of the bold and the original.

Of course, deadlines aren’t without their limitations. Blind adherence to them can stifle organic growth, lead to rushed, unsatisfying results. The key, then, is to find the sweet spot – a deadline that sets the necessary fire without extinguishing the creative spark.

So, the next time you face a deadline, don’t see it as a burden, but as an opportunity. A deadline isn’t about reaching perfection, it’s about unleashing your difference, your unique voice, your contribution to the vibrant tapestry of creation. And who knows, you might just surprise yourself with what emerges from the crucible of time.

Remember, sometimes the most spectacular views aren’t from the summit, but from the path less traveled, carved out by the urgency of a deadline and the courage to be different. So,set your sails, light the fire, and let the deadline wind propel you towards a masterpiece of your own making.

Note: Google Bard helped write this article based upon a highlight I made reading Kevin Kelly’s book that was resurfaced to me by Readwise.

Categories
iPhone 13 Pro Max Optimism Photography Photography - Fujifilm X70

On Optimism, the News and Technology

I’m enjoying listening to an interview with Kevin Kelly on edisode 110 of the 3 Books podcast wiht Neil Pasricha. Kevin’s optimism is a delight – and a great reminder of how to sustain positivity.

I really enjoyed Kevin’s discussion about news – that bad news (like almost everything we read/watch daily) travels fast while good news travels slowly. He says if we had headlines every ten years, instead of every day or every hour, those headlines would be more optimistic. Such a good point.

2022 for me has been a year of very consciously turning my news consumption way down – especially video news which I’ve essentially eliminated. I still do follow a lot of RSS feeds and read too much news from those print/online sources – but getting rid of the talking heads on TV news has been very rewarding this year!

I also very much enjoyed the recent Cool Tools episode that Kevin did recently with my photography guru Christopher Michel. Chris is a wonderful teacher of photography and his abilities with portraiture continue to amaze me.

On Cool Tools Chris recommends one camera (beyond the Leica’s he typically uses) – the Ricoh GR3. The GR3 is a camera I’ve resisted buying – preferring my iPhone’s camera for the kind of casual street photography that I enjoy. But the GR3 gets very high marks from Chris, Eric Kim and others.

Eric says that the

“RICOH GR III/IIIx is probably at least 1000x better for photography than even the newest iPhone Pro.”

Maybe he’s right. He continues:

“The iPhone Pro camera is not for ‘pros’– it is actually for grandmothers who want to make better landscape photos, millenials/zillenials who want to shoot better selfies of themselves and their ‘lifestyle’, or for people who just want the most long-lasting battery on a phone (which happens to also shoot photos).”

But for now and the kind of photography I’m doing, I’m more than satisfied with the computational photography power of my iPhone Pro.

There was one camera that I owned previously that was in the same genre as the GR3 – the Fujifilm X70. I owned the X70 for a couple of years and really enjoyed using it. Chris Michel talks about how his tools (especially his cameras) must inspire him – and the X70 did that for me. Unfortunately, I sold my X70 a few years ago and then Fuji stopped making that model – so they’re hard to find in decent condition. That X70 of mine is one camera I really wish I’d held on to!

Both of these episodes (with Kevin and Chris) are great to listen/watch. Two masters at work!