Best Of: Life Lessons From Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sign up for our daily Substack here! Kevin Kelly has made a career out of looking to the future. He helped pioneer online social networking all the way back in the 1980s, and he co-founded Wired, the magazine devoted to digital technology, when the internet was still an infant. But in his new book, Excellent Advice for Living, he looks backward. It’s a collection of 450 bits of wisdom he wishes he’d known when he was young. Things like “Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points” and “That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult—if you don’t lose it.” Today on the show he shares his best advice for building careers, nurturing relationships, solving problems, and finding satisfaction. He also explains why he’s more optimistic than ever about technology (yes, even AI).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, folks, with the holiday weekend upon us, we thought we'd take a breather and share one of our favorite episodes from the archives.
0:08.0	It's a conversation with Kevin Kelly.
0:10.3	Hey there, Caleb. What are you doing here?
0:12.9	Hey, Rufus, I thought I'd join you on mic this week.
0:15.7	Wonderful. I'm delighted to be joined.
0:17.9	So as I was saying, this week we're resharing a conversation that you had a couple years ago
0:21.9	with Wired Magazine's co-founder, Kevin Kelly, about his book, Excellent Advice for Living.
0:28.9	I love Kevin Kelly.
0:30.8	He spent years writing and collecting more than 400 aphorisms from his extraordinary life.
0:37.3	Yeah, these are things like enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points. more than 400 aphorisms from his extraordinary life.
0:41.4	Yeah, these are things like enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points.
0:47.2	Or it's thrilling to be rudely polite to complete strangers, which I found to be true.
0:50.7	Never wear a hat that has more character than you do.
0:51.9	Whoops.
0:58.5	So we invited Kevin to tell us a few of his favorites, and the result is just a really lovely conversation about creativity and life lessons, and it's full of optimism.
1:04.1	You know, I just listened to it again, and it just warms my heart. It's so packed with great stuff.
1:09.5	And one thing I love is he says, make stuff that is good
1:13.6	for people to have, not just things that people want. Make stuff that's good for people to have.
1:20.0	Yeah, I know where you're going with this. You're on to me, Caleb. This is exactly what we try to do
1:25.8	every day, every single day at the Next Big Idea Club.
1:29.2	Sure is.
1:29.9	And I'm telling you this because some astute listeners may have noticed that this episode
	...

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