Kevin Kelly Quotes

“You can be whatever you want to be, so be the person who ends meetings early.”

“To have a great trip, head toward an interest rather than to a place. Travel to passions.”

“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.”

“Your passions should fit you exactly, but your purpose in life should exceed you. Work for something much larger than yourself.”

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

“Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind.”

“Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them.”

“Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid, because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question.”

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

“Be strict with yourself, and forgiving of others. The reverse is hell for everyone.”

“Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.”

“Listening well is a superpower.”

“Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions.”

“Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them, 'Is there more?' until there is no more.”

“Kevin was the person who got me to San Francisco in the early days of the digital revolution to work with him and the other founders of WIRED. He was the magazine's founding executive editor, and his instincts on the next big story made it a must-read global brand in that era.”

“I will say that the more powerful the technologies are, the more powerful the problems it will create. So I am expecting AI to be one of the most problematic technologies we've ever made while being the most powerful one that we've ever made.”

“I'm a professional lifelong learner who uses his writing jobs in order to think, as a means to figure out what I think about it.”

“My formula is that if we can create just 2% more than we destroy every year, that 2% compounded over time is what progress is. So there will be a very, very long and big list of all the problems with AI, but the list of what's good is a little bit longer, not by much.”

“There's something I call thinkism, which is this idea that we can solve things by thinking about them or that we can even understand things by thinking about them. We're not going to solve or even identify the right problems by thinking about them. We only figure it out through use.”

“These are all recommendations of tools, in the broadest sense, of things that are helpful and practical for doing things yourself, for learning things yourself or as a small group. They are self-empowerment tools.”

“Most of my writing time on the project was trying to remove words and reduce the advice even further until it is less than 140 characters.”