Kevin Kelly: recommendation

Transcript context

…How many people asking for advice actually want advice? And to the extent they don’t, what is it they’re looking for? People write me for advice every day, and at least half the time, I feel maybe they want the feeling of having asked me rather than the advice. Now I’m happy to supply them with that feeling, but maybe it’s process they’re maximizing. I think you’re right. I think that sometimes people are looking for confirmation about things that they’ve already decided. Sometimes they’re actually looking for justification for something they’ve already decided. I think sometimes they are actually looking for attention. But I think there’s a sense of, maybe, confirmation. I’m not sure how much people are actually looking for information from this. The kind of advice that I get from — people writing are usually young people who are trying to decide about where to go, what to study. And they’re wanting to hear from an adult some sense of whether something is valuable or not, and they don’t know. That kind of advice I’m very reluctant to give, and almost never answer, because I don’t feel I know that person well enough. I can give them a platitude (like my book is filled with), saying, “Here’s my piece of advice for a young person who is setting out — ” And I would say my piece of advice to them, somebody I don’t know, is, “Try to work on an area where there’s no words for what it is that you do. ” I would say that’s my advice. You said that to Noah Smith in that interview. But if I’m a young person and then I say, “Well, how do I operationalize that? What do I do in the morning? Do I put that on my LinkedIn profile?” How do they make that concrete?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.