Kevin Kelly Quotes

#1. In the context of your dreams,knowledge will always gives you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute xceptionally

Kevin Kelly

#2. A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.

Kevin Kelly

#3. All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

Kevin Kelly

#4. Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

Kevin Kelly

#5. The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

Kevin Kelly

#6. Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

Kevin Kelly

#7. The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

Kevin Kelly

#8. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A

Kevin Kelly

#9. One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

Kevin Kelly

#10. Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

Kevin Kelly

#11. Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

Kevin Kelly

#12. A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.

Kevin Kelly

#13. Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What

Kevin Kelly

#14. The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.

Kevin Kelly

#15. But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

Kevin Kelly

#16. Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

Kevin Kelly

#17. Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

Kevin Kelly

#18. What technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an 'infinite game.' ... A finite game is played to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing.

Kevin Kelly

#19. We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

Kevin Kelly

#20. The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.

Kevin Kelly

#21. But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

Kevin Kelly

#22. The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.

Kevin Kelly

#23. And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.

Kevin Kelly

#24. Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Kevin Kelly

#25. Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

Kevin Kelly

#26. Your greatest job is shedding what you don't have to do.

Kevin Kelly

#27. All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers - what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine ... We're constructing a single, global machine.

Kevin Kelly

#28. Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Kevin Kelly

#29. This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.

Kevin Kelly

#30. Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

Kevin Kelly

#31. The young are always coming up with the good ideas; it's because they waste time. They follow their passion and do something, not looking for a payoff, just doing what's interesting.

Kevin Kelly

#32. It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

Kevin Kelly

#33. Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. A

Kevin Kelly

#34. The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Kevin Kelly

#35. Tim believes that entrepreneurship isn't based on an idea or a plan, or even a model - it is based on having a strong competency in something. The way to overcome fear, he claims, is by testing your competency.

Kevin Kelly

#36. Singularity is the point at which "all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."

Kevin Kelly

#37. The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

Kevin Kelly

#38. Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.

Kevin Kelly

#39. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. This

Kevin Kelly

#40. Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

Kevin Kelly

#41. The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.

Kevin Kelly

#42. In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

Kevin Kelly

#43. Paranoia is acceptable in the new friendship paradigm. Worrying that your best employees or customers might leave is ok, as long as you put in place an active strategy to offset any possibility of that scenario.

Kevin Kelly

#44. Our existence here, he says, is a case of "not we the accidental but we the expected." Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.

Kevin Kelly

#45. This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

Kevin Kelly

#46. It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

Kevin Kelly

#47. Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.

Kevin Kelly

#48. It is easy to make a dollar but it is hard to make a difference.

Kevin Kelly

#49. You'll always have enough reasons not to execute, not to do: not enough time, not enough money, not enough will or skill.But what matters isn't what you lack. What matters isn't your idea but what you do with it. What will you do?

Kevin Kelly

#50. An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

Kevin Kelly

#51. Entrepreneurship is about freedom, financial freedom but it also about what you leave behind.
Guibert Englebienne, Co-founder of Globant

Kevin Kelly

#52. What excites the media is that someone has a great idea or vision and makes millions as a result. The reality is that rarely happens. It is competency that unlocks a person's potential.
Tim Clark excerpt from DO! the pursuit of xceptional execution

Kevin Kelly

#53. Every year I own less of what I use. Possession

Kevin Kelly

#54. Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

Kevin Kelly

#55. We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.

Kevin Kelly

#56. It's about how to deal with the idea killer in your own head, the part of your brain where fear and knowledge keep you from executing the brilliant ideas your mind generates every day.

Kevin Kelly

#57. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.

Kevin Kelly

#58. Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.

Kevin Kelly

#59. There is no "I" for a person, for a beehive, for a corporation, for an animal, for a nation, for any living thing. The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost, an ephemeral shroud.

Kevin Kelly

#60. once we wrapped the globe in endless circles of wires crossing the deserts and beneath the oceans, decentralization was not only possible, but inevitable.

Kevin Kelly

#61. I work in a "you scratch my back, and I'll stab yours" kind of a place.

Kevin Kelly

#62. Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

Kevin Kelly

#63. An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

Kevin Kelly

#64. So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy.

Kevin Kelly

#65. It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Kevin Kelly

#66. Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

Kevin Kelly

#67. The organization and the environment are in concert.

Kevin Kelly

#68. The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Kevin Kelly

#69. Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

Kevin Kelly

#70. Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

Kevin Kelly

#71. Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

Kevin Kelly

#72. Well, here's what you can do, and that's about it.

Kevin Kelly

#73. Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

Kevin Kelly

#74. The proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.

Kevin Kelly

#75. Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it's bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.

Kevin Kelly

#76. This is the culmination of a lot of people's vision. I think this is just another step towards making Central Michigan football among the elite programs in the Mid-American Conference.

Kevin Kelly

#77. For better or worse, our lives are accelerating, and the only speed fast enough is instant.

Kevin Kelly

#78. We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.

Kevin Kelly

#79. Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

Kevin Kelly

#80. There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

Kevin Kelly

#81. Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.

Kevin Kelly

#82. When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

Kevin Kelly

#83. We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

Kevin Kelly

#84. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

Kevin Kelly

#85. The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.

Kevin Kelly

#86. But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

Kevin Kelly

#87. An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

Kevin Kelly

#88. Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment.

Kevin Kelly

#89. Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

Kevin Kelly

#90. Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

Kevin Kelly

#91. Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

Kevin Kelly