Kevin Kelly

And when you have conversations or observing them or reading them, you realize, oh, this little mind could go pretty deep in many different directions.

There's a depth and a breadth to them saying, there's lots of things that this could intersect with.

I would say that's one energy signature is a depth and breadth to the possibility space that it suggests.

And secondly, I think there is some detection of how fast

things are being uncovered, like a rate of discovery in that area.

If you encounter some subculture or some little niche or some new technology or some research area, there's maybe one person working on it and every year or so, maybe they discover something.

It's like, okay, it's not enough.

But if there's a bunch of people and every week they're coming with another something, that says that there's a sufficient momentum.

Maybe that's the word I'm looking for.

There's a certain momentum or acceleration that's involved.

There's a sense of, well, there's enough being discovered that we could kind of imagine this scaling up into something bigger.

And so you're looking at the recent past to see what's the rate of

new things.

And then another metric that I use is how much new language and words are needed for what's happening.

You want a true area like this will be ahead of language and having to create new terms, new words, new things.

You can't describe it well or easily.

Right.

And so that's another sign that it's worth paying attention to.

So it's related to another piece of advice in the book, which is, I actually talked with this with David Allen, the Get Things Done guy, which is that there's a kind of a misappreciation or misunderstanding about productivity, which is that a lot of people who are productivity focused will be trying to minimize the amount of time they spend on working on something.

But actually, what you really want to be doing is you want to be finding things that you want to spend as much time as possible working on.