Kevin Kelly

But the idea that there was something about realizing the essence of yourself

I think that's not something that I began with or even had an early epiphany on.

It's actually more recent is to kind of reflect on things like even writing this book where you have to articulate what it is.

So I think I've been doing it, but not articulating it.

not aware that I was doing it.

And it would have been easier if I had, this goes back to the subtitle of my book, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier.

I wish I'd known this earlier, that that's sort of the framing of a good life, is to think about what it is that you're trying to optimize in your life, trying to articulate the purpose in your life, and to come to some understanding of what it is that makes you unique and different among all the other 8 billion people

on the planet at this moment, let alone who've gone before us and who may come after us.

And so I think you could be on this journey and not even aware that you're on your journey.

And I think a lot of us may do it unconsciously where we're just trying to figure out what we can do well, what we can do that's valuable, what we can do that other people can't do.

And we could be doing that every day and not even have this articulation of trying to come to some essence of ourself.

I haven't done that exercise.

But let me think if I take a minute now to try and do that.

This is something I learned at Wired Magazine.

And there is a piece of advice in the book.

It's a little bit like this.

It has to do with there's a value in articulating what you're doing because instead of relying on other people to describe it.

And so this is kind of part of like branding exercise in marketing, which is that you actually want to control the message rather than have people interpret it.

And so we learned this at WIRED that we actually had to tell people again and again what it was that we're doing because we couldn't just sort of

rely on them kind of figuring out from reading the magazine.