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Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

joincolossus.com

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Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#61

Post by vessenes »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #60

Gemini summary: The article "Flounder Mode" on JoinColossus.com, while ostensibly about Kevin Kelly and a concept called "flounder mode," is primarily an autobiographical reflection by the author on their own career and life philosophy. The author describes their journey through various roles and experiences, from working on Capitol Hill to tech outsourcing and consulting, and ultimately to building multiple business…

Downvoted. Anyone who wants Gemini’s take on this is capable of getting it; what’s hard is finding thoughts from other people of interest. Please don’t post these.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#62

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

egypturnash wrote: post #10

Is this a story about Kevin Kelly or is this an autobiography? It purports to be the former but it's largely about the author's work history. It sort of gestures vaguely at being an interview with Kevin but there's only about four paragraphs in the entire article that contain quotes from him in response to things the author asked, and most of these are about his collection of knick-knacks. I kept on waiting for a ser…

I'm glad I threw that wall of text into an LLM for a summary before wasting my time reading it only to be annoyed that the concept is never explained.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#63

Post by vessenes »

Brie, great essay, and salient - thank you! I had a similar set of feelings getting to know John Seeley Brown; another legend albeit slightly older than KK. Reading his bio on his website once just put me at ease; his interests were so varied and the work he’d done was so interesting, but the through line was just .. him, a person and his interests.

I once asked him about his career and he was very uncomfortable with the idea in any sense - he was like “Do I have a career?”

I’d like a follow up from you in ten years, though: or maybe a counterpoint about someone else: I’ve recently been mulling over what parts of “just follow your interests” is a super power and what part is just ADD/an excuse for not getting through the boring parts that lead to long term impact: right now my self review is I should have settled down a little.

Thanks again! Fun to read about you and Kevin and see those awesome photos.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#64

Post by mathgeek »

vessenes wrote: post #63

Brie, great essay, and salient - thank you! I had a similar set of feelings getting to know John Seeley Brown; another legend albeit slightly older than KK. Reading his bio on his website once just put me at ease; his interests were so varied and the work he’d done was so interesting, but the through line was just .. him, a person and his interests. I once asked him about his career and he was very uncomfortable with…

> an excuse for not getting through the boring parts that lead to long term impact

Personally I don't worry too much about long term impact. It's incredibly hard to actually predict what will have an impact after you're gone, and the world will have forgotten about approximately all of us in a hundred years or so. Instead, I focus on the idea that folks happily engaged in useful work produce useful things.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#65

Post by coderatlarge »

WJW wrote: post #54
coderatlarge wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of millionaires out here that never had a successful startup. what do you mean by this?

Not GP, but exactly what he says: don't fall for the HN narrative that the only way to be successful in life is to found a startup and become a billionaire at 25. Carefully and diligently working your way up the career ladder and consistently spending less than you earn has a vastly higher expected value than the startup life, but since it can be described in a few sentences and is not very exciting you will not find…

thanks for explaining; 100% agree.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#66

Post by chr15m »

kaiwenwang wrote: post #39
chr15m wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring is not a zero sum game (growth of the company/economy through good hiring means more positions are created). I've hired software developers before and what I was looking for was somebody who commits code that works and is good quality. I don't care about their ranking on some imaginary programmer hierarchy. You probably don't want to work at a company where they do.

No, not a fan of Leetcode either, nor imaginary measures of social prestige. We may not necessarily disagree with any of each other's points, but lack of mutual context and having different lived experience makes our words have different meaning.

Yeah true. Thank you.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#67

Post by corry »

Quarrel wrote: post #37
yeeetz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs have strong religious or spiritual beliefs — I believe it's part of the unique competitive advantage and edge in this industry

Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs don't have strong religious or spiritual beliefs. Both are true. I think finding self-motivation in life is important, particularly for entrepreneurs, but there are many sources. I've never thought the SV / San Fran scene was particularly religious. I'd have guessed religion was under-represented there compared to the rest of the US.

As an outsider but someone who spent a fair bit of time there in the tech scene, it seems like there's a really interesting piece waiting to be written about the juxtaposition of SF/SV culture (tech hedonism, psychedelics, affluence, utopian thinking, dislike of authority, social justice) and a seeming rise in leaders being openly religious (usually Christian).

Or maybe it was always there and now it's just more obvious since you can scroll a big name VC's IG account and see him posting Bible verses from his SoMa office.

I find it actually kind of nice that these things are mixing.

Maybe the world is poorer if people with different metaphysical beliefs completely self-segregate into closed communities, especially during these times of great change where our understanding of consciousness, physics, AI, and everything else is rapidly undermining a lot traditional positions on both sides of the aisle.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#68

Post by dasil003 »

jebarker wrote: post #36

I too would like to hear more from people with similar approaches to work, career and technology to KK. However, it seems like there’s a large amount of survivorship bias at play when people talk about just following their interests and it leading to financial security and work freedom.

Of course there’s a survivorship bias. Everyone’s gotta eat, and the path of least resistance is to get a job and do what you’re told. Finding an alternative path is much harder of course, but in the grand scheme of things well supported by our industrial prosperity and individualist culture.

If you look around you’ll find more people doing it than you think, they just tend to be less famous than business moguls since peculiar interests are more of a niche thing but everyone is interested in material success.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#69

Post by danparsonson »

kaiwenwang wrote: post #34
pragmatic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah that’s bleak. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other people the bear is chasing. The bar is so low in corporate America you could trip on it. Just try to be halfway competent, do something useful at work, read a book or two about your industry. You’re already way ahead. Don’t fall for the hacker news bs. Lots of millionaires out here that never had a successful startup.

I've tried to be as accurate as I perceive it, and the descriptions of the environment are accurate to the locale of most of the United States. If the bar is that low, then the environment is sure to be like the first place I described.

"Most of the United States"? You're covering an awfully big area there - how much of it have you actually seen for yourself vs learned about second hand through news and social media?

As for the skills bar, if you're intent on being hired by the likes of OpenAI then sure, you'll need to aim high, but for the majority of jobs, being reasonably good, friendly, and reliable will definitely be sufficient; the challenge is then mainly about seeming slightly more appealing than the other candidates for a position.

Re: Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

#70

Post by [deleted] »

dannyobrien wrote: post #9

Just after I took on my new role, I wrote to Kevin Kelly and asked if I could meet him (I assumed he wouldn't know who I was, even though we've met informally, but he did). I wanted to talk to him about talking about how to be optimistic about technology. At my heart, I still remain positive about the contributions and opportunities of technology, but I've increasingly struggled to know how to convey, qualify or tran…

[deleted]
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