Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work
joincolossus.com
joincolossus.com
I realise in reading this, that I never wrote after the fact to say thanks for that: so, thanks, KK, for everything.
(Alternative comment: I think oblomovka's down).
(For real dannyobrien completists, I also write small more regular email newsletter at https://buttondown.com/dannyob of my work within the Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe (which includes IPFS, libp2p, iroh, Bluesky, Spritely Institute, Guardian Project, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archive, DWeb Community, Foresight Institute, EFF, Muckrock, etc see https://ffdweb.org/projects , https://fil.org/ecosystem-explorer , https://directory.plnetwork.io/projects?focusAreas=Digital+H... ). It's pretty lowkey though.
> oblomovka runs off a machine on my desk, which tends to crash whenever I walk out of my house
Your essay on moving to the edge when everyone else is moving to the centre had a big effect on me at the time. I think it was prescient.
The tech sector has grown and changed so much. It has gotten much more "professional" which is arguably good but it this in turn promotes a fair amount of "corporate stooge" behavior. I am guilty here for sure, it is really easy to focus on levels, promo packets, OKRs, especially as you age and responsibility grows and forget what make this industry amazing in the first place.
Good reminder to focus on direction and interests and what you feel should be built. Reminds be a bit of the opening section of "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" which I only came across because I liked other Stripe press books.
You also meet more interesting and passionate people if you pick a direction vs a destination.
You describe a way of living that is probably much more common than the ramen scurvy CEO lifestyle, but it doesn't get written about because people want to read about financial success and winning at zero sum games.
The typical "success" archetype is often at the peak of some hierarchy (e.g. CEO) where the vast majority in the game literally cannot occupy the top positions. So in those situations most participants are losers. Sounds like you found a way to quietly opt out of that framing of success e.g. in your time at Stripe.
Thank you for normalizing shiny object syndrome floundering!
Why did you want to start Stripe Press in the first place? How did you get the support to do it?
I kept on waiting for a series of questions that acted as springboards for long responses from Kelly that included him talking about the value of an approach to work that he calls "flounder mode" but they never came; the only appearance of "flounder" is in the title. It's an extended intro to an interview that never actually comes. You talked with Kelly all day and hooray, great for you meeting one of your idols! But you barely tell us a single thing he said.
Even though the language is very simple, the writing is quite convoluted.
In psychology there’s a concept called splitting, or dichotomous thinking, where a person only thinks of things in concepts of their extremes. Either the most extreme good outcome, or the most extreme bad outcome. They might see people or public figures as either amazing or evil. The Wikipedia page has a primer on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) But you don’t need a Wikipedia article or psychology concepts to realize that there are more outcomes than extreme success or increasing poverty.
I’m fascinated by how these concepts that were once relegated to psychology and therapy have started to become commonplace among young people on the internet. They’re not seen as failure modes in thinking, but rather an obvious conclusion from whatever they’ve been consuming so much of online.
The comment above is a prime example. Even the obsession over “food derived from vegetable oils and chemically bleached wheat” is a confusing conclusion for me, someone who has had no problem avoiding wheat products and eating healthy on a budget with even minimal effort. The food topic is particularly strange because it’s not that hard to learn basic cooking skills, buy cheap vegetable, and cook quick and easy meals. Yet I continue talking to young people who simultaneously fret about food quality while filling their diets with nothing but processed and fast foods, many of which are more expensive than cooking basic fast meals.
I don’t know what else to say, other than the above style of thinking is, in my experience, indicative of what happens when someone collects too much perspective from the internet and not enough from the real world. Given the context of this comment section, I can only recommend trying to reevaluate, disconnect from the internet a little more, and make an effort to reconnect with the real world
The reasonable perspective does not. It demonstrates that though agency is limited it does exist.
Our life outcomes are connected to our actions. For many their circumstances make this an unpleasant thought, thus binary thinking protect their self-image. For some that's all they have left.
Humanity’s initial circumstances, by modern standards, was pretty poor! What is lacking from the modern day doom and gloom is any notion of agency. You can change an awful lot in your life if you identify a goal and then ask yourself “what do I need to do to get there?” The common objection to this line of argument is “well there are people who cannot change their circumstances” and maybe that’s true. But I doubt that’s true for most people, and it certainly was not true for me. My life is dramatically more interesting and comfortable than the one I started life in. My main advantage over others is that I had loving and supportive parents who encouraged me to dream, and maybe that is a big advantage, but what we did not have was much money.
The recurring thought I have is that, where I live in the Eastern US, most of the houses, which were built in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, were built with what we would now think of as primitive (and affordable) tools. That did not stop people from building beautiful things. I have learned to use those tools, and while they are slower than modern ones, they work fine. It’s hard not to get the sense that, for all of the complaining about “I will never be able to afford a house,” etc, there is also not much effort invested in seriously considering how one might acquire one with limited means. I bought what used to be called a “fixer-upper,” a house that sat on the market for years because of its problems, and turned it into a comfortable and pleasant home. I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. For years. But I made it happen, and eight years after I bought it, my mortgage (which was small) is nearly paid off.
Was I lucky? Maybe. But I also coupled that luck with the motivation to actively change things. I would love it if I could somehow convince people that they really can have fulfilling and even happy lives if they are willing to work toward that goal.
Your students who can’t graduate will have to reevaluate their entire lives. If I didn’t become a software engineer I would have to move across the continent and choose a new career. I already had to leave all my friends and family behind and I’m one of the success stories. Sometimes there is a solution but it’s not worth the trade offs and that’s typically when pessimistic thinking is helpful.
If you live in a low cost of living area then I have no idea though. Those people really are just whining.
My opinion is based on the real world as I've lived it. I cook for myself. I highly recommend https://www.centurylife.org/ for anyone else learning to cook.
Have also deeply thought about types of cookware: from glass to ceramic to clay, have experimented with clay pots such as RÖMERTOPF (not worth it), dutch oven is fine to pressure cookers, or German cookware such as Fissler that has spot welded and presents a neat design compared to riveted cookware common in the US.
If you go to almost any supermarket (Costco, Publix, Kroger, Whole Foods, HMart), the majority of foods people eat are derivatives of what I said.
Whereas recipes in the past were limited by the locale, we are now limited to the cities we have transportation options to.
If you're in a suburb of one of the major metropolitan areas, this doesn't apply. In small cities of the United States, people might only have Walmart, Amazon, Dollar Generals. So people have to cram into cities as the availability of goods is limited.
There are only a few suppliers for things---there is not unlimited choice from free market competition, a wall of supermarket cereals look different but the ingredients are fundamentally the same. I can't get good cuts of meat such as bone-in shoulder easily. Nor can I get it cut at a butcher because USDA guideline has limits on outside meat.
Food is only 3 categories: fats, carbs, or proteins.
Let's consider proteins: The major meat I buy from Costco is the Australian grass-fed lamb import. The Sprouts has lamb, but it's been sitting on the shelf for a long time. The factory farmed pork, chicken, fish, and feedlot beef give me symptoms of malaise.
Almost all processed foods are using canola oil, vegetable oil, sunflower oil, etc.--the polyunsaturated fats are shown to highly depress metabolism, despite what the USDA guidelines say.
For carbs, most of the wheat is chemically bleached with "Oxides of nitrogen, Chlorine, Nitrosyl chloride, Chlorine dioxide."
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
The wheat and the corn give me symptoms because I am fairly aware of my body's reactions. Some person might be extremely unhealthy and live in a slum (from my perspective) and say that they're fine, and we would both we right because each perspective is relative to an individual.
Many are increasingly unable to afford to even transport oneself in the United States without a car or gasoline because of the suburbanization of infrastructure yet cities are increasing in price.
The internet affects the real world because federal laws, which be written in places far away from where you live, affects people's behaviors and how they can do things.
You categorize me as a surface-level thinker prone to the emotional dramatics derived from the internet not having deeply thought about the reality and nature of things, but I would hope that the above comment dispels such preassumptions.
Seemingly widening inequality and inability to land meaningful jobs as a lived experience for people I know makes my concerns reasonable and truthful based on lived experience (young 20s).
The alternative is to choose to be very good at what you do, which has a good chance of success if you try hard at something you care about.
Something about the increased social stratification of our times, which also has to do with increased transportation and communication.
Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas.
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.
This is just flatly false. Employers want candidates at all ability levels given a competitive price.
You can be pretty bad at your job and still have a steady stream of work if you're cheap, for example. The Hacker News crowd loves to poop on these guys because we are almost by definition a quasi-professional platform, but we are far from the median take on this.
>Might also depend on your locale. Plumber in Germany might be better than SWE in Texas.
If you truly believe this, and think the difference is substantial, make a 5 year plan and move to Germany. Talk is cheap.
For the benefit of future readers with less context, you can model my move to Finland and Europe more generally to a first approximation as a trade. I gave up somewhere in the ballpark of $500,000 in expected post-tax income over the first ~5 years of my career by moving away from the US right after graduating from college. In exchange I married the love of my life a few years earlier than I would have otherwise, and we got our little family started a few years earlier too.
To me this was and is a fantastic way to spend $500,000. To most other people their heads would explode merely by realizing such a trade could be on the table, and so they never get serious enough about either money or love to face it head on.
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.
If the bar is that low, then the environment is sure to be like the first place I described.
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.
Most of the United States is suburbanized, and if you want to rent an apartment near the city it tends to be that gray laminate style I've described for $1500/mo with roommates.
Most of the people who managed to have a family in a major city area are doing well for themselves, prior to asset and rent inflation because they have accessible goods and knowledge to them.
I didn't even know what IKEA was until age 18.
Because the national system of laws and transportation forms a certain culture, Costco regardless of the location is the same. The STOP signs in the United States are all the same. The processing of foods all follow certain guidelines. There are certain stores existing up to the limits of the locale, and only certain producers because society has centralized so heavily. So I think my claim of generality is reasonable.
what do you mean by this?
I talk to incompetent people all day every day but I don’t know anyone competent who could get the opportunity to work here without at least a few weeks of studying and a lot of luck. Thousands of applicants for every position and you still think meritocracy matters? The only winners in this market are people with no self respect and the well connected
Basically if you pursue your interest half heartedly or without the rigor and discipline that you would under pressure of work, you would probably never do anything interesting with your interests. But if you held yourself to the same standard of excellence in your interests that you do in work, then your interests will take on a quality that allows it to stand on its own.
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.
Work on Capitol Hill for less than a year then tech outsourcing then consulting. Realized it was boring, useless, and mind numbing and moved across the world. Now have multiple businesses, more than 30 employees across those business, and I get to have fun. It's stressful sometimes but I think we've kicked the stress finally (at 37). Now it's just fun and we get to see what we can pull off when we want to.
Most people simply quit or aren't willing to do the uncomfortable things. It's uncomfortable to be unbothered. But I certainly didn't follow my interests. I used my interests to get better at what was in front of us. Gotta pay the bills and give people what they want, I just put my own spin on it.
Do you think your employees are where they are in life because they aren't willing to do uncomfortable things? Or because they follow their interests too much?
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.
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.
It was only about two years ago that I was obsessed with the idea of starting my own ambitious startup and “conquering the world”, but I’m now moreso considering the idea that I can have a significant positive impact on the world through building and contributing to software in a more “pro-bono” way.
As kk said in the article:
> “I think one of the least interesting reasons to be interested in something is money,”
Reminds me a lot of Ryan Norbauer's writings (https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-...) on why he sold half his company and the satisfaction he got from being able to focus on doing the work that he considered fun.
I hope to engage my interests and hobbies in this way, super thankful that I have the opportunity to try.
Find some interest in your current product and go hard after it.
I particularly like feeling like you need permission to show optimism and enthusiasm about your work.
I also particularly like this bit:
“Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”
...but mostly out of a sense of confirmation bias. It's nice to know that there are smart, accomplished people out there who share my view that Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan are jerks.
One thing this helped crystallize for me, in my position as a nascent team leader, is the position that: "If something about your daily work sucks, let's talk about it. That's the first step to seeing if we can fix it."
This seems like - not a panacea? But a solid strategy to help uncover many problems in an organization.
Enjoyed the read. Thanks for posting.
It's definitely something that I was guilty of really early into the development idea, sleepness nights, 80 hour weeks, this idea that greatness must be achieved.
But actually, chilling out, taking time to think about where you actually want to be past accolades and achievements is really important.
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.
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.
There's usually a lot more "I'm entitled to love and money and I will wish them into existence for me personally" than "I think everyone should have good affordable public healthcare, so I will work hard towards making that happen."
That is, if you took someone who's an atheist, would making them religious (left as an exercise to the reader) make them measurably more successful? Or is it that people who already have supportive families tend to come from religious families, and tend to inherit their parents' religion?
A moderately devout Christian's principles are likely ones you already know in some low resolution through cultural osmosis. This is reason enough to suspect that, ceteris paribus, people will prefer to engage in voluntary trade with the Christian over the atheist. It is less because of the Christianity itself, than because trying to follow a known standard for good conduct reduces transaction costs.
Religion tends to give you several quite positive beliefs about the world that aren't entirely logical. Things like karma, the golden rule, belief in a plan, etc.
Generally speaking I also believe that religious people are more willing to trust and forgive. These are all pretty positive things.
And finally I believe religious people have a higher sense of duty to others, but the better term is probably responsibilism.
Just a diet of the small things. Above and beyond that, we lose control over what’s good, great, bad, or important. We don’t see the true consequences of most of what we do.
Beautiful read.
- having just endured time in a startup that was all about PMF, metrics and the 'growth flywheel', that pushed aside human intuition and creativity in place of 'winning'. It's indeed such a waste of humanity that the Reid hoffman's and Bezos's of the world can push inhuman cultural tropes of "winning" over our humanity. Just who is winning, the board, the VCs certainly not the person who loses his soul? On top of that, in today's world AI Slop and social media and lunatic linkedin influencers pushing those same memes hyped to eleven by AI tools, relentlessly on young founders and engineers via push notifications. day and night -what message do we deliver to ourselves?.
Amazon for all its technical chops and innovation and LinkedIn are anti-patterns in that regard. Do not follow.
Also, its too bad that silicon valley is so ageist that the lessons and wisdom of the older generation tend to get forgotten or cast aside-wish that we could at least take advantage of capitalism in our culture instead of it taking advantage of us
When we lose the pleasure of finding things out, going with our passions and intution and lose our love of creativity and invention, curiosity, patience and empathy we loose who we are as a human in society
Our economics has created a collective belief that if you aren't trying to be the best at playing the game, then you will be left behind in poverty. Mediocrity is shunned in Silicon Valley, and the rise of social media has only inflated that idea. We're increasingly checking our humanity at the door so we can be great, and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of capitalism. For what? So we can look ourselves in the mirror and believe we are one of the special chosen ones?
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 businesses. They touch upon themes of finding purpose, opting out of traditional success metrics (like reaching the top of a corporate hierarchy), and the importance of pursuing one's interests even if it feels "uncomfortable" or lacking immediate structure.
Despite the title, direct quotes and extended insights from Kevin Kelly on "flounder mode" are minimal. The article's core message seems to be that success can be found by embracing a less linear, more explorative approach to one's career, much like a "floundering" fish might move around until it finds its way. The author suggests that this "flounder mode" involves an openness to trying different things, even if they don't immediately seem to lead to a clear path, and that this can ultimately lead to more fulfilling and interesting work.