I’ve featured author and digital-culture pioneer Kevin Kelly in a number of podcast episodes over the years — in large part because he is so insightful on topics like travel, technology, and life in general. The opportunity to participate in one of Kevin’s “Walk and Talk” sojourns in Thailand was a big highlight for me back in 2023.
Kevin’s has also shared his travel (and life) wisdom in books, videos, and online writing over the years, including his 2023 book Excellent Advice for Living, his 2022 book Vanishing Asia, his 2021 video The Joy of Differences, and his various online roundups of “Advice I Wish I Had Known.”
Here are nine nuggets of Kevin Kelly travel (and travel adjacent) wisdom from these sources that have stuck with me:
1) “If you are stuck in life, travel to a place you have never heard of.”
2) “To have a great trip, head toward an interest rather than to a place. Travel to passions rather than destinations.”
3) “Pay attention to what you pay attention to.”
4) “When I face what is different I can finally see me. When I encounter the unknown I come to know myself.”
5) “Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your baggage. This is 100% true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need.”
6) “Purchase the most recent tourist guidebook to your home town or region. You’ll learn a lot by playing the tourist once a year.”
7) “A different place triggers a recalculation: what is ordinary there becomes miraculous and the incredible becomes ordinary. This difference of a faraway place seeps into me, making me different. And when I have changed, relocated, then the ordinary is erased from the world.”
8) “Your twenties are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and look nothing like “success.” For the rest of your life these experiences will serve as your muse.”
9) “Very few regrets in life are about what you did. Almost all are about what you didn’t do.”
