Guy Kawasaki Quotes

I learned how difficult it is to self-publish a book. It's complex, it's confusing, it's idiosyncratic.

I travel all the time.

Crowdsourcing is a great way to approach creation because in any given point there's always somebody on the Internet who knows something better than you do.

If you truly don't have competition, then zoom out until you can define some. Competition can be as simple as the reliance on the status quo, Microsoft (since at some point Microsoft will compete with everyone for everything), or researchers in universities. Pick something, because saying you have no competition at all is a nonstarter.

Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore ... but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.

Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.

Coming from the U.S., you tend to look at one homogeneous market with 350 million people. But in Europe, every country has its own customs and laws.

Steve [Jobs] proves that it's OK to be an asshole ... He just has a different OS.

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.

Bootstrapping goes awry when entrepreneurs focus on saving pennies to the detriment of the Big Picture.

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.

The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people's lives.

You need to save some mental, physical, and emotional resources for enhancing your product after you ship. A revolution is a triathlon, not a hundred-yard dash-it requires long distance stamina and multiple skills such as creating, churning, and evangelizing.

You have to start with the basic premise that you need to know what your competition is doing.

The Future belongs to those who can spread ideas.

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules.

Customers can tell you how to evolve a product, but they can't show you how to make a leap.

My books are always tactical, bullet lists, this is what you need to do because I'm trying to appeal to people who are trying to change the world and they need checklists.

What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.'

Look back to the old days: people bought an MS DOS machine and struggled with it for weeks to bring it up to speed. Then Apple created Macintosh, struggled a bit with it, but eventually succeeded. Then it went into other businesses. If your company truly wants to change the world, it would make these problems go away for customers.

His idea is to get your team together and pretend that your product has failed. That's right: failed, cratered, imploded, or "went aloha oe," as we say in Hawaii. You ask the team to come up with all the reasons why the failure occurred. Then each member has to state one reason until every reason is on a list. The next step is to figure out ways to prevent every reason from occurring.

The goal is to provide inspiring information that moves people to action.

Every day, I get five pieces of hate mail: Tweets or hate emails.

Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

In some cases . . . the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. . . . You use the knife carefully because you know it doesn't care who it cuts.

Inertia. Guy's law of enchantment: People at rest will remain at rest, and people in motion will keep moving in the same direction unless an outside enchanter acts upon them.

The next time you think that there's something that you "can't live without", wait for a week and then see if you're still alive or not

The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it.

Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.

I have a hardcore attitude: a "self-published, ghost-written book" is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When
people read a book - particularly a self-published one - they have the right to expect that it's the person's writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

A company should search for every instance of the use of its name and zoom in when there are issues - both good and bad.

Remember that you are influencing people who are watching you.

Greatness is won, not awarded.

Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C
players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z
players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.

If you make money, you might not make meaning.

A magnificent cause can overcome a prickly personality, but your ability to enchant people increases if they like you, so you should aspire to both. You'll know that you're likeable when you can communicate freely, casually, and comfortably with people.

Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

•Everyone is better than you at something. If you have a tough time accepting others, it's probably because you think you're superior to them. However, you're not superior to every person in every way.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. MARK TWAIN

Enchantment is the purest form of sales. Enchantment is all about changing people's hearts, minds and actions because you provide them a vision or a way to do things better. The difference between enchantment and simple sales is that with enchantment you have the other person's best interests at heart, too.

Instant success are seldom instant and if you talk to the people behind these successes, you'll find out that they came after months of fear, uncertainty and confusion along with a flagrant lack of adoption.

Try stuff. I also used to believe that it's better to be smart than lucky because if you're smart you can out-think the competition. I don't believe that anymore-this is not to say that you should strive for a high level of stupidity. My point is that luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth."

The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by.

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment.

If you're not pissing someone off on social media, you're not using it aggressively enough.

The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I've never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.

Twitter, Facebook, Google + are the trifecta of marketing for authors (and bloggers).

Don't ask people to do something you wouldn't.

The jewelry business is a very, very tough business - tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.

It's just as valuable to curate content as it is to create it.

Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies.

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.

Skillful pitching ... is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of raising capital. More important are the realities of your organization: Are you building something meaningful, long lasting, and valuable to society?

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.

I want to know which idea you're going to kill yourself trying to make successful, not which ideas have crossed your idle mind.

There are two ways to approach the application process: trying to hit a home run by getting an immediate 'Yes, here's an offer' or trying not to be eliminated. I recommend the second approach.

When I was getting my education, I fell in love with the writings of Peter Drucker. He was my hero. I had a naive belief that when I became a manager, it was going to be like Peter Drucker's books. That is, I was going to be the effective executive. I was going to talk to people about their goals. I was going to help them actualize.

Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air.

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.

The first 90 percent of a revolution is creating the product or service; the second 90 percent is evangelizing it. At the beginning of a revolution, you need evangelists, not sales, because leverage spreads news.

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. - Ludwig van Beethoven

To say that Windows 95 is just like the Mac is like finding a potato in the shape of Jesus and thinking you have witnessed the second coming

Pursuing your passions makes you more interesting, and interesting people are enchanting.

I merely consider myself a father, and one role of a father is to provide financial resources for his family.

If you think that leadership is deciding what you want and telling people to do it, I feel sorry for you. Reality is going kick your ass so far that not even Google will find you. The goal of this chapter is to help you become such a great leader that you'll appear on the first page of a Google search for leader.

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer.

The more popular a person thinks he is in the blogosphere, the thinner his skin and the thicker his hypocrisy. This should be exactly the opposite: the higher you go the thicker the skin and thinner the hypocrisy.

There is only one Steve Jobs, but if you want a shot at being the next Steve Jobs, learn to communicate using stories, demos, and pictures.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

The secret of evangelism is Guy's golden touch - whatever is gold, Guy touches. That's very different than saying whatever Guy touches turns gold.

It's hard to name a person who is unpopular who has influence.

I don't think Steve Jobs nauseated people when talking about how great Apple stuff was. The reason why he didn't nauseate people is because it was true. The start of all great marketing is to have a great product.

One must understand what people are thinking, feeling and believing in order to enchant them.

My perspective is this: my allegiance is to the best product for my needs. For a computer, this means Macintosh. For phone and tablet, this means Android.

An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.

Most venture capitalists won't read a business plan unless the entrepreneur is introduced to them by a contact.

Defy the crowd. The crowd isn't always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE.

Companies in Europe should stop trying to do the U.S. version of a European idea.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people.

Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress.

I would like my kids to inherit a world where people succeed because of merit and hard work, not entitlement, and where people accept others for what they are and not try to change them.

Many men can make a fortune but very few can build a family. - J. S. Bryan

If achieving success were easy, more people would do it.

The essence of evangelism is to passionately show people how you can make history together.

I don't want to make more friends. I have four kids, I have plenty of friends, and all the personal relationships I need.

Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.

The right algorithm is to put off seeking funds for as long as physically possible. And in an ideal world, a startup would never have to seek funds at all.

Should two founders split the company right down the middle? Answer you're looking for: No, you should allocate 25 percent to future employees and 35 percent to the first two rounds of investments. That leaves 40 percent for the founders to split among themselves.

If you make meaning, you'll make money.

If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this "feeding the Content Monster." There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are." - Halford E. Luccock

At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I'm picking the former, although I would not mind both.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone.