Guy Kawasaki
Appearances
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
We're going to be in the Bay Area soon. We'd love to get together. So I talked to the person doing my social media with me and I say, isn't this the product you use to create graphics for our tweets? And she said, yes. And I said, well, do you like them? And she said, yes. I said, do you think I should help them? And she said, yes. So I met with them and one thing led to another. And now,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
you know, thank you God for Canva. And this is my 16th book, which I've said 15 times, this is my last book.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
You could also make the case you could make the world a better place by turning your own life around.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
No, my very first book was called The Macintosh Way, and it explained the Macintosh division, what we were trying to do, what we learned from Steve. And at that point, I said, okay, I wrote down everything I possibly can know about That's it. End of writing career.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And I guess in a sense, writing 16 books is really very good evidence of a growth mindset because you cannot write 16 books about the same subject.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
We're going to get real transparent. Let's do it. So there's two theories. One theory is the Polish PR answer. The other theory is more of what's realistic. So I'll give you a smattering of both. At 69 years old, having done this podcast for four years, I really did interview remarkable people. I would put my guest list up against anybody's podcast. NPR, Joe Rogan, anybody.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I have just as good, if not better, a guest list. And I realized that, man, you know, guy, you have encountered a lot of wisdom, a lot of insights and a lot of value. But let's face it. You know, am I going to tell people, oh, go listen to 200 episodes, one hour each. And you'll you know, you'll hear what I have. And so I figured out that.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I have all this knowledge and I can filter it down even more. So in a sense, I have this moral obligation to take the lesson of Jane Goodall or Angela Duckworth or Carol Dweck or Stephen Wolfram or was and put it in a package that everybody can digest and use so that they can make a difference and be remarkable. So that's kind of the high road thing. The lower road answer is, you know what?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
There's royalty. So it's a combination of both. But as I say, when I'm gone, I want people to say, you know, I read Think Remarkable and it just changed my life and it helped me make a difference. And I owe some of my success to Guy. That would be a good legacy.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, Steve Jobs had a very famous Stanford commencement address in which one of the key messages he had is you can only connect the dots looking backwards, right? So when you're 18 and you major in English, it's hard to say, okay, I was thinking I majored in English because when I'm 69, I'm going to write a book, right? I mean, nobody can think like that. I'll give you the dots, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So, this sixth grade teacher convinces my parents to put me into this private prep school. In the private prep school, I did well enough to get to Stanford. At Stanford, I meet this guy, Mike Boych. Mike Boych is the guy that eventually hired me into the Macintosh division, despite my lack of qualifications. In the Macintosh division, I do well enough that I'm very, very visible and I'm tied.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
My reputation is tied to the Macintosh and Apple. I'm kind of living proof, Heather, that if you do one thing right in your life, you can coast the rest of your life. But that's a different subject. So now lots of people know about me because lots of people use Macintosh.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And in particular, I think it's the creative, innovative, artistic people who use Macintosh because you don't buy a Macintosh to crank Excel spreadsheets. So one day I get this email out of the blue and it's the director of the TEDx Palo Alto. And she says, I have Jane Goodall coming in for a TEDx and I'm looking for a moderator. She's looking for a moderator.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
She says, you know, you don't know me, guy, but I know you because I use a Macintosh. So would you like to moderate Jane Goodall? On TEDx. It's like, be still my heart. You're telling me I can interview the Jane Goodall for TEDx. Like, pinch me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Yeah, right. So I canceled a paid speech. Cost me a lot of money. But man, you know, at the end of my life, am I going to say, you know, guy, if you had only made one more speech, you would have been happy. Or are you going to say, I got to interview Jane Goodall? You don't need to be too smart to figure out the answer to that question. So I interview Jane Goodall. We become deep friends.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
To this day, we're close friends. And so when I start my podcast, she's my first guest. All right. So now, I don't know about you, but the way I select what podcast I agree to be on, the first question is, who else have you had? I mean, if all you have is Joe Blow from Blow Consulting, who wrote the Blow Way podcast, You're probably not going to go on that podcast, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
You know, so when I'm asking Stacey Abrams or I'm asking Margaret Atwood or Stephen Wolfram or Neil deGrasse Tyson, please come on my podcast. The first thing they ask, maybe they don't ask it, but I know they're thinking it is who the hell else has been on your podcast? To which I say, well, maybe you've heard of some of my guests like Jane Goodall and And guess what?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Nobody ever says either to me or to themselves, why should I go on his podcast? He has losers like Jane Goodall, people you never heard of. So once you have Jane Goodall, then you get Margaret Atwood. Then you get Woz. Then you get Bob Cialdini. Then you get David Ocker. And guess what? It gets easier and easier. And pretty soon, you are buying. You're not selling.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Basically, but you know, can I tell you that I purposely worked at the Macintosh division because I knew that someday I was going to start a podcast and people would have to have heard of me. So they would say yes.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I think I'm that smart. God bless you. But it ain't true. And I think there's like an important lesson here that I kind of believe you should default to yes. You should always say yes. You should help people because you just never know. I would also like to clarify one point. So I've been dropping all these big names and I know I've been dropping these big names. It's a marketing ploy, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
But I just want you to know that being in my book or being on my podcast, it's not because you're rich or you're famous. It's because you're remarkable. So the big names I dropped are,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
are people who are remarkable at an extreme if some billionaire who ran a hedge fund asked to be on my podcast the answer would be no because i don't give a that you have figured out financial arbitrage and you've made billions of dollars because you have not made the world a better place you've made your world a better place but you haven't made the world a better place
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And so I've been dropping all these big names, but I can also drop names of people most of you would never heard of. A high school teacher in Rogue River, Oregon. A guy who is now a respiratory therapist, but he grew up in the projects in Brooklyn and both his parents are crack addicts. I've had Halim Flowers, who's one of the hottest young artists in America today.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
You know, he's the next Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was sentenced at 16 to 44 years of prison for being an accomplice to a murder. Six years he got out early, and now he's one of the best artists. You know, most of you have not heard of him. You will hear of him, but he is remarkable. I have another woman who was smuggled across the U.S. border from San Diego as a baby.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
She lives in a house with 15 other relatives, and now she's working for Adobe as a middle manager. You know what? I think that's remarkable. On the other hand, you know, it's not like I have hedge fund billionaires, trust fund babies. None of those. They don't qualify.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, in a sense, we've been talking about this the whole time, right? Because the book is based on growth, grit, and grace. And that's what I learned from him. I would be hard-pressed to think of somebody who has more grace and graciousness than Jane Goodall. That's what I learned. And... This is a sample of 200 people, highly selected.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
It's not scientific in the sense that I took a random sample of people and I waited for all the factors, and then I gave them objective tests so that they pass. It's not like Mensa, where if you got an IQ, you're in, right? So this is subjectivity, self-selection. A lot of things. On the other hand, there is a lot to learn from these people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And I just want that to get out in a form that people can easily gain access to. Now, my podcast is free. You can download all 200 episodes, but that is literally 200 hours of listening. You can read my book. My book is less than 200 pages long. And you could read it in probably two or three hours. And that's how it should be. This is not the Chicago Manual of Style that's 700 pages.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
This is not the war and peace of self-help, okay? This is more like how to be remarkable for dummies. I mean, I want this to be quick. Part of making a difference and part of being remarkable, you can only read and study so much.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Yes, thank you. But if I could just issue a couple corrections there. Yes. I am no longer on the board of trustees of Wikipedia. You roll off those things. And I am no longer a brand ambassador for Mercedes. They kind of did not continue that program. Although I still have one. And actually, I have one on order, too.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I already talked about the guy who had two crack addict parents. I talked about the guy who was in prison for 20-something years. Another woman, and just FYI, if you're a woman listening to this and you're thinking, oh, this is a typical Silicon Valley tech bro. And when you look at my podcast, you're going to say, oh, it's like 90% men and 10% women.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I hate to disappoint you, but if you look at my podcast, it's probably 60 or 70 percent women and 30 or 40 percent men. It's heavily. I should just name my podcast Remarkable Women, but that's a different discussion.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I mean, OK, we could really go down a deep, dark hole here. But I think that men have been screwing it up for now 2024 years. And I think we should give women a chance. I think like, you know, I want the Angela Merkel's and the Stacey Abrams. And what's her name from New Zealand? Jacinda Ahern or, you know, Melanie Perkins from Canva.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I want women to run the world because men have proven that they are incompetent and cannot do it. So now I just lost all the male readers listening to this, but maybe they'll buy the book to give to their daughters. Okay. Anyway, the woman's name is Andrea Lytle-Pete. And 10 years ago, she was diagnosed with ALS. Those of you not familiar with ALS, typically you die after two years.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So she's lived eight years longer than expected. And when she got diagnosed, she decided that she was going to complete a marathon in all 50 states with ALS. Now, she started running. She ended up in a recumbent bike, but she did do it. And I look at that and I say, you know, that is remarkable. It's remarkable she's still alive.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
It's remarkable that she went through all the effort and time and expense to go to 50 states and participate in all this and overcome barriers. Like, one of the best stories in the book is the 50th... Marathon that she wanted to run was the Boston Marathon. Okay. And the Boston Athletic Group or whatever its name rejected her application.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And they said, well, we have categories for people who have, you know, wheelchairs and we have cars. People who have this and we have people who have that and these kind of, you know, issues and disabilities. But we don't have a category for people on recumbent bikes. So you cannot run or bike the Boston Marathon. Like, what the hell? Yeah. Wrap your mind around that, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So now that's a good enough story about overcoming resistance, but it gets better. So what she did is she and her team, Drea, her name is Andrea. So team Drea, small crew of volunteer, they get to Boston. The day before the race. And she runs the race by herself. How can it get better? I mean, seriously, how can it get better than that? Sticking it to the man. I love that story.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I was an advisor to the president of the Motorola division of Google, but that was sold off. So what I am is I am the chief evangelist of Canva. I'm the host of the Remarkable People podcast. And I do live in Watsonville, and I love to surf. So that's the three most important things.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, the first path is to build the foundation. I first want you to understand that, as I said, this is not a self-help book. So this is not about instant success, how to make yourself remarkable in 10 easy steps, because being remarkable is not easy. If it was, there would be more remarkable people, quite frankly, right? So the way to be remarkable is not to decide to be remarkable.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
The way to be remarkable is decide to make the world a better place. So this could be as a teacher, as a coach, as a mentor, as a parent. You could also make the case you could make the world a better place by turning your own life around. There are people in the book and podcast you've never heard of because they impacted in terms of sheer numbers, very few people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
But what they did was remarkable. And so you have to get it in your brain that this is not about putting lipstick on a pig to get a prettier pig. You cannot start with the pig. You have to start with people. How can I make the world a better place? How can I make one person's life better or a team or a classroom or my kids, whatever it is?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And I would make the case that if you do make a difference, people will have no choice but to consider you remarkable. So this is not chicken or egg. I'm remarkable. Therefore, people call me remarkable because I can make a difference. The order is make a difference. This book is how to make a difference. And guess what? Hallelujah. You make a difference. People will think you're remarkable.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
That's how you do it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
This is a question that is so open to abuse. Well, I love the expression there. I mean, in a sense, you know, that Sandra Bullock movie where she was running for Miss America. And then in Miss America, there's usually this place where there's the impromptu answer a question part, right? It's like, so what are your goals? You know, how do you want to contribute or whatever?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And everybody, the whole parody of the movie was she's up there. She's saying, well, You know, I want to end climate change or I want to foster education or I want everybody to have health care or clean water or all that. And I understand that. But this is about like first do good shit and everything else follows.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
If you don't do good shit, then, you know, you may be just putting lipstick on a pig and you still end up with a pig. Yeah.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Oh, yeah. Listen, I think that the universe has a karmic scoreboard. And someplace, somewhere, God or whatever you want, AI, whatever it is, but she is keeping track. And there's no scientific proof of karma, okay? Some things you just need to believe to see. But I believe there's a karmic scoreboard. The Japanese have this concept called bachi.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And bachi means that, you know, when you do something bad, guess what? It's going to come back to haunt you. And I believe that. And I'm not talking about just, you know, creating genocides. I'm talking about, you know, when you throw your litter out the window. When you're driving on the street, you're going to get bocce. Something is going to happen.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Your car is going to get a flat tire or somebody is going to back up into you. Something is going to happen. So I'm a big believer in bocce. So I try to never, ever take any chances.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, I mean, it's you could live your life just worried about bocce and the golden rule. If you just did those two things, you'd probably be OK. Yeah.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Okay, what Heather's talking about is the people who got the manuscript, they also got some acorns. And believe it or not, I bet no author has ever sent you acorns before.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Okay, so not only are there acorns, but I promise you, I personally collected those acorns. There is a street in Los Gatos, California, where for some reason the oak trees there, they really put out a lot of acorns. So I spent an afternoon picking up acorns and they probably thought, who is this dementia Asian picking up acorns?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, I mean, I think that as I write about, I think that people go through, like, if they do it and they're lucky, they go through three phases. There's the growth phase where you're learning new skills and embracing new things. There's the grit phase where you're paying the price and you're working hard. And there's the grace phase. And I hope that I'm in the grace phase now.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Like I just confirmed many Asian stereotypes for people that they're getting those acorns. So now people are wondering, guy, what the hell are you talking about? Well, acorns grow up to be gigantic oaks. An oak is one of the most beautiful trees, not just aesthetically, but an oak creates an ecosystem of insects and birds and And they provide shade, and they last forever.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And so we bought a house, and it was surrounded by eucalyptus trees. The problem with eucalyptus trees is that they burn really well, and they use a lot of water. They don't have a good root structure, so they fall over. So eucalyptus trees burn, fall over, and use your water. These are not three good qualities. I hired somebody to cut a lot of these eucalyptus trees.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And then I went on a mission to return native species to this hill because eucalyptus was brought from Australia. I love Australia, if you're an Australian, because it's Canva Canva. I have a cochlear implant because I'm deaf. That's from Australia. I use an external monitor called Espresso. That's from Australia. When I podcast, I use Rode Mixer. That's from Australia.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So I love Australia, but you should not have sent the eucalyptus trees. So anyway, so now I got to figure out how do I get native oaks on this hill? And all the reading I do, it says, you know what? You can go and you can buy these saplings and you can plant them. But a much better way to grow oak trees is you start with the acorn.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And apparently, and we're going to find out, if you start with the acorn, it puts down a stronger root system. So after a few years, it will catch up to the sapling and pass it. I hope I'm alive to see this happen. But anyway... So I go and I gather these acorns. And then the first thing you learn is you got to throw all the acorns into the water because the ones that sink are good.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
The ones that float are dead. So you throw away all the ones that float And then you take all the sinkers and you put them in a tray and you cover it with a cloth or something and you keep it damp in your refrigerator for two or three months because you need to simulate the winter because that's what makes it germinate. OK, so for a long time, my wife was wondering, what the hell is this trail?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Stop in our refrigerator. So then after two or three months, you plant them. And listen, you have to plant like dozens and dozens. I planted probably about 50 or 60 to get five or 10 seedlings. And it's not clear that those seedlings will be saplings. And it's not good. Those saplings will be old trees. And as I was thinking about this whole process, I,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
you know, I came to the conclusion, this is a great metaphor for life, right? You've got to gather a lot of seeds. You've got to sample. You've got to gather a lot of experiences. You put them under stress. Some sink. Some float. You throw the dead floaters away. You plant the ones that have potential. Some of them actually seed. Then you take care of those. You water them. You fertilize them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
You make sure the deer don't eat them. And if you're patient and if you're lucky... in 10 or 15 years maybe i will sit under the shade of what used to be acorns but let's say i die so this is another interesting you know thing you have to come to grips with that in fact i realized that i am planting acorns that i will probably never sit under their shade
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So you're thinking for your grandchildren, probably. Not even your children, your grandchildren. And so when you have a perspective that you're thinking for your grandchildren, it kind of changes everything, right? It's not about me, me, me, me, me, me, me. You know, when am I getting my reward, my bigger house, my Mercedes? And it's not even like, what am I going to give to my kids, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And so I, being a podcaster, I don't know about you, but we get about 10 requests a day to be on our podcast. And so I'm rejecting hundreds of people every year. So I know that the fact that I'm on your podcast. I'm at least one or two of the most important people that sent you a request of the 10 that day. So that means you're doing me a favor and it's a privilege and an honor.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
It's what am I going to leave for my grandkids? And, you know, when you have that kind of reflection and thought, I have to say it really impacts how you think.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, I mean, this isn't, first of all, if you ask Madison, she will tell you that guy doesn't always exhibit patience. Okay.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I am certainly not. But you know what? Like many things in life, it's complicated, right? So patience is waiting 20 years for that old tree. But patience is the flip side of complacency. And so if you're overly patient or you're patient in everything, maybe you won't grow and maybe you won't have grit, right? So it's not as binary as you got to be patient. Sometimes you got to be impatient.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And as I look back in my life, some teachers, some bosses, some coaches were very impatient with me. And that led to good things, not bad things. So it's not that simple that I have this theory that the older I get, the less I think I know what
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And don't you have any easy questions?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
OK, so one thing that I've learned in my life is that everybody you meet can do something better than you. Right. Listen, you may talk to your gardener and you're thinking, well, I'm the landowner. He or she is just the gardener. For all you know, that gardener can raise oak trees better than you. Maybe that gardener can surf better than you. Maybe that gardener can cook better than you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So, you know, you think you're all hot shit and you're the center of the freaking universe. But I'm telling you that that gardener can do something better than you. And that is true of everybody. So when you ask a question like that, it's very risky because it's kind of like saying that, you know, you can judge people as losers, right? But okay.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So let's say someone is not progressing in his or her career, not putting in the 60 hours, you know, whatever, just kind of a middle of the road person. And you're thinking, Oh, I'm so vastly superior to that person, but you don't know. Maybe he or she is single parent raising four kids and, taking care of her parents and grandparents. Maybe he or she is abused. I mean, who knows what, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
But you're just judging that he or she is not this overachiever at work. But you don't know the total picture, so you should not judge people. This is a very long answer to say that I hesitate to give you an answer to your question. Because I'm telling you, remarkable people, they grow. They have grit and they have grace. But you may not see those things because you're only seeing one slice.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
If you go to the United Airlines counter and the check-in person treats you like shit, I suggest to you that you step back and you say, you don't know what's going on in her life, right? Maybe her school just called her and said, your daughter or son is in trouble again, right? And all you care about is you want to get an upgrade to first class because, you know, your global services.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And do you know who I am? I demand that you upgrade me. Like, give me a break. My kid is like, you know, just got arrested. And that's my problem. What's your problem? Go sit in fucking middle of the economy. I don't care. I can't say if I was United Airlines, I would want that to come across. But you got to think of what else is going on in people's lives.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Yeah, I think that based on my interviews with these 200 remarkable people over the past four years, and when I say remarkable, I truly do mean remarkable. These are people like Jane Goodall, Stacey Abrams, Margaret Atwood. Angela Duckworth, Woz, Stephen Wolfram, the youngest MacArthur fellow, you know, over and over again.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
You know, of course, it will be in bookstores and Amazon and everywhere, right? I mean, getting it will not be a problem. Deciding to get it is what I'm trying to make you do right now. And listen, I... A tech guy like me sure as hell should have a great domain. So I have a domain, Think Remarkable.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And the way you remember the title, well, we've been talking about Remarkable all day, but back in 1997, Apple ran an ad campaign called Think Different. And it was about Einstein and Richard Branson and Gandhi and Picasso, all the people who thought differently and would be the kind of person that would use a Macintosh. And that ad campaign and the iMac save Apple.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Well, of course, there was Steve Jobs, too. And I think that, you know, yes, thinking different is good and kept us going. But now in today's fractured world, you got to think remarkable. You need to up your game from just different to remarkable. So I hope you'll read the book. You know, I hope it helps you make a difference. That's the key. That's the reward for me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Thank you. Thank you very much. And listen, if you drop those acorns in water and they all flow, just let me or Madison know and I'll go get some more for you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And so what I noticed is this common pattern of you don't get to be remarkable unless you have a growth mindset. People with fixed mindsets, they believe that they are what they are. They cannot embrace new subjects, new topics. The skills they have are the skills they'll all ever have. They can't make it better. And it won't get worse. And that's just not true of remarkable people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Remarkable people are always learning and trying and working hard, which leads us to the second phase. Because, I mean, even if you're willing to learn a new sport or a new subject, It's not going to be easy. I took up surfing at 60 and I've had to dedicate a fair, one might say, obsessive portion of my life to become a surfer.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So you don't just wake up one day and say, I'm going to be a musician forever. And it magically happens. That's the grit phase. And finally, the grace phase is where you decide that it's not about you anymore. It's about making a mark and making the world a better place.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
and for me when i die i want people to say you know guy empowered me he empowered me with his book with his podcast with his speaking with his investing with his advising so just if members of your audience are used to reading self-help books this is not a self-help book
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
like i think a lot of self-help books you know the whole purpose is to get you to come to my conference right and you know we're gonna be at the miami ritz-carlton and for five thousand dollars in 48 hours i'm gonna teach you how to be remarkable and in the general session you know you the visionary guru you walk out and you get a standing ovation and you tell people oh
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Say to the person on your right, you're remarkable, and then look to your left and tell that person you're remarkable. And, like, stand up and raise your hands because we're all remarkable. That ain't happening. I'm not that kind of guy, okay? This book is not, you know, the guy's way. This is my analysis of 200 remarkable people. filtered through 40 years of frontline tech experience.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So it's not like I'm a 22-year-old millennial wannabe that says, oh, I met all these famous people. Let me tell you what I learned. Because at 22, I've already created a remarkable track record. Like, give me a break.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Oh, my God. I mean, were you ever on Clubhouse?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I mean, holy shit, Heather. On Clubhouse, every conversation was, I'm 25 years old. I've already built up a really successful practice. If you click on the link in my profile, you'll get $200 off my $1,000 course on how to make money in social media. I mean, you know, there's a lot of reasons for the death of, or I don't know if it's dead yet, for the demise of Clubhouse.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
But I swear, 90% of the conversations were people talking about how great they were and how you should click on their link for their online conference.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Yeah. Well, you can contact any of the schools that I said I attended to see that I really attended them. That's number one, including UC Davis Law School, where I quit after two weeks.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Being remarkable is not easy. If it was, there would be more remarkable people, quite frankly, right? So the way to be remarkable is not to decide to be remarkable. The way to be remarkable is decide to make the world a better place. So this could be as a teacher, as a coach, as a mentor, as a parent.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
I went to law school for two weeks and couldn't take it. So I quit. You know, a lot of people cover that up on their resume by they say they attended as opposed to graduated. So I'm from Honolulu, Hawaii, a lower income part of Honolulu, though. I you know, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to paint this picture of how I overcame crushing poverty and
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And, you know, lifted myself up by my bootstraps. I came from a lower income family, but my parents made a lot of sacrifices so that I could get a great education. So don't feel sorry for me. I've had a charmed life. And a sixth grade teacher convinced my parents to take me out of the public school system in Hawaii, put me into the private school system because she said I had too much potential.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Thank you, God, for that teacher. Thank you, God, that my parents listened to her. That enabled me to get into a private school in Hawaii called Iolani. At Iolani, I cannot tell you why, but for some reason, I applied to Stanford. I also cannot tell you why, how the hell I got into Stanford, but I got in. And so I went to Stanford, and from Hawaii to Stanford, it was a religious experience.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
Now, Hawaii is a wonderful place and, you know, all that. Don't get me wrong, but in Hawaii... Your sort of horizons are limited by, well, if I'm really successful, I'll run the Sears Roebuck or I'll run the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel or something. Now, I'm not saying that that's not remarkable accomplishments. It takes something to get to that level.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
But there's none of the sort of growth of Hewlett Packard or Apple or Facebook or Google in Hawaii. So I get off this airplane in SF full, you get in a van, you go to Stanford. This is like the holy land. I mean, this is like, thank you, God, the scales are removed from my eyes. And at Stanford, I met someone and we became very good friends.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And years later, he hired me into Apple, into the Macintosh division. And just so you know, I majored in psych because that was the easiest major I could find, right? If you looked at my background on paper, thank God that, you know, it was an AI analyzing my resume back then. It would say psych major, two-week dropout from UC Davis.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
And at the time, I was more or less in the jewelry business, the jewelry manufacturing business, so schlepping diamond gold. You know, you wouldn't say, oh, perfectly qualified. You know, let's bet Macintosh Software on this psychology major from the jewelry business. So I'm living proof that nepotism can have positive results.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: You Can Be REMARKABLE: The Guide To Growth, Grit, & Grace with Guy Kawasaki Chief Evangelist of Canva & Remarkable People Podcast Creator
So I worked at Apple as the software evangelist, convincing people to create Mac products. I left, I started some tech startups. I returned to Apple as Apple's chief evangelist. Then I left again and I started, you know, other companies, writer, speaker, and then Canva reached out to me. Do you use Canva? Yeah. So 10 years ago, Canva sends me a tweet saying, we noticed you use Canva.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I think that's absolutely true. And I'll give you a sort of a related theory that I learned from Angela Duckworth, who is the mother of grit. MacArthur Fellow, mother of grit, right? And she has a rule in her family that you have to take on something challenging, something that stretches you. And then you can quit that when you are successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So if you took up, I don't know, let's say you took up figure skating and It was very hard for you to become a figure skater. And so you just wanted to quit after one or two times. You're not allowed to quit until you are successful or at least, you know, you have some kind of positive experience. You cannot quit on the downside. You have to quit as a winner.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And as a parent, I can tell you that is a great theory. As a parent, I can also tell you that it's very hard to do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, I think for you parents out there, I mean, I'm sure you'll agree with me that the concept that you can control your children is a delusion. I mean, it is. You are absolutely not in control.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
This is another good story that you should ask what's missing because... Now, you might think, oh, so Guy, you know, he decided to pivot. He made a very intelligent decision. He started taking programming classes. He started to learn about computing. He started to learn about tech because he was tired of schlepping gold and diamonds. And so he's going to go to tech.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I'll tell you something, what happened is, At Stanford, I became very good friends with a person who was very technical. And after graduation, he went to Harvard Business School. And after Harvard Business School, he went to Hewlett-Packard in the calculator division. So he was in Eugene, Oregon, or Bend, Oregon, or someplace.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And he was recruited out of HP to go to the Macintosh division of Apple. And then he went to Apple and then he recruited me out of the jewelry business into Apple. So you could say that, yeah, guy, you are so smart. You pivoted from the jewelry business. You saw the future of Silicon Valley. You saw that everything was going to go tech. You are such a visionary guy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Even at a young age, you called the future. Or you can say, guy, you are successful because of nepotism, nothing else. And that would be closer to the truth.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, I'll tell you something. You know, I have come to embrace nepotism because I have come to believe that It is not how you get your job. It is what you do after you get your job. So yeah, you can be the boss's son or daughter and that's how you can get in.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
But ultimately, it doesn't matter how you got in, whether it's because you're the friend of a classmate or whether you're the son or daughter of the boss or the founder. Ultimately, it depends on how competent you are, how hard you work, and maybe how lucky you are. So I have gotten over guilt. of nepotistic starts.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I got to tell you that there's a lot more parents who just mow down everything in front of their kids than there's helicopter parents who just hover and make every decision. I'm more the lawnmower parent. I mean, I can mow down almost anything in front of my family. Literally, I can mow it down.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I tell you something, I have mowed down a few things from my family, but I'm telling you that once the lawnmower goes past, that lawnmower doesn't come back. So if the weeds grow back, that is your problem. I mowed it. Planted your ass. Now it's your problem.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Again, you know, you have to ask the question, what's missing? But without my friend, Mike Boych from Apple, the guy that I met at Stanford, I don't know, I might be making cappuccinos right now in Starbucks. And I met him in college. If I had stayed in Hawaii, I would not have met him. If I had not have met him, I would not have gotten to Apple.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
If I had not have gotten to Apple, I wouldn't become the chief evangelist of Canva and Wikipedia board of trustees and all these things. And certainly you would not be interviewing a barista from Starbucks on your podcast right now. I mean... there's anything wrong with being a barista at Starbucks because some of that is an art. But probably I would be less desirable as a guest.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, listen... Everything you have heard about Steve Jobs is true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Every story, every movie, every article is true. And so this is another very good example of you should ask what's missing because from the outside looking in, it's very difficult to separate correlation and causation. So if you did a really shallow analysis of Steve Jobs, you would say, well, I need to wear Levi's jeans. I need to wear New Balance jogging shoes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I need to wear a black mock turtleneck. I need to drive a Mercedes or a Porsche. I shouldn't register the Mercedes or Porsche because I don't want a license plate. I should drive in the carpool lane by myself. I should park in the handicapped slot. And I will be the next Steve Jobs. And I hate to tell you, but if you did all that, all you would be is an asshole.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You would not be the next Steve Jobs. And then speaking of asshole, you could say, well, you know, Steve wasn't exactly known for treating his employees with empathy and kindness. And that is the understatement of the year. So if you look at all of that, you say, okay, I'm going to black mock turn. I got a blue cheese, New Balance shoes, Porsche, Mercedes, and I'm going to be an asshole.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You're still not going to be Steve Jobs. You're not going to be Steve Jobs. So the last person who tried to emulate Steve Jobs is now in prison. If you know what I mean.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
As long as you don't say that I wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I'm happy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Listen, let me be honest. I would not be where I am without Steve Jobs, right? Because let's just say that there's a saying that the rising tide floats. I will also tell you that the tsunami floats everything too. And I was riding the tsunami. So Steve Jobs, I've never met anybody like him. He really could either invent the future or call the future.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
He could predict what people would want, or he would make whatever the hell he wanted and convince people that they wanted it too. Either one of those explains Steve Jobs. And I learned from him the importance of design. I learned about how to be an evangelist and get people to believe in stuff as much as you do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, first of all, evangelism comes from a Greek word meaning bringing the good news. So Apple's Macintosh was the good news that made people more creative and productive. And I will now unveil, get a drum roll here, I will unveil the secret to evangelism. And the secret to evangelism is that you evangelize good shit because evangelizing shit is hard, if not impossible.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So now that sounds like a duh, isn't it? Like, God, thank you very much. Until this podcast, I was going to evangelize shit. But now I realize I shouldn't evangelize shit. I should evangelize something insanely great. Thank you very much. You know, what a great podcast.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
What I'm telling you, what I'm telling you in a not subtle way is that if you want to be a great evangelist, you have to either create or find or align yourself with something great. Otherwise, it ain't going to work because evangelism is about bringing the good news. And if you have mediocre news, it ain't going to work. So don't try it with something mediocre.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Now, I'm not saying that evangelism is the only way to succeed. There are other ways to succeed. I mean, for crying out loud, Microsoft has succeeded. So that proves, right, you don't have to be insanely great. But for evangelism to work, you have to have something great.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Yeah, we all sound alike. We all look alike. It's OK.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
There are two explanations for why I left Apple, the first time anyway. So one explanation is this. I was the evangelist for Macintosh, and I believe Macintosh was good news. It was a great opportunity. So, of course, Guy would leave Apple to start a Macintosh software company, right? Because if the evangelist doesn't believe in the software market, who will?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So it's expected almost that I would leave. So that's story A. Story B is deeper and sicker and more insipid about me. So at the time, this is 1987. At the time, I was a manager of the group that did the Apple-labeled software developer tech support and Apple evangelism, convincing people to do Mac software. So... I was the manager and the next level up was director.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And the next level after that was VP. And so Apple had this policy that they would buy a director or VP a car. That was, you had to get one level higher than me. So I love cars. I love cars. We could have a whole podcast just about cars and cars. I don't mean like I have to drive a Lamborghini to show off the other people. Nobody needs to know what I drive. I need to know what I drive.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I just put it in the garage. I look at it. I don't need to pull up at some country club or some disco in my Lamborghini. In fact, I would never do that because I don't go to discos or play golf. But anyway.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You should have him and me on and I will debate.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So anyway, so the next level of Apple, you get a free car. So I go into this job review, right? I think he was CEO of Apple at the time. And he starts by saying, you know, guy, the small developers, they just love you. These are the page makers and these companies you probably never heard of. You know, they love you. The small developers love you. You've championed them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
No, I did not. I did not grow up in Mar-a-Lago, no.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You helped them embrace Macintosh. They're bringing out these innovative products. And I'm thinking, man, should I get a Mercedes? Should I get a Porsche? Should I get a Lamborghini? Should I get a Ferrari? Which kind of car should I get? And then he says, but the big companies don't like you. Microsoft doesn't like you. Lotus doesn't like you. WordPerfect doesn't like you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And Ashton Tate doesn't like you. And I'm thinking, here we go. No more car. And he says, they don't like you. And I'm an optimist. I'm still thinking, yeah. this is a strength of mine because Microsoft was copying our user interface, so they shouldn't like me. And Ashton Tate was doing a piece of crap software, so they too should not like me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So I'm going down this list thinking, those big people should dislike me, and it's their fault, not mine. But he says, so since they don't like you, but your job as evangelist is to have all the companies like you, I'm not promoting you to director. Okay, so I walk out of that meeting and I see my friend Jean-Louis Gasset.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I grew up in a lower middle income neighborhood in Hawaii. It's called Kalihi Valley. And if you know anybody from Oahu or Honolulu and you say you met a guy from Kalihi Valley, the first question out of their mouth might be, well, did he hijack you? Did he pull a gun on you? Did he pull a knife on you? And so that's the kind of place I grew up. It was a very, very diverse community.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
At the time, he was the vice president, but I was the manager, but we were more or less peers in a sense. So I go to Jean-Louis, I say, Jean-Louis, guess what, Jean-Louis? Yeah. I did not get Z promotion, Jean-Louis. And I said, you know, and this is why. And Jean-Louis, I think I'm just going to quit. And he says, guy, do not quit.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
It'll be very useful for your career to leave Apple as a director as opposed to just a manager. And he said, listen, there's going to be a reorg and I'm going to be your boss. And you have another review in six months. And in six months, I'll make you a director. So for once in my life, I listened to somebody and I stayed for six months and then I got to be a director.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And then the next day I resigned. What? So now if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it says director of Apple. Only for one day, but I was director of Apple. So that's another piece of wisdom. Don't believe everything you read on LinkedIn. Yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So if you're 35 to 65 and listening to this, I mean, one lesson to that is you quit on your own terms and you quit when it's good for you. And don't quit out of fury or hate. Calm down and think, what's the strategic move? When should I quit? And let me quit on my terms, not on the company's terms.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
More mea culpas, because if you think that there was ever a grand design or a plan, I hate to disappoint you. No such thing. So I started a software company that did okay. I fell in love with writing. The writing led to speaking, and the writing and speaking became very lucrative. So I just did that for a while, and then... Started another software company. I returned to Apple.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I mean, I did a lot of weird things, but I cannot tell you that there was ever a plan. I have gone from thing to thing that intrigued me. Now, some of that I was lucky because really at no point was I living check to check. So I could take chances, right? But there was no plan.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And the lesson that I learned, I think, which is important to people listening to this is this concept of finding your passion is vastly overrated. The passion test is too hard a test because it seems like you're supposed to find your passion and you instantly fall in love and you're instantly good at it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Oh, can I say diverse anyway, Aidan? These days, right? We were DEI before DEI was a thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And it's a Venn diagram where you love what you're doing, you're good what you're doing, and you can make a lot of money. And that's your passion, you know, that's your ikigai. And Man, that is a good theory, but I'm telling you that I think that most things start off as an interest. Like I'm interested in social media. I'm interested in podcasting. I'm interested in writing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
The hell if I knew I would become passionate about any of those three things, right? And I would make the case that stop looking for your passion. Just keep your eyes open, your ears open, and your mind open. And when you see things that interest you, scratch that itch. And over the course of a lifetime, you'll scratch a lot of itches. And thank you, God, if some of them become passions.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
But don't set off in the world saying, I got to find this passion overnight. I'm in love. I mean... To use a dating analogy, if you tell people, yeah, I decide I'm going to get married, so I'm going to find the passion of my life. I mean, I guess you could do that. Good luck to you, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I more advise you to do a lot of sampling.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
The only way you can figure out your mission in life is by looking backwards. You know, I could tell you right now, looking backwards, that clearly a mission in my life was democratizing things. So I wanted to democratize computing with Macintosh. Right now, as a chief evangelist of Canva, I'm democratizing design.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I was in a public school system. And thank you, God. One of the public school teachers told my parents to take me out of the public school system, put me in a private college prep system because I had potential to go to college. And again, thank you, God. My parents listened to her and made the sacrifice. And so I got into this school and then...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So you can see this consistency of guy likes to take things that only the elite could do, only the elite could afford, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Yeah. But let's just be honest that when I was in college, it's not like I had this aha moment. And the scales were removed from my eyes and I dedicated myself to helping people find their passion because that just did not occur. I wasn't too concerned about changing the world. I just wanted to change the car.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
There is no case to be made that you should have the victim mentality. Now, do not get me wrong, okay? I have been very fortunate. I didn't come from a rich family, but I mean, look at the arc of my life. So I come from this lower middle class family. This elementary school teacher tells me to go into this college prep school. Guy gets to Stanford. His parents sacrificed, so he gets to Stanford.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
He meets this other guy. Nepotism gets him into Macintosh. Macintosh gets him into these other things, and pretty soon he's a writer and a speaker and chief evangelist of Canva and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Now, it was not easy, but I cannot tell you that I overcame, like— I have interviewed people from my podcast that they literally came across the American border as an illegal immigrant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I have interviewed people in my podcast who spent the first, well, not the first, but they spent 22 years of their life in prison. I've interviewed people on my podcast who have ALS, and ALS typically is lethal after two years, and she's had it for 10 years. So Guy has not overcome anything like that, all right? So let's just get that out on the table in a rare moment of humility from Guy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
But I think you just have to keep trying. I'm not telling you that you deserve something and the world owes it to you because I think that would be deceptive too. But there is no case to be made to say that just understand you are a victim and feel sorry for yourself. That is not going to work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
As my son often tells me that suffering and pain is mediocrity leaving your body.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Sure. You can take me anywhere you want. I don't know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I honestly cannot remember why, but somehow I decided to apply to Stanford. Because I know today if I applied for Stanford, I wouldn't get past the first reader. I don't think I would get past the, you know, AI they use to make the first screen. So, yeah. So I got into Stanford. I went to Stanford.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
People have told me that I have a really great attitude about this, but honestly, honestly, one of the beauties of my podcast is that I have been able to see relative challenges that I have faced compared to other people, right? About four years ago, I lost almost all my hearing. And I use a cochlear implant. That's why we're having this conversation at all. I have a cochlear implant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So technology has brought back my hearing from being deaf to just being really lousy. If you're out there and you have normal hearing and stuff, you're probably like, oh my God, it must be so hard to be deaf. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I said, yeah, I love being deaf. But I will tell you something that...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
If you said, guy, you can either be deaf or you can have pancreatic cancer, what would you choose? Oh, deaf. Guy, you can have ALS or you can be deaf. What would you choose? Oh, deaf. Guy, you can go to prison for 22 years or you can be deaf. Oh, I choose deaf. Guy, your parents could be crack addicts and they could steal money from you and they could beat you. What do you choose? Deaf.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Guy, you could be homeless and you're in 30 different shelters over the course of your life. Or you could be deaf. Guy, what would you choose? Deaf, deaf, sign me up. And so, you know, with a combination of technology, and I guess I'm just an optimist. I'm just a happy guy. And listen, I prefer not being deaf, but I'm telling you, nobody ever died from being deaf.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I would much rather be deaf than dumb because for deafness, you can get an implant. If you're dumb, I don't know what you can do, but it's not as easy as getting an implant. Yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
What worked for me, and again, this is kind of hindsight, but what worked for me is that in a sense, having this podcast was a blessing because I came into firsthand contact with people who had ALS, with people who had been in prison, who people were homeless and all this kind of stuff.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So, you know, if you have half a brain and you're on the phone with somebody who has been in federal prison for 22 years, it's hard for you to say, oh man, You should feel sorry for me. I'm deaf. I mean, there's just no freaking way. If you have half a brain and you can say, well, you know, I'd rather have gone to prison than be deaf.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Listen, you know, I don't want you to think I'm Dan Quayle comparing myself to JFK, but when I became deaf, I said to myself, you know, if Beethoven can compose the Fifth Symphony, surely, guy, you can interview a few people being deaf. And for a while before my cochlear implant, I was basically depending on half a good ear, but also live transcription.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And right now I'm getting live transcription of most of what you're saying so that it helps me, right? So live transcription helps. So one way of looking at it, you know, one message is that... There's always a way. And believe it or not, Ilana, I interviewed a woman who was deaf and blind and graduated Harvard Law School.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Yeah, I can hear, I can see. I don't think I would even get into Harvard Law School, much less graduate. And then to just top it off and make me feel about two inches tall, she surfs. I was like, how the hell can a woman who is deaf and blind... Go to Harvard, pass, and surf. This is not just possible, guys. So you are only deaf, so, you know. Get your ass in gear, God.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I already mentioned the passion thing. Like don't go looking for passion, just look for interest. And when you find interest, scratch them and just hope that over the course of your lifetime, a few of them developed into true passions or true reasons for your existence. So that's one thing. A second thing I would say is do not underestimate the grit that's necessary. You have to be gritty.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I hate to tell you, but I'm so old that Silicon Valley wasn't Silicon Valley yet. I mean, I came to Silicon Valley in 1972, and it was like Intel and HP, but it certainly wasn't this kind of phenomenon yet. And yet, coming from Hawaii, the scales were removed from my eyes when I landed at SFO because here was a place that... Fortunes, true fortunes were made.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You have to be willing to persevere. Nothing will come easy that's valuable. And then you have to make yourself vulnerable. You know, I took up ice hockey at the age of 44, never played ice hockey, never skated before. I took up surfing at 60, having never surfed before.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Now, those are athletic things, but I got to tell you, I mean, taking up ice hockey at 44 is 39 years too late and taking up hockey at 60 is 55 years too late. But you have to say those were interests that I scratched that became passions, if not obsessions.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And you have to say that you're going to have to pay the price and you have to open yourself up to vulnerability that you will get hurt if you try something risky. If you have, in the words of my hero, Carol Dweck, if you have a growth mindset, the flip side of the growth mindset is you have to embrace vulnerability. Because you are going to get hurt. You are going to fail.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You are going to be ground down. And you just have to come to grips with that. And I think it's very, very poor to say to yourself, you know, I tried this and it was so hard. I didn't succeed immediately. It's not for me. If you go through life only doing things that you're instantly good at, you're not going to do very many things. I mean,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You know, the grass that looks greener might be astroturf.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
If somebody had told me not to quit Apple three times because you would be part of a trillion-dollar company, that would have been useful.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
On the other hand, maybe this is a rationalization, but if I had stayed at Apple from 1983 till today, I'd be richer than God, but I would also be even more of an asshole. So there's some upside there. Yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Can I give the entrepreneurs listening some advice?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So my advice to entrepreneurs first is you have to understand the business you're in. And the business you're in is not creating wealth for yourself. It is not creating jobs for society. It is to create customers. You need to take people who never heard of you, don't know what you do or make, don't understand what you do or make, and you need to create customers out of those people.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
That's the purpose of a company. And if you create customers, the wealth and everything else will follow. But if you don't create customers, you might end up in jail. So that's step number one. Step number two is that... You have to understand that sales fixes everything. You can talk all about the strategic, visionary stuff you want, but at the end of the day, cash flow is king.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Do not ever forget that because you cannot pay the bills with strategic relationships. It is cash. That's number two. Number three is if you're the... CEO and you have a technical officer or an engineer or, you know, VP of engineering, let me give you a rule of thumb. Whatever your VP of engineering or CTO tells you about the delivery date of the product, you always add one year.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
If you're from Hawaii and from Clay Valley, you know, you think you're successful if you run a drugstore or run a hotel or work in agriculture. Not that anything is wrong with those three things, but your horizons are limited by what's in Hawaii. And I come to California and it's like, oh my God, there's like Italian cars, German cars, blonde women, you know, I have found myself.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You always add one year. I don't care if they say it, it's going to be ready in two weeks. You add a year. You will never go wrong adding one year to the delivery date of what your engineer tells you. And so that's engineering. Now on the sales side, you can never go wrong by taking his or her worst case projection for sales and dividing by a hundredth.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So basically, I'm telling you, when your CTO says we'll be shipping in a month, you heard 13 months. When your VP of sales says we're going to do 5 million in the first year, you divide that by 100 and you get... What is that? 50,000 or whatever. Yeah, right. And if you believe that, and then you always believe that sales fixes everything, you'll be just fine as an entrepreneur.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Now, the way you figure out what to make for this person, this customer, this you're trying to create, is you have to work backwards. You have to work backwards from what people need as opposed to what you like to do. So you may like to do something, but that doesn't mean that it's going to sell. You have to work backwards from what they want.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And the way you figure out what they want, that's called empathy. And the way you do empathy is you have to either go and see them in real life, or even better, you go and be them in real life. And I'll tell you an exercise that I ripped off from my friend Martin Lindstrom. He was retained by a pharmaceutical company who wanted to get, quote unquote, closer to the customer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So this is the most powerful metaphor you're going to hear in this episode. You want to get closer to the customer. If you work for a large company, when you hear that, most of the time that parses to, oh, we're going to hire McKinsey for $5 million to do consumer research. So I'm telling you, I'm going to save you $5 million right now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You should at least listen to my podcast and buy my book for the $5 million I'm going to save you right now. So if you wanted to get closer to the customer, the way to do this is to be the customer. And I'm going to give you a story that you can use as a metaphor in your brain whenever this occurs to you. So my friend Martin Lister was working with this pharmaceutical company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
He took them on an offsite. And he passed out straws. I actually did this in Maui two weeks ago. I passed out straws to the executive team of this company. And I made them breathe through the straw doing my presentation. And at the end of that, I said, listen, this is about empathy. Let me tell you a story about my friend, Martin Lindstrom, the pharmaceutical company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
He passed out straws like I just did. He made them breathe through straws just like you did. And the reason is, he said, because your customers have asthma. And that's what it feels like to have asthma. Like you're breathing through a straw every minute of your life. So you want to get closer to your customer. I just made you into the customer.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So now if you're listening to this podcast, you take that metaphor and like, how can you be the customer? How can you be the customer? You breathe through a straw. If you, you know, designing minivans, you actually use a minivan and you try to figure out, well, how do I get two baby seats, two strollers and two baby bags in the back of this thing?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And, you know, if you are a camera company, like, you know, Have you ever tried to go through the menu structure of a Japanese digital camera? I mean, it's like they sat down and they said, oh, how can we confuse these Americans the most? Let's just put the things you need the most buried in the 14th menu of the 14th menu. And maybe an example every day we encounter is like...
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, we're going to give away all this free information. All we ask is people set up an account. But to set up an account, we first want to get their credit card, even though we're not going to bill them for the first month. So, yeah, we're going to ask everybody to give you their credit card for a free account. Like, in what planet do you live on?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And then they say, yeah, and then we got to make sure it's not some kind of Russian bot. So we're going to make people, you know, complete a cap test.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
This is the promised land.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So yeah, so there's, here's a three by, it's actually a four by four matrix. And, you know, click on the pictures that have motorcycles. And I have literally, Ilana, never, ever succeeded in doing that the first time.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I mean, it should be pretty obvious that, oh, you know, click on the pictures with a school bus. I mean, a school bus is not a subtle thing, but I cannot get that right. You should be the customer. So, you know, the underlying principle here for an entrepreneur is assuming you're not a psychopath, you should never ask people to do something you would not do yourself.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And you wouldn't give a credit card. You don't like filling out CAPTCHA. You know, you don't like putting up with all that bullshit. So why are you making your customer do that?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, there's a deeper story there. So if you were Asian American back then in the 70s, your parents wanted you to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And marry a nice Jewish girl, yeah.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And so I took this course where you went on staff rounds at the Stanford Medical Center. I swear to God, in the first class, I fainted. So I figured, okay, that takes out medicine. And then I thought, well, maybe dentistry. But then I read an article that dentists have the highest rate of suicides. I said, no, there goes dentistry. So all that was left was law.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I quit Apple twice. I turned Steve Jobs down for a third job. So you're listening to a podcast guest who left Apple three times.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And my father was a state senator in Hawaii. So he would have loved if I had a law degree. He never went to college. So I went to law school and, oh, wait, we're backing up, backing up. How did I get a psych major? I got a psych major because at the time at Stanford, psych major was the easiest major you could find. I had a very rigorous selection process. I'm like, what is the easiest major?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Psychology. Sign me up. I went to law school for about two weeks and I quit and I just couldn't stand it. I mean, it was like too tough on my fragile ego. So or the way I look at it now is that many lawyers take 20, 30 years to figure out they're miserable. I did it in 20 days. So that's how much smarter I am.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Well, I mean, listen, I'll tell you something about Silicon Valley. The way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw a lot of shit up against the wall. Some of it sticks. You go up to the wall, you paint the bullseye around it and you declare victories. I hit the bullseye. I hit the bullseye because I am so freaking smart. I hit the bullseye. So you're wondering why this story applies to my career.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So yeah, I guess I look back and I said, yeah, I decided I wanted to be in sales and marketing. So I majored in psychology because I knew psychology, social psychology, behavioral psychology would help me in the rest of my career. And if you want to believe that, God bless you. But I'm telling you, the reason why I picked psychology... Psychology was the easiest measure. It is that simple.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
You know what? If you come right down to it, there are only two fundamental processes in business. And somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. Everything else is easy. Counting it, getting the money, hiring, training. Everything else is easy. If you have somebody who can make it and somebody who can sell it, revenue comes in. And with revenue, as I say, sales fixes everything.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Sales fixes everything. No more strategic partnerships. No more strategic bullshit. Sales fixes everything. So in the world, the world, you're either selling or you're making. So I was not an engineer. So I couldn't make. So I had to sell. And it was that simple. And I attribute my success in evangelism and selling. I work for a small jewelry manufacturing company in downtown L.A.,
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And this was a manufacturing company owned by a Jewish family. And they embraced me. I don't know why. I mean, I could not be further from Israel than Honolulu, Hawaii. But, you know, whatever. So they embraced me. And basically, I schlepped gold and diamonds for the first five years of my life. And I tell you something, the jewelry business is a very, very tough business. We were a manufacturer.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
The way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw a lot of shit up against the wall. Some of it sticks. You go up to the wall, you paint the bullseye around it, and you declare victory. I hit the bullseye. I hit the bullseye because I am so freaking smart. This concept of finding your passion is vastly overrated. There are only two fundamental processes in business.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
We sold to retailers. And so we weren't the retailer. We didn't do business with consumers. We did business with businesses.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So you learn patience because you make an appointment with a jewelry store and you fly to Kansas City and the appointment's at 10 and you get there at 9.30 and then all of a sudden it's 11 and they kept you waiting and then they say, okay, so now you can go see our buyer, but the buyer's about to leave for lunch, so you got 15 minutes.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
So then you open up your bag and you show your goods and they look at the goods and they say, well, you know, there's five ounces of gold is one carat of diamonds. Diamonds are $300 a carat. 14 carat gold comes out to so much per gram. And so... They're basically reverse engineering. You say you got $300 worth of diamonds. You got $75 worth of gold. Your cost of goods sold is $375.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Because I'm such a nice person, I'm going to let you make 10%. A bargain.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
$400 from me, and I need 90-day no-interest dating because I'm not going to pay you right away, and I need delivery in two weeks. And that's the good news. That's if you got an order. If you didn't get an order, you went to Kansas City for nothing. So basically, I learned sales in that kind of surrounding, hand-to-hand combat.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Which if you tell that to most Gen Z people who say, this is what sales is like. You're sitting in an office outside the door. You're waiting for an hour. You get 15 minutes. Somebody throws your goods on a scale. They figure out the cost of goods sold and the scrap value. And because they're kind to you, they're going to give you 10% over scrap value. That's what sales is like. Not this bullshit.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Let's do A-B testing on our way of sight. You know, it's the purple bullseye. More effective than the red border. Do we get more clicks with this? Do we get more clicks with that? Should we put the button at the top or the button at the bottom? That's not sales.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
This is one of those kinds of questions that you answer and you hear somebody answer. And you have to understand, you need to be a skeptic when you hear people answer that kind of question because you're only hearing one person's story. There's nothing scientific about my story. There's no controlled experiment.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
It's like if you took two people identical to a guy, you put them in an identical program, you give them identical opportunities, and then you see which way is better, pivot or stay. This is not science. There's no control. There's no hypothesis. This is just dog shit luck. But dog shit luck worked out for me.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Listen, I write management books, so I know how much bullshit there is. But for every book that says you got to fail fast, you got to break things, you got to pivot. There's another book that says you got to stick with it. Even when naysayers are telling you it's impossible, you don't believe them, you stick with it because you believe. Well, those two pieces of advice are diametrically opposed.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Do I pivot or do I gut it out? And it depends on which book you read last, right? So when you asked me that question, I don't know what to tell people because for some people you can pivot, for some people you can stick it out. Both ways have worked.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I don't think there's any science to it, but I will tell you that my observation, and this is just one person's observation, is that sometimes it's better to water the grass that you're standing on than to find new grass. And I could make the case that I quit Apple twice. I turned Steve Jobs down for a third job. So you're listening to a podcast guest who left Apple three times.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Maybe you want to go find a better episode now because why would I listen to this dumbass who left the most valuable company in the world before he made any long-term capital gains? So Let's just put that out on the table. But I will say that for those of you who are now thoroughly confused about whether you should pivot or stick it out, I'm telling you, either way can work.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
Somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. Everything else is easy. My advice to entrepreneurs first is.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And like I referred to before in Silicon Valley, the way it works is if you pivot and you're successful, you say, Of course I pivoted. I'm so smart. I came to that realization. And if you stick it out, you say, of course I stuck it out. I knew I was right. But that's how Silicon Valley works. Now, there is a bigger, more important lesson here.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And I think the bigger, more important lesson is whenever you hear a story, you always ask the question, what's missing? And I'll give you a perfect story for this. So, you know, lots of times there's this issue about should I go to college or not? Is a degree worth it? I'm an entrepreneur. I don't need a degree or do I?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And then you listen to some people, Peter Thiel or whatever, and they say, you don't need to go to college. Steve Jobs didn't finish college. Bill Gates didn't finish college. Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Those are three highly successful people. They prove you don't need to go to college. Well, when you hear a story like that, you ask yourself, what's missing?
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And what's missing is you've heard three examples of people who didn't go to college and succeeded. Well, what about the people who didn't go to college and failed, which is 99.9999999% of the people? And the flip side is also true is how many people went to college and became successful? Because every Fortune 500 company has a CEO that went to college.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
And then you also have to, how about the people who went to college and failed? But you need to ask in that two-by-two matrix of college, no college, success, failure. You cannot just look at the box about no college, success, and conclude failure. That's for me, because the odds of you being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is pretty low. I hate to tell you.
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Guy Kawasaki: The Tech Evangelist Who Built Apple and Canva into Iconic Brands | E97
I hate to tell you.