Guy Kawasaki
speaker
235 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Guy Kawasaki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
I hate to tell you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, listen... Everything you have heard about Steve Jobs is true.
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.
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.
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.
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