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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I more advise you to do a lot of sampling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As my son often tells me that suffering and pain is mediocrity leaving your body.
Sure. You can take me anywhere you want. I don't know.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Showing 81–100 of 235 · page 5 of 12
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