Top 100 Guy Kawasaki Quotes
#1. I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity.
Guy Kawasaki
#2. A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE.
Guy Kawasaki
#3. The desire to change the world is a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead because focusing on a lofty goal is more energizing and attracts more talent than simply making a buck.
Guy Kawasaki
#4. Social media allows me to pick my times for social interaction.
Guy Kawasaki
#5. Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies.
Guy Kawasaki
#6. When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight.
Guy Kawasaki
#7. The mark of a good conversationalist is not that you can talk a lot. The mark is that you can get others to talk a lot. Thus, good schmoozer's are good listeners, not good talkers.
Guy Kawasaki
#8. You really can't spend money on social media unless you really try. Social media is really more about effort than expense.
Guy Kawasaki
#9. You need to save some mental, physical, and emotional resources for enhancing your product after you ship. A revolution is a triathlon, not a hundred-yard dash-it requires long distance stamina and multiple skills such as creating, churning, and evangelizing.
Guy Kawasaki
#11. People who earn the label "creative" are really just people who
come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster,
and are willing to try them out. The problem is that most schools
and organizations train us out of those habits.
Guy Kawasaki
#12. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. MARK TWAIN
Guy Kawasaki
#13. Reality is going kick your ass so far that not even Google will find you. The
Guy Kawasaki
#14. The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.
Guy Kawasaki
#15. The higher you go in a company, the less oxygen there is, so supporting
intelligent life becomes difficult.
Guy Kawasaki
#16. High achievers tend to have major weaknesses. People without major weaknesses tend to be mediocre.
Guy Kawasaki
#17. It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.
Guy Kawasaki
#18. Better to fail at doing the right thing than to succeed at doing the wrong thing.
Guy Kawasaki
#19. There was no "decision" per se to re-position myself. I simply decided that I wanted to write a book that would help people influence others.
Guy Kawasaki
#20. Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do.
Guy Kawasaki
#21. There are two ways to approach the application process: trying to hit a home run by getting an immediate 'Yes, here's an offer' or trying not to be eliminated. I recommend the second approach.
Guy Kawasaki
#22. Twitter, Facebook, Google + are the trifecta of marketing for authors (and bloggers).
Guy Kawasaki
#23. A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.
Guy Kawasaki
#24. Looking back on my own career, I've come to the conclusion that too much money is worse than too little.
Guy Kawasaki
#25. The A-listers and the A+ listers, are reporting the news, they're not making it.
Guy Kawasaki
#26. The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless
most of the engineers who did ground-breaking work of the Macintosh design didn't even graduate from college.
Guy Kawasaki
#27. An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.
Guy Kawasaki
#28. If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society's heroes.
Guy Kawasaki
#29. People are forgiving of v 1.0 of a product if it's truly innovative and useful. Then you can get away with a lot. But if you're merely marginally improving the status quo, then you better be rock solid.
Guy Kawasaki
#30. If you want to make a good first impression, smile at people. What does it cost to smile? Nothing. What does it cost not to smile? Everything, if not smiling prevents you from enchanting people.
Guy Kawasaki
#31. When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.
Guy Kawasaki
#32. I think that no one, or very few, are born as good presenters. It's a skill that you learn.
Guy Kawasaki
#34. The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you're sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.
Guy Kawasaki
#35. If you start out to solely make money, you will attract the wrong kind of employees.
Guy Kawasaki
#36. The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.
Guy Kawasaki
#37. The most powerful sign is that your work no longer enchants you - it's not deep, delightful, and mutually satisfying. When this happens, it may be time to look for new challenges.
Guy Kawasaki
#38. Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.
Guy Kawasaki
#39. Someone once said that death is God's way of telling you to slow down. I do enjoy what I do, and the secret of my success is the willingness to grind work out.
Guy Kawasaki
#40. If you make money, you might not make meaning.
Guy Kawasaki
#41. Every social media post should have a beautiful graphic. If there are two identical stories, the one with the beautiful graphic will always win.
Guy Kawasaki
#42. The good news about entrepreneurship is that your fate is in your hands. The bad news is that your fate is in your hands!
Guy Kawasaki
#43. The jewelry business is a very, very tough business - tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.
Guy Kawasaki
#44. Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress.
Guy Kawasaki
#45. The greater the difficulty of the change, the greater the need for enchantment. Factors that cause friction include expense, risk, and "politics." If a change is a big deal, then it's a big deal to make it happen.
Guy Kawasaki
#46. Original visions are often wrong. Companies have to morph as they learn what customers don't want.
Guy Kawasaki
#47. Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air.
Guy Kawasaki
#48. If you use social media right, you will piss people off. It's actually recommended!
Guy Kawasaki
#49. The key to evangelism is a great product. It is easy, almost unavoidable, to catalyze evangelism for a great product. It is hard, almost impossible, to catalyze evangelism for crap.
Guy Kawasaki
#50. Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice. Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it Google? Is it Apple? They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life.
Guy Kawasaki
#51. For startups, SM is now crucial: it has never been cheaper and easier to reach one's customers. Entrepreneurs should thank God for Twitter, Facebook ...
Guy Kawasaki
#52. Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates.
Guy Kawasaki
#54. Revolutionary leaders have to care more about what they think of themselves than what the world thinks of them.
Guy Kawasaki
#55. There are two types of people on social media: people who want more followers, and liars.
Guy Kawasaki
#56. If achieving success were easy, more people would do it.
Guy Kawasaki
#57. Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that's one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).
Guy Kawasaki
#58. A simple summary of my life is that my parents worked very hard so that I could have a great education, and I took that education and worked very hard to get where I am. I would like my kids' lives to be exactly the same.
Guy Kawasaki
#59. The self-edited author is as foolish as the self-medicated patient.
Guy Kawasaki
#61. My perspective is this: my allegiance is to the best product for my needs. For a computer, this means Macintosh. For phone and tablet, this means Android.
Guy Kawasaki
#62. Some things need to be believed to be seen.
Guy Kawasaki
#63. A 50-year-old company can innovate as well as two guys/gals in a garage.
Guy Kawasaki
#64. Just do what's right for the customer, and you'll be okay.
Guy Kawasaki
#65. You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.
Guy Kawasaki
#66. If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.
Guy Kawasaki
#67. For me writing is as close to being an engineer as possible.
Guy Kawasaki
#68. My theory is that when you're young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world.
Guy Kawasaki
#69. It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.
Guy Kawasaki
#70. Steve [Jobs] proves that it's OK to be an asshole ... He just has a different OS.
Guy Kawasaki
#71. Crowdsourcing is a great way to approach creation because in any given point there's always somebody on the Internet who knows something better than you do.
Guy Kawasaki
#72. A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.
Guy Kawasaki
#73. Mission statements are long, dull, and forgettable.
Guy Kawasaki
#75. Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C
players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z
players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.
Guy Kawasaki
#77. Instant success are seldom instant and if you talk to the people behind these successes, you'll find out that they came after months of fear, uncertainty and confusion along with a flagrant lack of adoption.
Guy Kawasaki
#78. Entrepreneurship is at its best when it alters the future, and it alters the future when it jumps curves
Guy Kawasaki
#79. You know in a startup, you only need three people. You need someone who can make something. You need someone who can sell it. And you need someone to collect the money. That's the only three roles in a startup. So which one are you?
Guy Kawasaki
#80. Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore ... but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.
Guy Kawasaki
#81. Leverage your brand. You shouldn't let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.
Guy Kawasaki
#82. Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP.
Guy Kawasaki
#83. I don't "need" the rush to be happy. I'd be perfectly happy without the attention and action.
Guy Kawasaki
#84. A large social-media presence is important because it's one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.
Guy Kawasaki
#85. The first 90 percent of a revolution is creating the product or service; the second 90 percent is evangelizing it. At the beginning of a revolution, you need evangelists, not sales, because leverage spreads news.
Guy Kawasaki
#86. Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn't easy, but it's fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.
Guy Kawasaki
#87. The telephone operator has one of the biggest roles in creating your organization's image ... indeed, many people may come into contact with no one except your operator.
Guy Kawasaki
#88. Second, you need to spread the large amount of information knowledge that you've gained-pooping like an elephant. This means sharing information and discoveries with your fellow employees and occasionally even with your competitors.
Guy Kawasaki
#89. If you look at my Twitter feed it is 99% links, but 1% is me responding and 1% of a big number is a big number.
Guy Kawasaki
#90. The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.
Guy Kawasaki
#91. The next time you think that there's something that you "can't live without", wait for a week and then see if you're still alive or not
Guy Kawasaki
#92. Every person has the ability to improve the life of someone else.
Guy Kawasaki
#93. There is no shortcut to awesome. Zoe Winters
Guy Kawasaki
#94. My mother taught me not to take any crap from anyone and to stand up for my rights. You might not believe this lesson came from a tiny Japanese woman, but it's true.
Guy Kawasaki
#95. I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. - Ludwig van Beethoven
Guy Kawasaki
#96. The more popular a person thinks he is in the blogosphere, the thinner his skin and the thicker his hypocrisy. This should be exactly the opposite: the higher you go the thicker the skin and thinner the hypocrisy.
Guy Kawasaki
#97. It's hard to name a person who is unpopular who has influence.
Guy Kawasaki
#99. Companies should always want to delight their customers.
Guy Kawasaki
#100. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.
Guy Kawasaki
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