Guy Kawasaki Quotes

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

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

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?

Social media puts reciprocity on steroids because now you can reach more people in more ways to do more things for them faster and at lower expense. Positive word about your reciprocity can spread faster than ever.

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

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

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

If you're in enough places at enough times, then some of them are bound to be the right ones.

Leverage your brand. You shouldn't let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.

• People deserve a break. The stressed and unorganized person who doesn’t have the same priorities as you may be dealing with an autistic child, abusive spouse, fading parents, or cancer. Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Give them a break instead.

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.

Don’t be discouraged by the size of your network – inspire one person and you are doing good.

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

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

The self-edited author is as foolish as the self-medicated patient.

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

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That's the acid test.

What gets me up in the morning is either my daughter crawling into bed or my sons having to go to school. I love my family. They need a certain level of economic resources. They need my time. They need my attention. That's why I do what I do...and don't do what I don't do what I don't do.

Social media allows me to pick my times for social interaction.

High achievers tend to have major weaknesses. People without major weaknesses tend to be mediocre.

If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing, If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.

If you use social media right, you will piss people off. It's actually recommended!

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

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.

If you start out to solely make money, you will attract the wrong kind of employees.

Everything you want is cheap or free. If you went to a venture capitalist and said: "I need money to buy tools." You flunked the IQ test, I mean every tool that you need is free!

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.

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

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

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.

Great teams are usually small-under fifty in total head count. (There are few examples of a team made up of hundreds of people who created anything revolutionary.) Big teams aren't conducive to revolutionary products because such products require a high degree of single-mindedness, unity, and unreasonable passion.

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

For me writing is as close to being an engineer as possible.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

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

Here's what you should say [to an investor]: 'this is what my company does' It's that simple. What you're trying to do is get potential investors to fantasize about how your product or service will make a boatload of money. They can't fantasize if they don't know what you do.

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

Most of my life is over. I am going to enjoy my family and friends before any of us depart this earth. I'll never start another company. I'll never work long hours again. At this point in my life, I only answer to God, my wife, and my kids. Everything else is secondary - especially the expectations of strangers.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sales fixes everything.

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

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

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

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