Business Podcast | Guy Kawasaki on Why Real Entrepreneurs “Fire Then Aim”

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation. On today’s show, we have the legendary, the iconic man with the plan, Mr. Guy Kawasaki. Welcome onto the Thrivetime Show. How are you sir?

Guy Kawasaki:
That’s quite an intro.

Speaker 1:
Good times, I’ve been working on that for about 14 hours in a row now, so I feel, I’ll try again if I need to. Welcome onto the show, sir.

Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you. I can tell already it’s going to be a fun day here.

Speaker 1:a
Yes. Now, okay, now your career deserves, you could have 15 shows about you, but I tried to distill, to break down today’s questions into the ones that I think will impact our audience the most. So let’s go back to college and you’re selling jewelry. Could you talk about selling jewelry and how that job helped you?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So I was in the MBA program at UCLA, which was a four day a week program, and I needed money and had an extra day. So I started working for a jewelry manufacturer in downtown LA where I counted diamonds.

Speaker 1:
Really?

Guy Kawasaki:
And, yeah, literally counted diamonds. And later when I graduated from the MBA program, I went to work for that jewelry company instead of Wells Fargo or McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, unlike my classmates. And I became the, eventually, the vice president of marketing and sales for this company. And so I had to go and sell jewelry to jewelry retailers around the world. And I have to tell you that was great training because, in my humble opinion, there are two fundamental functions in life, somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. So if you can do one of those two things, you will always be okay.

Speaker 1:
Did you have a specific book or a specific mentor or a specific method that you learned that allowed you to become good at sales? Because most people by default are not very good at sales and then everything else begins to fail when you can’t sell anything. How did you get, how did you become a sales master?

Guy Kawasaki:
Basically I got the crap beat out of me, I mean I think that’s the way. In a sense, to take the sort of more intellectual extreme of that, if you go to work for Proctor and Gamble and you’re selling Tide and Bold and whatever they sell, Swiffers, and you’re calling on supermarkets, I would think that you’re getting the crap beaten out of you. And that is very good training because you really learn to sell and you learn empathy and you learn to work hard and none of this kind of, I created a website and I did a sex tape and now I’m a internet influencer.

Speaker 1:
You know, I got to cross that off my list because I was telling the guys, I said, “Guys, if we could just get a sex tape made…” And this is what they said to me, [inaudible 00:03:18] I said, “Guys, that could have been our move.” But you’re saying that’s not the move.

Guy Kawasaki:
No, keep your day job bro.

Speaker 1:
Okay, we’re moving on here. Now you then somehow landed at Apple. And for the listeners who haven’t read your books and followed you and cyber stalked you like myself, can you explain how you went from the jewelry store to Apple?

Guy Kawasaki:
Nepotism.

Speaker 1:
Nepotism.

Guy Kawasaki:
Nepotism. Nepotism is when you hire a friend or family. So I went to school with a guy named Mike Boich and he eventually hired me into Apple where he was. So I had the wrong educational background, psychology, I had the wrong work experience, counting diamonds, to go to work for Apple. It was pure and simple nepotism. And in my book Wise Guy, I talk about this story and there’s a lesson there, and the lesson there is number one, make friends in college. Number two is, you may not have the perfect background, but don’t let that stop you. So the key is to get in and once you get in, to work your [inaudible 00:04:37] and succeed.

Guy Kawasaki:
So it’s not how you got in. It could be your father’s connections, your mother’s connections, it could be your classmate. Doesn’t matter how you get in, it just matters what you do once you get in. And there’s a corollary to that. The corollary to that is, let’s say you had the world’s greatest background, right? So you went to Dartmouth and Yale and you worked for Goldman Sachs and you’re just perfect on paper. You had a 4.2 GPA, Phi beta Kappa, all, just everything. So you get this job and guess what? The next day nobody gives a [inaudible 00:05:19] if you went to Harvard or Dartmouth or Yale or Stanford or you had a 4.2 or whatever. You either produce or you don’t produce. So that’s a very valuable lesson that, if you have this perfect background, you can’t live off of it. If you don’t have a perfect background, it doesn’t matter if you work your [inaudible 00:05:39] off.

Speaker 1:
In your book Wise Guy, you talk a lot about your experience working at Apple and I’d just like for the listeners to hear it from you. Did they hire you as their leading diamond purchaser or seller, or what did you do at Apple when you started?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, my nepotistic friend hired me. We went out and evangelized Macintosh to software companies and hardware companies. So our job was to take a pre-release computer with no installed base, very few tools, very little documentation, and convince companies to write Macintosh software and create Macintosh hardware.

Speaker 1:
So you were, you started there through nepotism in this position. You’re evangelizing. How often did you interact with Steve Jobs?

Guy Kawasaki:
As little as I could.

Speaker 1:
That’s fair. That’s fair.

Guy Kawasaki:
He was two or three layers above me. It was a small division though, so we’d run into each other. But, and I can’t tell you that I was in his inner circle and it’s not clear to me being in his inner circle is safe. So he was a very challenging, perfectionist kind of person. I lived in fear of him, but I would not trade those days for anything.

Speaker 1:
You’ve done talks, I’ve seen video interviews where you’ve, or video presentations, where you’ve talked about some of the things you’ve learned from Steve. You talked about these 12 pivotal lessons you’ve learned from Steve Jobs. Could you talk about his personality a little bit? Because there’s movies made about him where, there’s like the Ashton Kutcher movie and others, kind of like the happy one, and then there’s the Walter Isaacson book he did with Steve, which I enjoyed. What was the personality like of Steve jobs?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well basically all those movies and books are kind of accurate, I mean to some extent. And so there may be some factual issues and all that, but he kind of was what he was and he was a perfectionist. He didn’t exactly mince his words. You could say that he didn’t really care about people’s feelings. That sounds more negative than it is because there are some people who don’t care about people’s feelings because they’re just 24 carat orifices, right? There are other people that it’s just not on their radar. They just don’t think about other people’s feelings. It’s not part of their operating system to consider other people’s feelings. They just blurt out the truth or they blurt out their opinion. Whereas there are other people who are trying to drill you into the ground. And Steve was, it was just not in his operating system. He just was what he was, truly the first Wiziwig CEO.

Speaker 1:
Well in my shameless attempt to help you sell your book Wise Guy here, in your book you talk about these 12 pivotal lessons, I’d like for you to share three of them. That way the listeners are going to say, “I can’t stand it. I’ve got to buy the Wise Guy book today.” So let’s talk about one of these pivotal lessons here. Value is different from price. What does that mean?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. Well, in the case of Apple, no one ever bought anything from Apple because it had the lowest list price. If you just compare apples against apples, no pun intended, for performance, screen size, et cetera, et cetera, Apple products are never the cheapest. You never buy an Apple product on price. You do buy an Apple product on value. So value considers other things besides the simple dollar amount. It considers ease of use, ease of conversion, coolness, all those other things, lack of the need for IT support, all those kind of things. So when you buy a Macintosh, it’s because you’re going to get up to speed faster. You’re going to have better results and you’re going to have to have less support. So is it more expensive when you buy it? Yes. But over the course of a lifetime, will it give you more value? Also yes.

Speaker 1:
Have you ever used a PC? Is it like unethical in your mind to use a PC? Have you ever used a PC?

Guy Kawasaki:
I used one about six years ago for about 30 seconds I remember, but generally, I never ever use a PC.

Speaker 1:
Never used it. Never used, okay. That’s, I wanted to ask you because these are the tough questions the Thrivers want to ask you. Now you have started saying, I’ve seen a few talks where you’ve talked about this and then in your book Wise Guy you talk about this, you say real entrepreneurs ship. Do you remember when you first started talking about this idea publicly?

Guy Kawasaki:
Do I remember when? I don’t remember what I did yesterday man.

Speaker 1:
I feel like you’ve been saying that though for about a decade, haven’t you? I mean, because it’s easier to see what you’ve been saying on YouTube now than it was before YouTube, but-

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but what I mean by that is I meet with a lot of entrepreneurs and they’ve been in their garage or in their bedroom and they’ve been noodling with this idea and tinkering around for years and they’re waiting for, I don’t know what they’re waiting for. They’re waiting for the perfect product, with the perfect market, with adequate funding and no competition. And that just does not describe the real world.

Guy Kawasaki:
And so real entrepreneurs, they ship and then they test. So you ship a Mackintosh 128 K. It doesn’t have enough Ram, the chip’s too slow, the monitors monochrome, there’s not enough software. There’s lots of flaws with what you ship. But once you ship, that’s when the real world, that’s… Once you ship, that’s when the real work begins and that’s also when you truly know what you have to do. Because you can sit in your dark cave in your mother’s house and cogitate about what will be necessary for your product, but the moment you ship, harsh reality slaps you in the face.

Speaker 1:
I don’t expect you to have done extensive research on me, but one of the companies I started back in the day out of my dorm room at Oral Roberts University was djconnection.com. And before I sold it, we were doing about 4,000 weddings a year and I thought-

Guy Kawasaki:
4,000 weddings a year?

Speaker 1:
80 a weekend. Yeah, the largest in the country. And I was cogitating. I was thinking, you know what? I am going to build this awesome club DJ company. Now what I found out quickly at the age of 18 is that you don’t, you’re not going to be very wealthy unless you’re like a Calvin Harris or a DJ Tiesto because there’s just not that many clubs that have that many events that can pay 80 guys to DJ. But weddings are everywhere. And when I went out there and tried to ship, I defined what I thought would work, I acted, and then I had to measure the results and realize I’ve got to refine this entire thing. And that pivot happened like in my first month of marketing, going from a club DJ to a wedding DJ. That is so important. Why do people get stuck on that idea of just defining, defining, defining, but never acting, measuring and refining?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well you probably learned more in the first day than you did in the previous year. Right? But that’s how life is and so hence the algorithm that real entrepreneurs ship. Real authors ship too. There are people who work for years on a book and they never ship it. Well, you’ve got to ship it. That’s just, it doesn’t exist unless you ship it.

Speaker 1:
You decided to, at one point, leave Apple and you’ve done a lot of other ventures throughout your career, beyond just your time at Apple. I know a lot of people want to focus there and there’s so much more tapestry in your quilt of a career there. Can you explain why you decided to leave Apple and then what you did between the 87 and 95 period?

Guy Kawasaki:
There’s two versions of why I left Apple. So version one is I left Apple because I truly did believe in the Macintosh software market, I wanted to start a software company and make the big bucks like software entrepreneurs do. So that’s the Silicon Valley dream. Version number two of this is I went to a job review with my manager and I was up for being a director level person. And director level at Apple at that time meant that Apple bought you a car and I really wanted Apple to buy me a car. So I go into this job review and the guy tells me, well, the small developers really love you. The innovative, two guys in the garage, two gals in a garage, a guy and a gal in a garage, they love you, but Microsoft, Ashton Tate and Lotus, they don’t like you. And so because those three companies are so important and so strategic for Apple, but they don’t like you, I’m not giving you your promotion.

Speaker 1:
Oh, come on.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I just frigging hit the ceiling. Because, to me, Ashton Tate was making a mediocre product, Microsoft was copying our user interface, and Lotus didn’t believe in Macintosh at all, so those three companies should hate me.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Guy Kawasaki:
That was the right thing to happen. And so I went to a friend at Apple who was kind of a peer at that point, and his name was Jean-Louis Gassee. And I said, “Jean-Louis, I’m just going to quit. Man, I went into this review and they told me that I wasn’t being promoted for this reason.” And he said, “Guy, don’t quit. Don’t do anything rash. There’s going to be a reorg. You’re going to be reporting to me and the next time you have a review, which is in six months, I will make you a director.” And he did.

Speaker 1:
Got it.

Guy Kawasaki:
And then I quit the next day to start a company.

Speaker 1:
Okay. So, now when you quit… I know I was working at Applebee’s, Target and Direct TV at the same time while my wife worked at Office Depot and Oral Roberts University to start my first company. And I remember when I could finally afford to quit, there’s kind of that feeling of like, yes. But I didn’t tell my wife first. So she comes home, we’re 21 years old, she comes home, said, “What are you doing home?” And I’m like, “I quit.” What did you do when you quit? I was just sitting there happy as can be, kind of freaking my wife out a little bit. Did you, what did you do the day you quit?

Guy Kawasaki:
I think the next day I started working on the company, the company that I quit to start. It was a Macintosh database company.

Speaker 1:
And tell us about that venture and then what you did after that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, so I started Macintosh database company and it did okay. Didn’t do spectacularly. I stayed there for about three years. I kind of didn’t get along with the other founders, so I left and I just pursued my bliss for awhile as a writer and a speaker, and I returned to Apple a few years later. I started a venture capital firm. Today I’m chief evangelist of a company called Canva, which is an online graphics design service that everybody should use to create their graphics.

Speaker 1:
Canva?

Guy Kawasaki:
Canva, C-A-N-V-A. And I’m a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador, so I get paid to drive a Mercedes. That’s a true story.

Speaker 1:
I want to get into… I’m going to ask you a really rude question right now and if you hang up, I’ll pick up that you don’t like the question. Here’s my question. I think you’re a brand ambassador for fish oil because you are getting younger every year. Have you seen your face? Your face is getting younger and I call you on the carpet. Are you a brand ambassador for fish oil?

Guy Kawasaki:
No. You know, I’m just getting better and better at Photoshop.

Speaker 1:
Oh man, you’re, how old are you at last count?

Guy Kawasaki:
I am 64.

Speaker 1:
You, it’s not possible. You-

Guy Kawasaki:
I am 64. Why would I lie?

Speaker 1:
I’m just saying you look younger all the time. You are, don’t take this the weird way, you’re a beautiful man. You’re a beautiful man. I think you’re using your sex to sell. Some people use sex tapes, you’re using your Photoshopped face or your fish oil, whatever that is.

Guy Kawasaki:
You know what keeps me young is, first of all I have a fantastic wife, but I also, or not but, and I have four children. And these children are as young as 13 and as old as 25. So my 13 year old, who’s a seventh grader, he’s got, let’s see, two more years, so that’s, and then he has three more years, five. He’s probably got nine or 10 more years. Right? And so my plan is he graduates from college and the next day I die. That’s the plan.

Speaker 1:
Now you, chapter seven of your book the Wise Guy, you wrote in the book Wise Guy, chapter seven, you decide to call this chapter Parenting, and very few entrepreneurs… And I’m not ripping on most entrepreneurs, but we’ve interviewed the top PR guy on the planet, Michael Levine, and we’ve interviewed, we have Wolfgang Puck on the books, we’ve got founder Ritz Carlton, and a lot of times you interview people that can really keep the family together. So it’s like as they’re growing the business, they can also grow the family, they keep together.

Speaker 1:
And then a lot of times you meet people where it’s almost like two diametrically opposed ideas. It’s almost like if I’m going to have a great business, my marriage is going to be terrible. And I think you’ve done both, which, so in my opinion, you’re one of the most successful people we’ve interviewed. And you said, on chapter seven of your book, you said parenting has been the most challenging and most rewarding activity of my life. So I would love for you to share, without judgment of our listeners, but where do most people seem to get it wrong with managing a family and keeping that together while keeping a business together?

Guy Kawasaki:
Man, I’m not going to touch that question.

Speaker 1:
You won’t.

Guy Kawasaki:
I like, who the hell am I to give you this advise?

Speaker 1:
Okay, well, I’m going to ask you, why does your family stay together? Is your wife just awesome or why? Because you seem like you’re a very happily married guy and I just want to know, because this is, I think there’s a lot of listeners who want to know that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well my wife is fantastic and I take our vows very seriously. I, you know, listen, I don’t want to hold myself up, like this is my Charles Barkley [inaudible 00:19:57]

Speaker 1:
You’re not doing it. You’re the most humble man in the world. I’m just saying, I’m impressed.

Guy Kawasaki:
That’s not true. I don’t, like Charles Barkley, I don’t want to be a role model. I just, I just love my kids. I love my family. When I, I hate traveling, when I’m home, I’m at home, literally in the house. I don’t go to an office. So, and when I travel, I mean I travel like nobody else I know. I am, a long visit for any city in the world for me is 24 hours. I have done things like go to Russia for 12 hours, speak and come back within two days. The whole trip is two days. I go to Chicago in the morning, come back that night. I just want to be with my fam, I love my family. And we have four kids and they all surf and I love to surf. So that’s what I want to do. I just want to surf.

Speaker 1:
You and I share a lot of things in common there. I have five kids and I live behind a wall. We call it Camp Clark and Chicken Palace at the Lampoon Lagoon. And I almost never leave except for to go to Atwoods to buy supplies for my silky chickens and I come back. So I really-

Guy Kawasaki:
What city do you live in?

Speaker 1:
Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s the birthplace of tourism. Sod farm tours are huge this time of year. And, I’m just kidding. But we have 17 acres and we love it in Tulsa. But we really just never, I don’t like to ever travel at all almost.

Speaker 1:
And in your book you also talk about email, which I think is a less controversial subject, but your take on it is fairly controversial. So we’ll move off the family stuff. You wrote here in your book Wise Guy, I once lost 400 unanswered emails in my inbox because my email application crashed. Afterward, no one sent a followup email asking why I hadn’t responded. Later, I lost another inbox and only had a handful of people follow up. I’d love for you to break this down.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So, and what I embraced was when close friends die, and I’ve had some close friends die, I just take my inbox and throw it away in honor of them, because I have noticed it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. You think everybody’s waiting and half the time I respond and the response to the response is, “Oh, I sent you an email. I never thought you’d answer. Thank you for answering.” Well why am I answering email to people who don’t expect to get answered? Why am I making myself crazy? So my message to your listeners is don’t sweat your email. I have right now, and I look at my email inbox and it’s getting to be a few hundred. I just throw away everything that’s older than 30 days and I figure if it matters, they’re going to write back to me. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

Speaker 1:
You are a guy who loves your family. You love what you do. You’re always smiling. You’re a great personality. I know you don’t want to be a role model and I’m not saying you are. Maybe we’re all looking down and judging you for looking so young all the time. But your book, the Wise Guy, you decided to write this book and it’s called Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life. What first inspired you to sit down and write this book?

Guy Kawasaki:
Royalty.

Speaker 1:
Royalty. You said I’m going to make some royalties. That’s my move.

Guy Kawasaki:
That’s a joke man. That’s a joke.

Speaker 1:
I got it. I like that. So you’re saying, “Hey, I have a lot of stories. I know people want to hear them. So bang, bang. There we go.”

Guy Kawasaki:
More or less, yeah. I wanted to write another book and I thought, geez, I got enough stores, just put them together in a book and… Listen, this is not my memoir or my autobiography, okay, because unless you’re Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King, you don’t write a memoir. So this ain’t a memoir. This is, probably many of your listeners have heard of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Well Chicken Soup for the Soul are short stories from many different people. This is miso soup for the soul. This is just Guy’s stories about my life and what I learned.

Speaker 1:
What are you terrible at? I think a lot of people, not our listeners, but they do look up to you and they say, “This guy, his name is Guy. He’s great. Good skin. Great wife, great kids. Four kids, they all surf. What’s going on? I just want to be like Guy.” But I’d like for you to share, and you don’t have to share anything weird, but I mean, what are you terrible at? What do you say that is the thing I’m not good at? I think that would be very helpful for our listeners.

Guy Kawasaki:
Surfing is one.

Speaker 1:
Really? Really, you’re not good at it?

Guy Kawasaki:
Surfing and hockey are two of my great passions, neither of which I can do very well. So what I figured out is when you love to do something that you’re not good at, it is true love, right? Because anybody can love what you’re good at. How many can love what you’re not good at?

Speaker 1:
How much hockey do you, how much do you love hockey? I mean, is it like your, is it your passion?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I have kind of transitioned from hockey to surfing, but I used to play hockey four times a week. I loved hockey.

Speaker 1:
Who is your favorite player?

Guy Kawasaki:
Probably Brett Hall. I just…

Speaker 1:
Really?

Guy Kawasaki:
All he did was shoot. He’s my kind of guy.

Speaker 1:
Now I want to ask you this question. Did you like Wayne Gretzky? Was he kind of your style? You’re out there in California, he was in California.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so here’s a bizarre thing. So I started playing hockey at 48 and I started surfing at 62, which is few decades too late for each of them. And so when I started hockey at 48, Wayne Gretzky had already retired. I didn’t even know who would know who these people were.

Speaker 1:
Well, I’ve got to tell you a funny Wayne Gretzky story and I only have one Wayne Gretzky story. Yesterday, I’m interviewing Shep Gordon, you know, the famous manager. I’ll just tell the listeners out there who don’t know, he’s managed Sylvester Stallone and Alice Cooper and all these big iconic names, I think it’s Wolfgang Puck. So I’m interviewing him. He lives in Hawaii now. And in the background there’s somebody punking him, some guy making noise and just kind of messing with him. And that person was Wayne Gretzky. So he’s like-

Guy Kawasaki:
Really?

Speaker 1:
Yeah, he’s like, “Wayne, wait, seriously, I’m doing an interview.” So anyway, that was a real thing. So that’s kind of funny.

Guy Kawasaki:
That’s hilarious.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. So you are an intentional guy. I know you’re focused on the family. So you’re probably focused on simplicity at some level or just not spending your time doing things that don’t matter. What are the things that you don’t do that you think a lot of people… You’re not judging, I’m just saying maybe you’re talking to me. You’re saying, “Clay, here are the things that I don’t do that a lot of business people think they have to do.”

Guy Kawasaki:
Answer email.

Speaker 1:
Right, then that’s why it’s a big thing. That’ll save at least an hour or two hours, four hours a day for somebody. What else?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, slightly different answer. What is the secret to my success is that I am willing to grind it out. I outwork people. And so I’m not smarter than people, I just work harder than people. And that’s kind of my story. I just love to work.

Speaker 1:
So with Canva, which you’re a brand ambassador for now and you’re involved in, how did you decide that Canva was a good fit for you? And how you decide like this is a project I want to invest my time in? Because you’re going to work hard once you decide. But how do you decide?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, the true story with Canva is that I had, and still work with her, a person who helps me with my social media, optimizing my posts, et cetera, et cetera. So this is back five years ago now, and she was using Canva to make graphics for my Tweets and she just loved it. So one day the people from Canva reach out to me over Twitter suggesting that we talk and meet and all that. And so I got the Tweet and I said to her, her name is Peggy Fitzpatrick, I said to her, “Is this the company that you use? Is this a company you’re always raving about for graphics?” She said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, do you think I should help them?” And she said, “Yeah, you should help them. It’s a great company. It’s great for making graphics.” And so that’s how I decided because there’s a lesson there too, which is listen to people who really do the work. She was really doing the work. She was really at the front line. She knew what was good. So I just listened to her.

Speaker 1:
We have about a half a million downloads a month of our podcast from people who a lot of them want to drive a Mercedes or do drive a Mercedes. So I’d like to ask you, do you have a specific, as the ambassador, as the man who gets paid to drive the Mercedes, do you have a specific make and model that you say that is boom, that’s nice, that’s hot?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, right now I’m driving an S 63. So it’s the S class, but the biturbo, super duper AMG one of that. However, I will tell you that we just came out with an A series, which is the antithesis of the S series. So the A series starts at about 33 grand and it’s kind of a, competes with the entry level BMW, entry level [inaudible 00:29:24] Audi 3. And there’s a part of me that just, I just, jump in a small car, good gas mileage, just dart around. So that’s one. I would, if Mercedes called me up today and said, “Listen Guy, we want you to swap out cars. What car do you want?” I would tell them an A series. And if not, then at the other extreme there’s a Sprinter, which is the ultimate surf mobile. And coming up very shortly is what’s called an EQC, which is their basic, all-electric, midsize SUV. So that would be, it has like a 220 mile range on the battery, holds five, SUV size, surfboard racks on the top, that would be the one.

Speaker 1:
So let me ask you this here. When you’re not surfing or recovering from hockey injuries or spending time with your family, how do you spend the first four hours of your typical day? Like what time are you waking up and what is your first four hours look like?

Guy Kawasaki:
Man, you don’t want to know.

Speaker 1:
I want to know now. I want to know the current, for the current four hours and then I’d like to go back-

Guy Kawasaki:
I wake up and the first thing I do is I look at three news services. So there’s Google News, Apple News, and SmartNews. So I look at these three things because I want to see the news for my social media. I spend a lot of time curating social media, so I need to find a lot of good stories every day. So I do that. Then I drop off my kid. So I, where my son goes to school, it’s half hour there, half hour back. So okay, well back up a second. So I get up. I get up at 6:30. About 50% of the time I’m making breakfast. I take them to school and I come back, and now it’s about 8:30. I go to a coffee shop and I do email and answer social media for the next two or three hours. Then I go and eat someplace and then I do another two or three hours of email and social media. Then I pick up a child or two and I come home and then I do email and social media.

Speaker 1:
And that’s your world right now. That’s a daily normal for you.

Guy Kawasaki:
And that’s with me ignoring email. Imagine if I didn’t ignore them all.

Speaker 1:
Now, when you were back in your Apple days, when you’re out there just grinding every day as an employee, a member of that team, what was the schedule expectation like when you worked there?

Guy Kawasaki:
We had a sweatshirt that said working 60 hours a week and loving it. So it was, we were working 60 hours and we truly did love it, right? We were on a mission to change the world, to dent the universe, to make people more creative and productive with a personal computer. It was a great time.

Speaker 1:
So you loved it. 60 hours a week and loving, you had a shirt, you all wore the shirt that said working 60 hours a week and loving it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yep.

Speaker 1:
That’s awesome. That’s, now okay, now this is my final question that I have for you on today’s show. You come across as a very proactive person. And I’m not hyping you up, not building up as a role model, just saying you come across as the proactive guy. How are you going to spend the next 12 months? What’s your vision? What’s your goal? Do you have a goal? Do you have a vision for the next 12 months of your life?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well for the next couple months, I’m heavily invested in the introduction of this book, so lots of these kind of recordings, lots of trips, lots of signings. Those kinds of things. As a baseline, I’m always trying to evangelize Canva. I’m always making speeches. I make 50 or 60 speeches a year, so I’m traveling making speeches. I’m evangelizing Canva. A lot of this travel involves Mercedes-Benz or Canva. And then when I’m not doing any of those things, I’m at home with my family and surfing.

Speaker 1:
Where do you call home these days?

Guy Kawasaki:
Northern California.

Speaker 1:
Northern California. Okay. So I think what we’re going to do, I think the cost of living is pretty high up there in Northern California. So I would just say this for the listeners out there, I’m doing a fundraiser and for as little as, what Guy, $2,000 a day you could feed a Guy Kawasaki? And so the only way we can do that is we have to generate royalties. And the only way we can do that is we’ve got to buy the book. So everybody out there, if you’re wise, if you care about your, if you just care about humanity and you want to help support Guy Kawasaki, for as little as a $2,000 a day, you too could support a Guy Kawasaki. Guy, am I missing something there? Is that about right?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I don’t want people to buy the book for that reason. I want you to buy the book because it reflects 30 years of living, 30 years of mistakes, 30 years of working my tail off. And I want you to benefit from my experience so that you can optimize your life. You may be able to avoid the mistakes I made. At the very least, I hope you make different mistakes than I made. And I have a personal mantra for my life, which is to empower people. So I think this book will empower you to have a better life. And listen, it’s not one of these get rich quick, buy my book and you’ll be an internet, real estate millionaire, driving a Mercedes and all that kind of stuff. I’m not an infomercial, I’m not a cult figure. I’m not that kind of guy. These are simple down to earth stories that taught me about life and I think that they can apply to almost anybody’s life.

Speaker 1:
And what’s the number one way where people love today’s show and they say, “I want to learn more about you.” Is there a particular website you want to direct them to or a Twitter handle? I mean obviously people can Google you. Is there a specific place where you say that right there is me at my best. Go there.

Guy Kawasaki:
Until you said me at my best, I had an answer for you.

Speaker 1:
Oh sorry. You at you’re normal self.

Guy Kawasaki:
If you want to see what I’m into and what I’m doing and how I’m trying to change the world and whatever, it’s probably my LinkedIn account. So I post a lot on LinkedIn. So that’s sort of my serious side. My playful, real life, behind the scenes side is Instagram. So between Instagram and LinkedIn you will truly get insights into who I am. And I’m warning you right now, that’s for better or for worse.

Speaker 1:
Well Guy, I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to be here on the show. I cannot express with words how much excitement there was for the whole Thrive community to have you on, myself included. It just, it means the world to us.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s, I just love doing this. I mean, this is, you get to let it rip on these things. I just love this, so thank you for having me.