Kawasaki Quotes & Sayings

Suck up with subtlety. — Guy Kawasaki

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

You need to earn the right to promote. — Guy Kawasaki

You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship." — Guy Kawasaki

Take my word for it: More people will like you if you believe that people are good until proven bad. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Inoculate yourself from dangerous bozos. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Reality is going kick your ass so far that not even Google will find you. The — Guy Kawasaki

You really can't spend money on social media unless you really try. Social media is really more about effort than expense. — Guy Kawasaki

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are. — Guy Kawasaki

I love the notification system on Google+. If someone mentions you, you get notified via Gmail. That's very useful for someone like me. — Guy Kawasaki

I think that no one, or very few, are born as good presenters. It's a skill that you learn. — Guy Kawasaki

Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do. — Guy Kawasaki

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

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE. — Guy Kawasaki

His idea is to get your team together and pretend that your product has failed. That's right: failed, cratered, imploded, or "went aloha oe," as we say in Hawaii. You ask the team to come up with all the reasons why the failure occurred. Then each member has to state one reason until every reason is on a list. The next step is to figure out ways to prevent every reason from occurring. — Guy Kawasaki

Mission statements are long, dull, and forgettable. — Guy Kawasaki

Accept diversity and don't take any crap. — Guy Kawasaki

Facebook is for people, Twitter is for perspective, Google+ is for passion, LinkedIn is for pimping — Guy Kawasaki

The companies that are successful, they start out to make meaning, not to make money. — Guy Kawasaki

I learned how difficult it is to self-publish a book. It's complex, it's confusing, it's idiosyncratic. — Guy Kawasaki

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer. — Guy Kawasaki

The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people's lives. — Guy Kawasaki

Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience. — Guy Kawasaki

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

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

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

I'm a lousy predictor of the future. — Guy Kawasaki

At the end of the day in business, it's not about peer review and getting into a scientific journal. You either increase sales, or not. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Companies should always want to delight their customers. — Guy Kawasaki

The goal is to provide inspiring information that moves people to action. — Guy Kawasaki

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

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. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Some things need to be believed to be seen. — Guy Kawasaki

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

The most powerful way to convince the interviewer that you can do the job is to show how much you already know about the industry, the company, and the products/services of the company. In other words, enchant the interviewer with how much you already know. — Guy Kawasaki

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

The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money. — Guy Kawasaki

If you make money, you might not make meaning. — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

Looking back on my own career, I've come to the conclusion that too much money is worse than too little. — Guy Kawasaki

You have to start with the basic premise that you need to know what your competition is doing. — Guy Kawasaki

Meaning is not creating a cool place to work with free food, Ping-Pong, volleyball, and dogs. Meaning is making the world a better place. — Guy Kawasaki

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

People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars. — Guy Kawasaki

Many men can make a fortune but very few can build a family. - J. S. Bryan — Guy Kawasaki

A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent. — Guy Kawasaki

Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face. — Guy Kawasaki

A 50-year-old company can innovate as well as two guys/gals in a garage. — Guy Kawasaki

Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. — Guy Kawasaki

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

I would like my kids to inherit a world where people succeed because of merit and hard work, not entitlement, and where people accept others for what they are and not try to change them. — Guy Kawasaki

I have four kids in a private school who have not yet entered college. Their tuition is what keeps me motivated. Life is simple sometimes. — Guy Kawasaki

There are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what someone else eats, they cannot eat. Bakers do not believe that the world is a zero-sum game because they can bake more and bigger pies. — Guy Kawasaki

Enchantment is the purest form of sales. Enchantment is all about changing people's hearts, minds and actions because you provide them a vision or a way to do things better. The difference between enchantment and simple sales is that with enchantment you have the other person's best interests at heart, too. — Guy Kawasaki

When you've worked hard and done well and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. — Guy Kawasaki

Just do what's right for the customer, and you'll be okay. — Guy Kawasaki

Revolutionary leaders have to care more about what they think of themselves than what the world thinks of them. — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. MARK TWAIN — Guy Kawasaki

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing. — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

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

As communicators and marketers, people are so accustomed to thinking from the 'top down.' Finding the great analyst or the famous journalist who will endorse what you do and tell the rest of the world to go and buy your product. — Guy Kawasaki

If you just enchanted one person per day, you would make a big dent in the universe. — Guy Kawasaki

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are." - Halford E. Luccock — Guy Kawasaki

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing. — Guy Kawasaki

You know you're ready to write a book when you have a feeling that you should do it, no matter what anybody says. It's like falling in love or starting a company. When you're still wondering if you should get married or you're still wondering whether you should start a company that might be not the right person or the right idea. And writing is the same way. When you've locked on to the topic, you'll just write it. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what you eat, someone else cannot eat, so they eat as much as they can. Bakers think that the world is not a zero-sum game - they can just bake more and bigger pies. Everyone can eat more. People trust bakers and not eaters. — Guy Kawasaki

I don't "need" the rush to be happy. I'd be perfectly happy without the attention and action. — Guy Kawasaki

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules. — Guy Kawasaki

We would be thrilled to have you as a guest on our show, EntrepreneurOnFire, a top ranked Business, averaging over 1 million unique listens each month in over 145 countries. We understand you have a busy schedule, and that's why we've developed an efficient, 30-minute audio interview over Skype. We have an awesome lineup thus far, including Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Eric Ries, and Tim Ferriss... just to name a few. — John Lee Dumas

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

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! — Guy Kawasaki

You have to sit by the side of a river a very long time before a roast duck will fly into your mouth. — Guy Kawasaki

My recommendation for SEO is very simple. It's Write Good Stuff. In my mind, Google is in the business of finding good stuff. It has thousands of the smartest people in the world, spending billions of dollars to find the good stuff. All you have to do is write the good stuff; you don't need to trick it. — Guy Kawasaki

The higher you go in a company, the less oxygen there is, so supporting
intelligent life becomes difficult. — Guy Kawasaki

Just be nice, take genuine interest in the people you meet, and keep in touch with people you like. This will create a group of people who are invested in helping you because they know you and appreciate you. — Guy Kawasaki

I think a lot of the logic of Google+ is much better in terms of notification of messages to you, in terms of how you post. One very obvious feature is that with Google+, after you post something, you can edit it forever. That is true of both posts and comments. I edit almost every post I make and almost every comment I make. — Guy Kawasaki

My mother wanted me to take piano lessons, but I never wanted to, because that is something you have to learn, like you have to learn to type, and to me, that has nothing to do with music. — Ryo Kawasaki

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

There is no shortcut to awesome. Zoe Winters — Guy Kawasaki

I don't think Steve Jobs nauseated people when talking about how great Apple stuff was. The reason why he didn't nauseate people is because it was true. The start of all great marketing is to have a great product. — Guy Kawasaki

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

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. — Guy Kawasaki

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff. — Guy Kawasaki

It doesn't matter whether the Dow is 5000 or 50,000. If you're an entrepreneur, there is no bad time to start a company. — Guy Kawasaki

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

To the extent that we are trapped by the overvaluing, idealizing tendency, we are not free fully to celebrate the limited but real goods of creation. Idolatry by definition is not an accurate assessment of creaturely goods, but an overvaluing of them so as to miss the richness of their actual, limited values. If I worship my tennis trophies, my Mondrian, my family tree, my Kawasaki, or my bank account, then I do not really receive those goods for what they actually are - limited, historical, and finite - goods which are vulnerable to being taken away by time and death. When I pretend that a value is something more than it is, ironically I value it less appropriately than it deserves. Biblical psychology invites us to relate ourselves absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. — Thomas C. Oden

The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this "feeding the Content Monster." There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation. — Guy Kawasaki

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. — Guy Kawasaki

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

From the outside looking in, trying to decipher Google's search algorithms is like reading tea leaves in a toilet bowl ... as it's flushing. With the lights off. — Guy Kawasaki

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