Guy kawasaki quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

Luck favors the people who are willing to grind it out.

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

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.

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.

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."

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

Not many people agree with what I do.

Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies.

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.

Revolutionary products don't fail because they are shipped too early. They fail because they aren't revised fast enough.

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

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

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

Greatness is won, not awarded.

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.

If achieving success were easy, more people would do it.

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.

Skillful pitching... is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of raising capital. More important are the realities of your organization: Are you building something meaningful, long lasting, and valuable to society?

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

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

At the end of my life, I want to say that I made the world a better place because I raised good children, loved my wife, and empowered entrepreneurs. If I do these things, then I can rest knowing that I made the world a better place.

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.

There is only one Steve Jobs, but if you want a shot at being the next Steve Jobs, learn to communicate using stories, demos, and pictures.

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

Companies should always want to delight their customers.

Money is not the sole or most powerful motivation for many people. A higher and tougher test is to look back and see how you've made the world a better place.

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.

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

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.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.

The record of what you do is forever recoverable because of Google. The lofty upside and scary downside makes reciprocity more important than ever. This is all good because it makes people think more before they do something that reduces their trustworthiness.

Want to change the world? Upset the status quo? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to make people dream the same dream that you do.

Original visions are often wrong. Companies have to morph as they learn what customers don't want.

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.

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.

If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society's heroes.

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.

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

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. Let Google do its job and you do your job.

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.

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.

While we're living, we need to get over ourselves and accept others if we want to enchant people.

I've always wanted to be a professional golfer. So what if you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?

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?

In giving presentations, use the 10/20/30 rule....use only 10 slides, take 20 minutes maximum, and use at least 30-point fonts.

Don't get stubborn, flow with the go. The key is to be open to unintended success. Some companies just can't take yes for an answer.

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.

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

It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.

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.

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

I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity.

There are two types of people on social media: people who want more followers, and liars.

Accept diversity and don't take any crap.

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

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.

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.

Better to fail at doing the right thing than to succeed at doing the wrong thing.

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

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

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

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.

Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they're the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don't take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings.

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

Evangelism is selling a dream.

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.

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

Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.

Sales fixes everything.

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.

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

The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people’s lives.

I want to know which idea you're going to kill yourself trying to make successful, not which ideas have crossed your idle mind.

Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.

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

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

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

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

Enchantment is the purest form of sales

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

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

If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don't have a business.

If you make meaning, you'll make money.

Everyone is passionate about something. It's your job to find out what it is.

Every person has the ability to improve the life of someone else.

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.

Great companies start because the founders want to change the world... not make a fast buck.

The real question is who will innovate.

Don't ask people to do something you wouldn't.

It's easy to say that entrepreneurs will create jobs and big companies will create unemployment, but this is simplistic. The real question is who will innovate.

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.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

One must understand what people are thinking, feeling and believing in order to enchant them.

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.

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.

When you're a good person, good things happen to you. You shouldn't be a good person with the expectation of therefore deserving good things, but in its purest form, I believe when you do good, good comes back to you.

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.

Provide good content and you’ll earn the right to promote your product.

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.

Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people.

Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans.

The Future belongs to those who can spread ideas.

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.

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

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.

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

Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people who want to alter the future.

Happiness is temporary and fleeting. ... Joy is the right goal.

Doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship.

Customers can tell you how to evolve a product, but they can't show you how to make a leap.

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.

• 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.

Arguably, in business books, I don't think there's much that has never been said before.