Guy Kawasaki Quotations | Page 2

To say that Windows 95 is just like the Mac is like finding a potato in the shape of Jesus and thinking you have witnessed the second coming

Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?

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.

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.

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

Writing a book is as different from digital curation as night and day. Digital curation is a series of split-second decisions: good/no good. It can even be done algorithmically. Writing is process-intensive activity.

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

"Patents make our product defensible." The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, "We have filed patents for what we are doing." Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, "I am clueless."

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.

You really can't spend money on socail media unless you really try. Socia media is really more about effort than expense.

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.

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

The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I've never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.

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?

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!

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

Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

"(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010." Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.

The Future belongs to those who can spread ideas.

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.

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.

The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.

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.

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

"No one is doing what we're doing." This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.

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

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

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Evangelism is selling a dream.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sales fixes everything.

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.

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.

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

The essence of evangelism is to passionately show people how you can make history together.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.

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.

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment.

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.

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

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

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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

Klout and various measurements of influence are fun. I love to see where I score on them, but there's a computer algorithm behind the calculation. If there's an algorithm, it can be gamed. Even if it's not gameable, you have to take a leap of faith that the number of followers, retweets, mentions, whatever really mean something.

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.

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

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

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

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

Hockey is the only thing that I'm not good at that I love.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies.

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.

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

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

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

I would consider...Google Plus a push technology. It's closer to Twitter than to Facebook.

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

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.

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

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

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.