The Jordan Harbinger Show - 190: Guy Kawasaki | Life Lessons from a Wise Guy

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) is the chief evangelist of Canva, was once the chief evangelist for Apple, and is the author of many paperbound books -- his latest is Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life. What We Discuss with Guy Kawasaki: How to focus on using the success of others as fuel for motivation rather than poison for envy. How we can embrace the unknown when we're looking at new ideas for our business or career. Why Guy believes it's better to be lucky than smart. What we can and should -- and should not -- emulate from visionary leaders like Steve Jobs. What Guy means when he says the key to career success is to get high and to the right -- even though we're in California, it's not what you might think! And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/190 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Find out how 22-year-old Nick Santonastasso inspires Self-Made Man Mike Dillard by listening to his podcast here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Start your free trial today. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Before there was anything like social media, influencers actually had to do, be, or create something. Today's guest, Guy Kawasaki, has been in the game since the 80s, working at Apple and other tech unicorns from the early days. He's missed just as many opportunities as he's won, and on this episode, we'll focus on how we can use other successes as motivation, instead of diving into toxic envy. We'll also discuss how we can embrace the unknown when we're looking at new ideas for our business or our career.

and why many businesses and industries in the past have failed to do so, and the consequences thereof, and why, as Guy says, it's better to be lucky than smart. We'll find out if there's a strategy for that. And of course, we'll talk about what we can and should, and more importantly, what we should not be emulating from visionary leaders like Steve Jobs. Right from the mouth of someone who's spent years working closely with Steve Jobs, guy brings decades of wisdom to the table here. And I'm grateful we had a chance to sit down and get some of that for you all today

here on the show. I'm able to co-create with great people like Guy Kawasaki because my network is nothing short of stellar and I've put tons of time and tons years and years of work into it. I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for free. You don't have to put your credit card number in or anything to get it. I made a free course for you at six minute networking and you can go get that Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's free. I want you to learn it. It'll change your life and then you'll come back for more, hopefully a super fan. That's what we're looking for here. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. All right, here's Guy Kawasaki. How many people book interviews with you and then tell you how much they loved rich dad, poor dad?

Interviewers, very few. People, many. Just people you run into at conferences? Yeah, that makes sense. That's sort of not the first time that you've been mistaken for a different Asian guy. No. I thought it was really funny that you started the book off being more or less pretty humble about the fact that you got mistaken for Jackie Chan by a group of girls in a convertible. Well, that was a very funny moment. I was very very, very, very. funny moment, actually. I feel like you're riding high at that time. Can you tell us that story? I think it's a funny way to begin.

At that point, I had a portion of 9-11, and I was stopped at a light at El Camino, look over. It was a car with four teenage girls, giggling, smiling, making eye contact. Girl in the front seat says, you know,

rode on your window. I rode on my window, and she sticks her head out and says, are you Jackie Chan? Oh, my God. It was very funny. And since that it's been my goal that some teenage girl asked Jackie Chan as he's sitting in his Bentley in Hong Kong or wherever he lives, you know, are you Guy Kawasaki? It's funny because, of course, at that point, you're like the height of, when was this, the height of tech evangelism, as we know?

It was the dot-com days. Yeah. I had just started garage.com, you know, post Apple. I had already written books, already given hundreds of speeches. So I thought, ah, you know, I've arrived. Yeah, I'm in my car, like, those women know who I am. Right. I've arrived as Jackie Chan's clone.

Yeah. Wrong ethnicity and a lot of other things that are wrong with that. But hey, cool. I know. He's about the same age. Yeah. I'm surprised you haven't run into him and been able to tell him this story at some point. I've never met him.

Yeah. Only matter of time. I have a picture in the book of he and I. But that's because I was in the Beijing, Madam Tussauds. Oh, I was going to say where you're at Wax Museum? House of Wax? Yeah. Yeah.

That was as close to Jackie Chan as I've ever got. That's pretty funny. Yeah. So you have a picture with him except he wasn't there. Yeah, exactly. Got it. Yeah. I know that you're Japanese American from Hawaii, and I know that that's a culture,

Japanese or Asian in general, that places a high value on education, sometimes to that point of obsession. Obsession and driving people crazy. And I was wondering what you think about that, having raised kids in Silicon Valley, in sort of today's economy. like, is it still all about that traditional education? Because there's a lot of arguments on both sides. I can't build the case that you don't want an education.

Of course. Yeah. I disagree with the theory of telling high school students you don't need a college education. You should just start a company. Yeah. I don't think that's, listen, you know, maybe that worked for Steve Jobs, but that doesn't work for most people. And you need four more years.

You need a broad base of, knowledge to prepare you for life. So I wouldn't go that path. But do you need a 4.2 and a 1600, and do you need to have taken calculus in your freshman year? Not clear to me. That matters. I don't use a lot of calculus every day in my life.

No, yeah. About you, but I don't. No, I don't. I deliberately avoided it. I became a lawyer to avoid math. Yeah. And now I interview and I let my wife do all the accounting. Okay.

She's good at it. She probably doesn't need calculus, you know. Probably not. No. 100,000 comes in and 50,000 goes on. You net 50, right? Right, yeah. More or less, anything more complex, we're hiring that out to somebody who knows what they're doing. That's right. I think that that's important to know because right now there is this trend in like the Instagram entrepreneur influencer sphere, which is getting a lot of attention. And those are the folks that say, quit now, go all in. You don't need this. This is the old generation talking. quit what?

School? Or your job or whatever it is. That's insane. I agree. It's insane. I don't know how many Instagram influence there are, but... Too many. The answer is too many.

But they're not that many, right? They're not tens of thousands of them. So that, I think, is the equivalent of telling a kid quit school to become a professional baseball, hockey, soccer, I mean, you name it, right, player. Yes, there is LeBron James. There is Wayne Gradsky. There is, you know, those kind of people. But the reason why they're famous is because they're so rare,

not because everybody achieves that stature. So just to play professional sports, you're in the top, you know, 0.01%, right? And there's, I don't know, let's say hockey, there's, I don't 2,000 professional hockey players. But there's only 20 on the all-star team, right? And even the ones on the all-star team, once they retire, what do they do? Yeah, I don't know. They become a coach.

Start hockey camps. They do hockey camps, celebrity appearances, coaching. And that's for 20 out of the thousand, and the thousand is a thousand out of, I don't know, a million. I mean, the odds are not good, right? And if you went to Facebook or Google or Apple, then they have, I don't know, 50, 100,000 employees each all making good money, good benefits, you know, riding buses for free with Wi-Fi, eating free food. Doesn't sound so bad. Yeah, you know, yeah, go ahead. Go for the dream. But I'm telling you, man.

It's a lot more people who work at Google than the NFL. NHL and NBA combined. Yeah, good point. And I think it's important to say that playing the odds in this way or playing to the numbers is a good strategy. Because right now there's this narrative out there that playing to the numbers or getting a job, even if it's for a company that you enjoy doing, is somehow like a suckers play and you're a chump if you do this. And people then will in the same interview with that same person espousing that theory, they'll say, what would you do if you could start over. And my answer is almost exclusively, I would go be the assistant to somebody who works for one of these companies, especially if they're an executive, and learn all of the things

that make them successful, because there are a lot more successful executives that are doing big things that are helping improve the world in some way than there is this one entrepreneur. Then there are Mark Zuckerberg's founders. That's definitely a long ball game. Yeah. And I also, I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, I don't think, I don't think, think that they had this plan to become Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Walt Disney, Elon Musk. I think that one thing led to another that, you know, my buddy in my garage wanted to build a personal computer, so we built one and come to find out there's a lot of people in the, you know, the homebrew club who wants to buy them. So we sold 50 of them and then and then four decades later, it's a

trillion dollar company. Right. Well, that's, that's a great story. But I don't know if they planned it, okay, we'll be a trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Right now we just need to build motherboards for Apple one. In a garage. Stretch, yeah. And that is the story of Apple. And I think that that's important. I want to get into some of that a little bit later as well because I think there's a mythology,

especially really popular right now in Silicon Valley. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is you're exactly the right person to say, this is a mythology, emphasis on the myth part because you've been around for a real time. free. I mean, obviously Apple exists. It exists, but it's not necessarily a replicable strategy to be like, where the next apple. No, I don't think that I surf a lot. And, you know, every once in a while, I turn around, I don't even paddle and I catch a wave. It's not because of skill. Okay, it just happens, right? But that's not a strategy to surf. My favorite saying is you have to wait by the side of a river a long time before a roast duck will fly into your mouth.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that a Chinese proverb or something like that? Must be because it's a Peking duck. Yeah, there you go. That's right. Although Peking duck was probably invented in Sacramento or something. Yeah, we'll have to check on that. I'm going to have to look that up after the show. Like Caesar salad was not invented in Rome.

No, I would imagine not. The croutons alone would be very hard to come by in ancient times. I know you're really big on when you make it big, provide opportunities to other people to come up. That's something that you talk a lot about in the book. And I think that a lot of folks say that. They say, send the elevator back down. I know that you've been doing this for a long time.

Why is this important to you? Well, one is karma. But listen, I don't want to position myself as some kind of saint where I'm, you know, giving back everything I made. And I'm like mentoring 50 or 100 kids at a time. I'm not. Okay. I'm not mentoring.

I'm not giving everything I got either. So it's not necessarily a numbers game. It's not how much you gave back or how many people you mentored. It's more, I think, a philosophy. The difference between Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and probably, you know, at an extreme, some homeless person or some immigrant who's arriving at the, you know, in El Paso right now with nothing, it's not that much, right? It's kind of good to be lucky sometimes.

And if one phone call away or one, you know, there's so many things that had to go right. The difference between people is not that great. You mean just in our raw material? No, I mean in terms of, you know, listen, no question that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Elon Musk are smarter. I mean, they are.

Yeah. I mean, but Elon Musk without the right breaks, Steve Jobs without the right breaks, would just be another guy. And I think it's important to remember that, you know, some people win the lottery. That doesn't mean they're any more skilled. Right.

So it's a humbling thing that, as they say, you know, they're for the grace of God go I. Yeah, it's so true. Did you have an experience when you were younger, where somebody nudged you 10 degrees to the left or to the right, and that changed the 2020-hundred? I would say more than 10 degrees. Okay.

Well, this elementary school teacher told my parents to get me out of the public school system in Hawaii and put me in the private school system because I had too much potential. So that was a humongous change, right? When I graduated from high school, the choices really came down to University of Hawaii, Stanford, and Occidental. And I wanted to go to Occidental because I could have played football there. My father told me, you know, I'm not spending all this money for you to go play football. Sure.

You know, what? You're not playing in the NFL. Even if you were playing in the NFL, we'd go back to our previous discussion. There's only, you know, a thousand people in the NFL. So he said, you're going to Stanford or University of Hawaii. And I, that was an easy choice. So I picked Stanford. Had I not gone to Stanford?

Why didn't you want to go to Hawaii, the University of Hawaii? I wanted to get away. Hawaii was too small. I wanted to see the rest of the world. And so, you know, had I gone to Oxy, well, I could have been president maybe. I'd have been, before Barack Obama went to Oxy. Or maybe I would have met him. I would have been vice president.

Sure, we know. Although I'm much older than he is. But anyway, so that was, you know, another decision. And at Stanford, I met a guy named Mike Boych. We became fast friends and roommates. And eventually he hired me into Apple. So if I had become friends with someone else, Yeah, so it's funny to look at this because it's like luck but then focus decisions that put,

increase your surface area for luck. Increase the surface area. And, you know, the secret, I'm not saying that your life strategy should be get lucky. Right. Because that's not actionable. Right. But I think an actionable strategy is, you know, an opportunity presents itself, taking and run with it and work your ass off.

none of those things would have really panned out to produce what I am today sheerly by luck. I may have been lucky that I had that teacher, that I had that roommate, that I had that father, but then I made the most of it afterwards. It wasn't just I was born Donald Trump Jr. I mean, I had to do something. Sure, of course, yeah, and I'm not trying to cheapen that. I'm just trying to give...

I don't take a fair store. Good, good, I'm just trying to give people action. stuff here because I think a lot of people look at this as a black and white situation where some people are lucky, they are not, and therefore whatever they want to do is more or less impossible. I would make the case that by definition, if you're listening to this, in the scope of humanity, you're very lucky. I'm very lucky, but people who are listening to this, by definition, they're very lucky. They're not in a caravan trying to get across seeking asylum. So it's all relative, I think. Yeah, of course. That's for sure true, although it is easy to compare yourself to other people. In fact, you've been around a lot of success in Silicon Valley. I mean, you worked with Steve Jobs, you worked with all these very successful companies. You had the CEO job of Yahoo, like right here, and then you kind of like sent it back to the chef.

Right. Another stupid mistake, yeah. But it's really easy to look at that and then compare upward and say, well, you know, I could have had this, I could have had this, but I don't, or I'm not lucky enough to have had that. You, on the other hand, seem to be using other people's successes as motivation. Don't get me wrong. I'm human, right? So there's, I think about, God, guy, you were so freaking stupid. Why did you quit Apple once? Why did you quit Apple twice? Why did you turn Steve Jobs down when he asked you to return the third time? You know, why did you turn down Michael Moritz when he said, would you like to interview for the CEO position of Yahoo? When you make epic decisions of that magnitude, you know, we're talking, well, those five decisions, $2 billion maybe, I mean,

I don't think anybody would not think about those decisions every once in a while. But having said that, I mean, you know, I'm healthy. I'm on wife 1.0. I have four kids. One point out. There are many times that I'm surfing with my four kids. So, you know, how many fathers can say they surf with their four kids or do anything with their four kids? And, you know, I've outlived Steve Jobs.

I mean, really, it depends on how you look at it. Do you feel like you would have had to have made a choice between having four kids that you're close to and being the CEO of Yahoo, among other things? Well, I probably would have retired. Yeah. I probably would have retired. Having said that, you know, those paths, I probably would have become an asshole. Yeah? Or more of an asshole than I think.

Yeah. Why do you think that? Because money corrupts people. You know, you start believing your own bullshit, right? And you start believing that you're indispensable, that you deserve it. No one else could do this. You gain a sense of entitlement, you know, all that kind of stuff. I abhorred this.

Yeah. How do you keep that from, I assume you look at other folks who've been in those positions that you think, okay, I could have had that. How do you stop ruminating on that or like turning that into time? You don't. You don't. I don't spend two hours a day wondering what would happen if I had stated that. On the other hand, I cannot tell you that it never crosses my mind because it does.

And you left Apple in the last time, when was that? I left it. I leave every 10 years. I left in 87 and 97. Okay. I missed 2007 and 17. I left twice. The bursts, yeah, and Apple.

You have... It seems like the longer I'm away from Apple, the better Apple does. I don't know if that's correlation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, I guess we'll never know. We'll never know. Yeah.

Oh, if I go back and it tanks, then we'll know. That's right. That's right. You can always go back. You can see if Tim Coco have you. I do think you're ahead of the curve in terms of quitting law school. You quit after a week. So that was probably good foresight. Yeah? Yeah. Did you have a law degree, right? I do. Yeah. You took the bar. You did the whole thing? Did the bar? Yeah. Did you practice law now? Not anymore. No. How long did you practice? Like a year and a half? Not even. Well, so you're smart, too. You didn't take you 20 years to figure that. No, no, yeah. I didn't have like a whole career, retire, then start this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that I'm quick off the ball, but mostly that was like the economy hitting and then me going, I don't really want to work that hard to find another job that I don't like.

What kind of law? Financial transactions is what I was doing. So I was working on Wall Street doing like mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. So it was, yeah, fun is right. That's denting the universe. Yeah, exactly. That's really denting the universe. So I'd already had this show started, and I was doing radio and I was like, you know, this is more fun. I'm not making that much money doing it at the time. But I thought, eventually I'll be able to figure this out. And that's what happened. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Guy Kawasaki.

We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. dot com slash subscribe subscribing to the show is absolutely free it just means you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player as they are released so you don't miss a single thing from the show and now back to our show with guy kawasaki one of the top concepts from the book as well is learn

to embrace the unknown that's a common refrain in silicon valley but you have this ice cutter example and i'd love it if you would go into that sure sure sure and how we can practice so uh ice 1.0 was ice harvesting winter frozen lake frozen pond cut blocks of ice Next, ice 2.0 was ice factory. You freeze water centrally. Much better than ice harvester because you can freeze water anytime, any place. Next curve is refrigerator. Now you don't have a factory delivering ice to you.

You have your own personal ice factory, a PC, a personal chiller. And the lesson there is that none of the ice harvesters became factories and none of the factories became refrigerator companies. because most organizations define themselves in terms of what they already do. So if you're in the business of harvesting ice, you don't embrace factory. If you're in the business of freezing water centrally, you don't build the refrigerator to empower everybody to freeze water. And so that's why companies die.

So, you know, I could make the case that Kodak was in the business or is in the business, if you consider it still alive, of preserving memories. So that's the business they're in. Now, I think what they did is they defined their business as we're in the chemicals business. We make chemicals that we put on plastic film. People expose that film to light. Then we expose more chemicals to it. And then it comes out a print or a slide or a negative, right?

So if you define yourself as being in the chemicals business, then guess what? You don't embrace digital photography. And the triple irony of this is that Kodak in 19. In 1975, an engineer there invented digital photography. Really? Yes. Now, can you imagine that said, that engineer going to his boss saying, I have figured out a way that people don't have to buy film anymore.

You're fired. Exactly. Right. Right. And, you know, that's the ice harvesting business shows that. I think digital photography shows that. most industries show that. I'm imagining somebody who invents a refrigerator

to transport the ice harvested out of the lake to the place where they store it and then put it in another bigger refrigerator. And nobody goes, what if we just take water coming out of the ground and put it in this refrigerator and turn the, you know, crank up the ability to... And then they're like, no, then what are we going to do

with all this harvesting infrastructure that we have? We have boats, we have whole teams and trucks and transportation. And we're an infrastructure company. Harvesting company. We're not a make ice company. Yeah. We're not a... Actually, I would make the case that a refrigerator company is a convenience company, right?

So you make it so that you can store food longer, hygienically, et cetera, et cetera. So you're increasing the convenience of your customer. You're in the convenience business. And it was more convenient for you to harvest ice for somebody. It was more convenient for you to freeze water and ship it to people. It was more convenient to make a refrigerator. So they're in the convenience business. This is not the harvesting factory or refrigerator business.

Right, because if you think about the business in those terms, if you're in the convenience business, you think what's more convenient than us bringing ice to everyone's house from our refrigerated trucks? And the answer is having them be able to do it at home or at least keep it for the whole month in their own refrigerator. Then it's like really obvious what business you're in. And then you switch to manufacturing small home refrigerators and stuff. of focusing on delivery infrastructure.

And then, I suppose at some point you can say, well, we're in the convenience business, so why doesn't the refrigerator recognize that you're out of eggs and send a message to Amazon to deliver eggs, right? So there's... Right, you can go down this rabbit hole. You can keep going. Amazon's a great example of this because for years and years, everyone was like, this is the book company.

Right. And they just happen to sell these books online. This is the... Or if you're a really big thinker, this is the... online book company. Meanwhile, of course, the plan, or at least if we look 20-20 hindsight, but I'm pretty sure we're confident on this now. The plan was get people used to buying things online, like books, sell them everything, and then eventually sell them everything once we prove the concept out. Books aren't fragile, they don't spoil, they're not.

No sizes. Right. There's not, there's only a certain limited number of sizes, right? They don't have to be packaged in foam. So once we prove that concept out, then it became really clear. That would be interesting to ask Jeff Bezos, you know. I'm curious. 20 years ago, did you just think you're going to sell books and CDs or did you have this 20-year plan to be selling everything? Right. I don't know. Netflix, they used to send DVDs to your house.

You couldn't stream anything. The rapper, right? Right. Yeah. And I remember a friend of mine actually asked one of the founders and said, wow, was the plan always to stream? And he goes, the name is Netflix, man. It was like a really. Net as an internet?

Yeah. Is it like, hey, this was, the idea isn't you order it on the internet, we mail it to you. The idea is eventually bandwidth is going to catch up, eventually licensing rights are going to catch up and we'll be able to do this. I would be interested to know if that's really. I'm curious too if that was just him going, of course I'm telling that story now. For the shareholders sake, yes, we always plan this. Well, to the victor goes the right to reinvent the story. Right, rewrite the history.

Yeah. You have to ask the question, why isn't blockbuster Netflix? Because Blockbuster defined themselves as we're in the retail store, brick and mortar, people come and look at our vast selection of DVDs and rent them, right? But they're really in the entertainment business. So Netflix is in the entertainment business that it used to provide entertainment via DVDs and mailers. It's streaming other people's movies, right? Sony, you know, 20th century Fox.

But now Netflix produces its own series. Truly. Yeah, so they really have embraces. I didn't even think about that. They realize they're in the

entertainment business, not the streaming movie business. Not the distribution business. Right. The distribution business, right. So there go, well, what's to stop us from making our own stuff,

which is going to then eventually hopefully force these studios to license things cheaper? Because right now on Netflix, you can't see the latest stuff because licensing it would be super, super expensive. So Netflix makes their own. And I think that's going to level the plane. Well, we'll see. Well, the interesting thing is arguably some of the Netflix stuff is better

than some of the stuff done by the quote experts in video. Of course. Yeah. If you ask who wants to go see, and this is HBO, but if you ask who wants to go see Game of Thrones, there's going to be a large number of people that would go see that. If it was only released in theaters, there would be a large number of people that would go do that too. So they're starting to realize there's a huge market and giving people what they want while they're sitting at home. So if I were in the movie business right now, movie theater business, I would be worried about what my next move might be. I would be worried too, yeah. And, you know, just making bigger chairs where you can reserve a specific seat while good. Because there's still a theater experience. They should be

redefining it too, right? They're in the entertainment business. Yeah. Yeah, they've got to figure this out. If they've already got these movies, they're already projecting these, why not make it so that they have their own streaming service or something where they're the ones who get the movies before all these other outlets do? Like, I don't know what the plan is. If I were in the movie business, or if I were in the theater business, I would be looking at the market for kids watching electronic games. Oh, interesting.

So like e-sports. Hey, we've got a big screen. We've got a small theater that holds a few hundred kids every Saturday. A limited jolt. Right. Like a limited popcorn. Right. Good point.

Come watch, you know. We're streaming the world championship of like, I don't know, Fortnite. Fortnite, yeah. Yeah, Fortnite Super Bowl. We're streaming it. That's actually a really good idea as well. You can have it. Yeah, I'm good.

I don't, but it's like McDonald's when they realized they were in the real estate business. Well, yeah. It's just like, okay, we're not just serving hamburgers. We're investing in all this property. Like, there's a whole bunch here, and it is really easy to get lost in it. And I'm going through this right now where I'm like, I used to do. do a lot of self-help related shows, and I realize I'm not in the self-help industry. I'm rolling my eyes at 90% of the stuff that I see in that industry. I'm actually in the interviewing

business, which is actually a, if you zoom out from there, it's more of an entertainment thing. So it's like, okay, that really opens up what I'm able to do on the show in a way that's more enjoyable for me and has increased the audience significantly. Really? Yeah. So because you interview different kinds of people? Exactly. And also do it in a way where it's not like, I used to interview very specific kinds of people and it was more like these are gurus yeah if you will only robins and yeah those types of folks people who've written books on the on certain subjects and then i was like well wait i actually like scientists so i'll expand to scientists then well i like these other people too i'll do a one-off with somebody has a crazy story or like a performer and those episodes became popular and i

realized okay i'm in the business of educating people in an entertaining way not in the self-help industry, guru. And then I started really gravitating more towards science-based and evidence-based material, which eliminates 80 plus percent of who's in the self-help industry. Yeah, probably 99%. And so I realized, wait a minute, I don't really want to be in that industry. And now, of course, I see that it's loaded with people that are not so innocently. I would say outright fraudulent instead of just delusion. They're the people who couldn't make it as Instagram. Right. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Or they're doing that. too. And so I decided to get away from that and now just keeping the market as education and

entertainment or education or whatever you want to call it, that is a much more open platform. So now I'm even thinking like what's even bigger than that? What sort of niche can I feel that's even more interesting and bigger than that? And that has kept me sane and it's kept the audience growing. A lot of working over the last 12 years has also been luck, right? Like I started podcasting early. I focused on what I was good at, which was talking and interviewing. in a way that is critical because of my legal training and because I'm a skeptic by nature, I think. You can detect bullshit? Yeah, largely.

And I do enough research on each of the guests. Like, I read the whole book. I read their Wikipedia. I look at people's negative reviews of the book on Amazon, so I have a well-thought-out argument. We'll see. I don't want to out you on the show. Not yet. But you have before also said that you're fond of being, it's better to be lucky than smart.

What do you mean by that? Well, it's a rare moment of humility. I think that, you know, when you look at a lot of these success stories, man, being in the right place at the right time is about 90% of it. Now, it doesn't mean that you open your mouth and the roast duck flies in, but, you know, if the duck comes, you've got to chew. Right. So. At least try to catch it. Yeah.

And I, listen, if you were facilities manager for Facebook when it was Mark and she, you were. Cheryl and, you know, 20 people, and they just, you know, they needed to move from this, like, dump in Mountain View to, and so your employee number 50, your facilities manager, and Right, you know, a couple stock options. And now you're worth $200 million. Were you smart? Were you, like, looking at all the opportunities, I can go work for Hewlett-Packard, I can go work for National Semiconductor, Intel, or this other company called FaceL

look or face cook or lace hook or what the hell was a name of that? Doesn't matter, mom. I just clean up the facilities and make sure they have snacks. And they offer me this thing called options. I don't know what an option was, but they said, I said,

I signed it and then I got 10,000 options and now it's worth 50 million bucks. Better to be lucky than smart sometimes. But we can't really bank on that, right? No, you can't. That's, yeah.

But there are moments with wisdom and hindsight, I could almost make the case, you should consider the most dumbass ideas that you hear. Because I swear to God, you know, when you hear about some of these successes, at the moment you had to squeeze the trigger, I refuse to believe that most intelligent people would say, yeah, that's a good idea. You know, if you heard the pitch for Twitter, we're going to enable people to make 140 characters. text messages so people can say the line at Starbucks is long. Right, yeah. I mean, well, have you heard of email? Have you heard of text messages? Have you heard of IRC?

So why would you need Twitter? Right. Why does this even need to be communicated in the first place? Exactly. Who cares if the line at Starbucks is long, right? And then, you know, it's easy for us to say now, but YouTube. So what's the pitch? I need infinite server space, infinite bandwidth, so people can up.

upload illegal video. That's a business model. Sign me up, right? And then I know we're going to tip when people start dropping mentos into diet coax. Mom, that's the plan. Infinite space, infinite bandwidth, illegal stuff, and people dropping mentos into diet coax. That's what your son is doing right now.

We're talking about their daily life. Right. And your mom is going to say, why didn't he stay in law school? Right. Yeah. So yeah, you can't plan for that. All you can really do is sort of increase your service area. And I understand that. One bit of career advice that I love that you put in the book is getting your foot in the door. It doesn't matter where you start in a job. I'm living proof of that, man. Yeah? Tell us about that because I think a lot of people are like, I need a great job. I need to start here. I need to be a founder. I need to do this. I had to give a presentation about that yesterday. So as I look back, I can barely remember my first job. And, of course, this isn't apply to my kids. but people spend much too much time thinking and worrying about their first job.

I think they're definitely afraid of making a mistake. Well, several things. So number one, if you're in the job market today, you're probably going to have more jobs than most people. You know, the concept of working 30 years for one company is just gone. Now, nobody does that. Well, there are Apple employees who've done that. But generally speaking, you're going to switch five or ten times, right?

And there's also the concept that, well, I really need to optimize my job because, you know, I want to pick the next Google. So at two extremes, you do pick the next Google. You're either smart or lucky or both, and you pick, you know, XYZ Corp, and lo and behold, it becomes the next Google. And now you're 25 years old and you're worth 50 billion bucks. Wow. The other side is, you know, you take a job. and you think you'd absolutely optimize it. CEO went to Stanford,

Board of Directors has George Schultz, you know, former General of the U.S. Army, huge market. Everybody needs diagnostics of their blood. They want to know, you know, give me a prick of little blood. I want to know what diseases I have.

Can you imagine you could just go to Walgreens and get one drop of blood and butta-bing, batheing, you know everything, you know, what a great idea. So you go to work for Teranos

and it Terranoses, right? Turns out to be a scammy. Yeah. So I would make the case that the people who picked Terranos as this perfect place because of all the factors

that we mentioned, you know, raised $2 billion, all the good stuff, they're going to learn more from the implosion of Terranos than they would have, by going to a successful company.

They're going to learn about greed. They're going to learn about denial. They're going to learn about stupidity and arrogance and all that kind of stuff. It's a great lesson, those people. Yeah. Now, I don't think you should say, all right, so guys' strategies, find something that's going to tank. Yeah.

Good luck finding another Theranos is going to be pretty tricky. That's a hell of a tank. Yeah. Epic implosion. But my point is that the first thing, first few jobs, it's all about learning. And I also think that the rising tide floats all boats. So, you know, this facilities manager for Facebook, who is today vice president of real estate and, you know, worth 50 million bucks and all that kind of stuff, the rising tide floated that boat. But you still have to be competent. And so, you know, it would it matter if you, if you, if you,

were the first receptionist at Facebook and then come to find out you had a flare for design so you transferred from receptionist to marketing and then to graphic design and to user interface design and lo and behold you know you're the jonathan i've of facebook today right well i think a lot of people would say well i am not starting as a receptionist i am not starting as a you know intern i you know i have my degree or whatever, I'm going to find a job that makes me product manager or, you know, I want the manager word in it, whatever, right? Yeah, get a good title. Yeah, you know, I'll tell you something, man, just, just get in.

It doesn't matter where you get in. It matters what you do once you get in. Because a lot of people, I think, don't realize that you either produce or you don't. Like, getting the job is actually the easy part. Well, listen, I got my job. I tell this story in the book. I got my job at Apple because of nepotism. Good. Yeah, tell me about it. That's how you got a lot of your jobs, right?

Yeah, absolutely. My Stanford classmate hired me. And I had a psych degree. I was working in the jewelry business. I had a short stint in the software business, but nothing that would make my resume pop. It was pure nepotism. But in the sense that, you know, on day one, did it matter that I got in through nepotism? Not really because I had to produce. On the other hand, on day one, if I had a PhD in computer science, and I had to work for 10 years at Hewlett-Packard and working with developers, I had the perfect background. But I didn't love Macintosh.

It also would not have mattered. And so what I learned is it doesn't matter how you get in. It matters what you do once you get in. And, you know, if you're Steve Jobs' son or daughter, you work for Apple and you're clueless, you're, I mean, you might not be fired, but you're still clueless. Right. Yeah, it doesn't change who you are. Doesn't change who you are. And I'm huge, our show really circles largely around making, creating, and maintaining relationships. Yeah. And personal relationships and networking in a way that's like not cheesy. Well, I have some

definite advice for that. Oh yeah. I'd love to hear it. This is guys' wisdom about succeeding in an organization. So tip number one is your job is to make your boss look good. good. I think many people think their job is to make their boss look bad so they can get promoted over their boss. That never happens, okay? So what you want is you want your boss to be successful and you want to draft behind your boss. So your boss goes from manager to director to vice president to CXO, just draft behind that. And so your boss may be CXO, you'll be VP. Hallelujah. Some day you'll break away and you'll go to another company or something, but there's no case to be made that you should try to tank your boss.

because it'll make you look good. Because even if you did tank your boss, no one's going to trust you because you're the guy who tanked your boss, right? So that would be advice number one. Advice number two is always default to yes. You should always be thinking, how can I help people, whether it's your boss or not? Because you want to be the person that is the go-to person.

Now, there are going to be times where I am actually recommending that, you know, somebody says, well, can you do this or can you do that? I would be harsh to say that I'm telling you to lie, but I'm saying just say yes. Say yes and figure it out because no is an instant stop, right? There's no going from no. But yes, you say yes, and you can come back and say, well, I can't quite do that, but I can do this, all right? Wouldn't we be potentially taking advantage of somebody if we tell a client we can do something and we can't? Yes. I mean, we want a real world. device here, right? Yeah, sure. Okay. So are you telling me, like, if a client came to you and said,

you know, I understand you talk about personal security and, you know, all that kind of stuff, but we're also having a motivational problem here. So can you help us to motivate some of our employees? Would you say yes or you say, no, that's not my expertise? Yeah, I would probably hire someone in my company to do that because it's not my expertise. I wouldn't just make it out. But you wouldn't say no. Depends. If they said we're looking at, we want to revamp our kitchen cooking, for our catering, I would definitely say no. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Okay, so we have to be very careful. We don't want to mislead you. Yeah. You know, yeah. How about if your boss comes to you and says to you, I need a PowerPoint presentation? Can you help me make a PowerPoint presentation? And, you know,

you're the last person in the world who's never used PowerPoint or never built a presentation. I think you say, I think I'm up to that challenge. Yeah, I think you say yes. Now, you know, if your boss comes to you and says, well, can you perform, you know, brain surgery on it? You probably say no. Of course. So it depends on the risk. It depends on the risk.

It depends on the risk. It depends on how far outside. Like, look, if somebody says, can you give a talk on a different topic you've never spoken on, sure, I give talks all the time. I can figure this out. Right. If someone says, change my supply chain, I'm not going to try to figure that out. That's fraudulent. So there is a line, yes.

Okay. But I think generally speaking, you should default the yes. I mean, you know, figure it out. Yeah, to give yourself. opportunities. A lot of people are emulating, speaking of Theranos, right? A lot of people are emulating Steve Jobs qualities or trying to, right? They'll wear a black turtleneck. They'll be an a hole. I'm on a black turtleneck. Yeah, see? Case in point. But Elizabeth Holmes is the first person that comes to mind when I think about this, right? She literally just wanted to be female Steve Jobs and did a lot of the negative things that people complain about. Well, that's because people cannot separate correlation and causation. Right. Right. So, so Steve Jobs, Black Turtleneck, Levi's jeans, new balance shoes, Mercedes, always black, never registers it because he didn't like license plates, drives in the carpool lane by himself, parks in the handicapped slot, rips people in public. Those are all facts.

Yeah, okay? Okay. But the fact is that if you went into Steve Jobs emulation mode, bought the new balance, bought the jeans, bought the black turtleneck, started ripping people, bought a Mercedes, drove in the carpool lane, parked in the handicaps lot. You would not be Steve Jobs. You would just be an asshole. And so, you know, people need to be able to separate causation from correlation.

So those things correlate with Steve Jobs, but they didn't cause Steve Jobs. They didn't cause him to be successful. He could foretell the future or invent the future. There's no question. So the hard part of Steve Jobs emulation is the ability to invent the future or to predict the future. That people will want a graphic user interface. People will want a device that holds all the songs. People will want a store where they just sell one product with people who love the product and understand it.

What a concept. That's the hard part. The easy part is buying the jeans and the blackback turtleneck and the new balance and the Mercedes. And so people should not confuse correlation with causation. And I see this all the time when people come to Silicon Valley and they visit Google and they visit Apple and they visit Facebook. And, you know, I just imagine it. Okay, so now they're flying home and they're going to tell their bosses and their shareholders

and their employees, okay, so we're going to be more innovative. I just came back from Silicon Valley. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to buy pool tables and ping pong tables. We're going to have an outdoor volleyball court. We're going to have a fitness center. We're going to have free food in the cafeteria. We're going to have buses with Wi-Fi, pick you up. We're going to have people come to us and do our dental work while we sit at our desks.

We're going to have massage therapists. And then we're going to be like Facebook and Google. No, you're not. You're just going to have employees with really great tea, well-tuned cars. Right. We're fat. And so. So halfway to.

halfway to Silicon Valley company's honest. Well, the reason why Google is great is because of engineering. And engineers, I think, neglect their lives. So you need to provide all the services, or they literally never would fix their cars or brush your teeth or whatever. And then they became some of an arms race that people realize, wow, we need engineers. Right.

To retain talent, they have to have all these. You have to do that, right? But Google didn't become great, and Apple didn't become great, and Facebook didn't become great, because it had free food. Now, the McIntosh Division, this is in 1980, we had unlimited supplies

of soda and Odwala. And just to show you how old I am, we thought that was freaking huge, you know, we don't have to pay for our soda and Odwala. And so I guess if you visited the McIntosh Division in

circa 1980s, you'd lead the McIntosh Division, you'd go home, you know, you'd go back, to your company, and you'd say, man, I went to Mac and Dodge Division. I opened up the refrigerator. It was full of soda and Odwala. And for free, you didn't have to, wasn't the honor system, wasn't deducted from your paycheck. You could drink all the soda you want. So let's do that. And we'll be like the Mac and Dodge Division. No, you won't. You just Right, of course. You'll be a shithole company. It'll be free soda.

Having worked with him for so long, do you, what do you think people should try to emulate from someone like Steve Jobs? I don't, I think emulate is the wrong word. Okay. Okay. I think the lessons of Steve Jobs are several. One is that your current customers cannot tell you how to innovate. They will tell you how to build better, faster,

cheaper. You ask an Apple 2 owner, what do you want from Apple? Better, faster, cheaper Apple 2. You ask Macintosh owner, better, faster, cheaper Macintosh. You ask an iPhone owner, better, faster, cheaper iPhone. nobody ever tells you if you are an ice harvester to create an ice factory right nobody went to an ice factory you know what you should miniaturize your ice factory so i can have one in my house i think customers are incapable of doing that and i i i'm not trying to insult customers because

well they just don't have the incentive why why i mean you know as as much as you may love a company you're not thinking about a 24 by 7 right so all you can really think about is oh so I don't know. I met this camera company and he asked me what I want from a camera company and I said bigger, faster, cheaper lenses. Well, it never occurred to me to say I want digital. I don't want a film. I mean, right? Because it's outside of your. So I think that's the major lesson of Steve Jobs. Number two lesson of Steve Jobs. He did not care about your race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation. He just didn't. You were either great or shit. That was the only two things. That was a beautiful thing, right?

So it led to harshness because no matter about your background, if you were shit, he called you out as shit. But it also meant that much more than your usual 10% of his direct reports were women. Because he didn't care if they were women. They were either great or shit. If you're great, it doesn't matter. So I think he was way ahead of his time in terms of meritocracy. Now, he had the most scary way of implicit.

implementing meritocracy, right, by intimidation. But nonetheless, I don't think anybody, for example, I never felt he picked on me because I was Japanese. I don't think any woman who worked in the McIntosh, Virginia, say, yes, Steve, he looked down on me because I was a woman. There's, I would find that inconceivable. Right. So if you do those two things, you know.

Like pure meritocracy and, you know, pure meritocracy and, you know, pure meritocracy and understanding that customers can't tell you how to truly innovate. I would say a third thing that you cannot avoid with Steve is he loved great design. Right. And so it's minimalist, it's beautiful, it's elegant. And it's not money, you know, because there are many companies. They have all the money in the world to hire their Jonathan I or whoever makes beautiful Apple designs, right? So it's not money. It's taste. And so taste is important. That design does matter.

It may not matter to everyone. But, you know, I mean, people overlook a lot of other flaws if the design is there. Well, I wouldn't put it that way, but that is fact. Yeah. But I mean, you know, Like today, you could still go to fries and buy ugly plastic laptops, right? Why is that? I mean, you know, if you were the manufacturer of ugly plastic windows laptops, wouldn't you think you would have seen it? Wow, you know, Macintosh, MacBook Airs, they're thin, they're beautiful, they're made of aluminum, they look like, you know, somebody, some Tibetan.

and monk hand tooled this thing, right? So wouldn't you think, God, and they sell like hotcakes. At 50% premium of what do we sell, maybe we should make ours beautiful. But wouldn't you think that would occur to people by now? But it doesn't. I don't know if they haven't thought of it or if they sell a higher-end model that just looks better, but has the same hardware inside and then they make their money in that. You know?

Okay, but why not revamp the whole line? I agree, of course, but I don't know. I don't run that business. Yeah. But it leads to another point. which you've mentioned in the book, which is that changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. Explain that. That's a concept that's near and dear. We're just going on the Apple Rattle here.

So the example I used in the book is that when iPhone was introduced, it was a closed system. The only way you could add functionality to an iPhone was a Safari plug-in. A year later, now there's SDKs and APIs, and now you can write any kind of app you want for an iPhone. It's 180-degree reversal. We went from closed system to open system. when it became an open system, all of a sudden we had tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and now millions of apps. And those apps added functionality and compelling reasons to buy an iPhone. And I think many companies, many CEOs would say, well, I can't admit that I was totally utterly wrong.

I mean, I said, closed system, we have to maintain a closed system. And so we told people, we'll look like fools if now we open it up. Steve Jobs did a 180. And the reason why Steve Jobs is so different from everybody is that he did a 180. And when he said the system was closed, all the experts said, that's a genius move. A year later, he opened it up and all the experts said, that's a genius move. Right. That's the Steve Jobs reality distortion.

That's right. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Right. And I think for someone like him to say, hey, we were wrong about this or that worked for the time being. because we've got to feel for how people consume apps. Turns out they want to make their own. You know, that does make a lot of sense. It is easy to get hooked on the ego factor.

I mean, you see this with Kodak. I'm sure someone there went, look, we control this whole industry. We're not going to let this digital thing take off. It's going to take a long time. Let's focus on our film business. Yeah. And that killed the whole company. Yeah.

Now, I want to respect your time, but there's one last career success tip that I really liked, which is you talk about getting high into the right. Yes. We are in California, so getting high into the right. Doesn't necessarily mean what I think a lot of people think. It's not political. Right.

Or drugs. Developing skills that are in demand and then go deep to be the best. Can you explain this? Because I think right now there's a tendency or a temptation or both for people to be like, look, I need to know a bunch of things about a bunch of things because that makes me useful. I think. So the high into the right theory is that there's a two-by-two matrix, Vertical axis is your degree of specialization, differentiation, uniqueness.

Horizontal line is, you know, the further out you are, the more valuable you are. If you're close to the zero point, then you're not valuable. So I think as a mental framework for your entire existence, you should be thinking, how can I be high and to the right, i.e., some value. You know, you're the best interviewer. But you have to be the best interviewer. You have to have this value. And it also has to be unique or differentiated.

Because if there were tens of thousands of great interviewers, that's a valuable skill, but there's too many of them. Right. Right. So what you want to do is you want to pick an area, an expertise, or whatever that is valuable, important, but also you can uniquely be in there. So when iPod first came out, it was the only system that a mere mortal could operate with the click wheel. It had unique properties like you could legally, easily, inexpensively buy the most popular song. So it was unique and valuable. Mercedes makes a smart car.

It's one of the few cars you can park perpendicular to the curb. Brightling makes a watch called the Emergency where you can unscrew a knob. it starts broadcasting an emergency signal. That watch can save your life. There's not too many watches that can save your life. Canva, the company at our workforce, online graphic design service, we have created literally hundreds of design types, presentations, covers, social media graphics. And within those hundreds of design types, there are hundreds of templates pre-done.

So anybody can be a great designer, unique and valuable. So my career advice is, you know, you've got to be unique and value. You may be the best three-minute YouTube video producer in the company. That is a unique and valuable skill. If you are unique but not valuable, you know, you own a market that doesn't exist. You're basically clueless. Right. It's like art in a lot of ways.

Not that all artists are useless or clueless. It's just that that's a market that typically, depending on the, The art, depending on the art, of course, doesn't really exist. And if you're valuable but that unique, then you'll always have to compete on price or you'll never have, you know, power in the relationship. And if you're not unique and you're not valuable, you're just a total loser. I don't know what you say. Well, you can work on it, I suppose. Yeah.

Yeah. So the goal for your listeners, I think, is to somehow position themselves as unique and valuable. I have a very special skill and that's very important. and you will always do fine if, you know, if I, you know, how would I place myself in that corner? I would place myself in that corner as I have a unique and valuable skill of seeing through the BS to help you market and evangelize a product. That's my unique and valuable skill. And I think it shouldn't dis, it shouldn't demoralize people if they feel like they're not there yet. the idea is you should be looking for get high into the right right like right now if you know

you're not unique or valuable you can work and hone these skills according to what the market means you can hone these skills you may switch skills you may say well you know everybody can write a blog post not that many people really know how to use a gopro a drone i movie and get the right song and you know not that many people know how to make a great video, but everybody knows how to write a blog post, I'm going to switch my skills. So, listen, I'm not saying that you just wake up one day and you're unique and valuable, but you need a roadmap. You need to have in your mind, so, okay, you know, I listen to this thing and I get it. I need to be unique and valuable. So how do I get there? But the realization

that you need to get there is probably 90% of the battle. Yeah, exactly. And I think that this makes it's possible for people to see the gaps in the market and sort of, what is it, skate to where the puck is going? Yeah. Yeah. That's the other half. I think it's also important that, you know, maybe you hear this and you say, you know what, I've been telling people I can do everything. I can make videos. I can make blog posts. I can make speeches. I can make pitches. I can do all that. And maybe you'll come to the realization that, well, maybe I should do one thing really well. and and you know maybe by miracle you truly can do all those things well but you may want to ratchet back your positioning and focus on one or two because it's more credible right so it's hard to imagine

it's hard to imagine someone says I'm good at video I'm good at photography I'm good at writing I'm good at editing I'm good at speaking I'm good at acting I'm good at modeling right Why don't you just say you're really good at whatever is really valuable? Right. Yeah, you see that in Los Angeles a lot. Singer, actress, model, dancer, and you just think, you know what? Social media guru. Right, social media, like you think, if you just put singer or singer-actress or just

actress and someone goes, can you sing, yeah, great, we need to sing and dance for this. Perfect. Right. You're still going to get the jobs. When you're a singer, dancer, actress, model, photographer equals mediocre. You just think, so you work at Equinox, right? Like, that's what I assume. At that point.

You're a waitress. Right, yeah. Which is fine if that's where you are now, but if you're marketing yourself as all of those things, you notice, I notice that people at the top of their field, they never, they're always very specialized. And I think that makes sense. Guy, thank you very much for sharing your time with us today. I want to be cognizant every time. It's fun. Twice.

That's right. Big thank you to Guy Kawasaki, his new book, one of his 15 books. The newest one is called Wise Guy. and this is fun to do this one in his house. It was really a pleasure to go and sit down with him. He's a super sharp guy, as you might imagine. If you want to know how I managed to create networks with people like Guy Kawasaki in it, well, I'm teaching you the systems, the tiny habits that I do every day.

It's all about that consistency. In my six-minute networking course, it's a free course. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't do it later. Start doing it now. It's six minutes a day, people. Go do it. Don't kick the can down the road. Once you need relationships, you're too late.

So dig that well before you get thirsty. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Guy Kawasaki. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One. And this episode was co-produced by Jason Proto Influencer to Philippo and Jen Harbinger.

Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen.

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