Guy Kawasaki Quotes

Enchantment is the purest form of sales

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 best reason to start an organization is to make meaning;

to create a product or service to make the world a better place.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.

Remember that nobodies are the new somebodies.

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

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.

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.

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.

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.

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

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

The hardest thing about getting started, is getting started.

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.

I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most of my life is over. I am going to enjoy my family and friends before any of us depart this earth. I'll never start another company. I'll never work long hours again. At this point in my life, I only answer to God, my wife, and my kids. Everything else is secondary - especially the expectations of strangers.

Evangelism is selling a dream.

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

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

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.

The real question is who will innovate.

• 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.

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.

Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress.

I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.

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.

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.