How to Build a Growth Mindset for Career Success
Guy Kawasaki, author and host of the Remarkable People podcast, shares his insights on embracing risk, developing a growth mindset, and focusing on doing remarkable work. He dives into lessons from his career, including the impact of grit, resilience, and the importance of taking many shots to find success.
In today’s episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we welcome Guy Kawasaki, renowned author, speaker, and host of the Remarkable People podcast. Guy shares insights from his latest book, Think Remarkable: Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference, and dives into the lessons he’s learned from interviewing some of the world’s most extraordinary minds.
Guy emphasizes the importance of embracing a growth mindset, taking risks, and learning from failure. He also discusses the power of planting many seeds in life and work, as well as the balance between doing remarkable things and being known for them.
🎓 In this episode, Guy discusses:
The role of grit, resilience, and vulnerability in achieving long-term success.
Why doing remarkable work should be the focus, not just appearing remarkable.
How to create a growth mindset culture that fosters continuous learning and innovation.
The story behind Apple’s “Think Different” campaign and what it means for modern organizations.
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Guy Kawasaki 0:00
You think you know exactly which seed is gonna turn into an A mighty oak, but really, you really have no idea. And so you gotta plant a lot of acorns to get a very few oaks. And I wish I could tell you that there's a way to, you know. Okay, here's 500 acorns. These are the five that will become trees. There's no way. You just got to plan 500 and you know, pray that. I think that is true with many things. You got to plant a lot of seeds.
Chris Rainey 0:42
Hey, guy, welcome to the show. How are you good? I'm
Guy Kawasaki 0:45
good. Let's roll it's nice to
Chris Rainey 0:47
see you. I feel like I've been stalking you on LinkedIn for way too long, and now we finally get to to meet you as well. I love the vibes, by the way, in your in your studio. You know, it feels very warm and homely, if that makes sense. I really appreciate it. So kind of the opposite of mine, which is kind of very corporate and cold. So I need to be, I need to bring a bit of warmth. You know, I
Guy Kawasaki 1:10
spent weeks and weeks setting up the shelf and trying the books and the lights and, you know, do I go hot or cold, or do I put curtains up? I mean, I spent weeks and weeks doing this, and then I turn on this and I see that you have eight cameras, so you have eight times the cameras that I do. So I have, can camera envy now,
Chris Rainey 1:37
definitely, definitely not a competitive advantage, really, it's more of a it's more of a hindrance, to be honest, because now I have to worry about eight cameras being in focus. Are they working properly? It actually probably caused myself more of a headache than everything else. I know that. First of all was, I know I've been following work for years, so it's really great to have you on the show. It's super excited to talk about your new book. Think remarkable nine paths to transform your life and make a difference right here on the table, actually in front of me, many of our audience are perhaps aware of you, but tell us about the inspiration about this new book. Why? Why now? Why this topic? What was it that got you excited about this.
Guy Kawasaki 2:21
I got a big advance from Wale.
Chris Rainey 2:27
Hey, please write another book. You're like, All right, just don't tell him. Just don't tell them you wrote a chance say I'm not honest, yeah, just don't tell them you wrote it in chat. GBT, just don't, just just don't tell them that, because they'll be pretty upset. Unfortunately,
Guy Kawasaki 2:43
that book was written right before chat GBT happened. But, yeah, that's a whole different discussion. But yeah, okay, so a more serious and professional answer is that I have this podcast called remarkable people. And you know, I truly do have remarkable people like Jane Goodall, Steve Wozniak, Margaret Atwood, Stacy Abrams, Neil deGrasse, Tyson, Stephen Wolf from Angela Duckworth, Carol Dweck, and then I figured out that after five years, I have 250 hours of podcasts and 5000 pages of transcripts, and no one's gonna read or listen to all that. So it was, I think, like my moral obligation to reduce that into a bite sized thing called, think, remarkable.
Chris Rainey 3:30
Yeah, I love that. And I have to ask your advice after this thing, because that's something I really want to do in the future with our show after, you know, I've got literally 1000 episodes of interviewing the world's top G people offices, and one of my goals in the future is to write a book based on all of those insights and perspectives. So I have to tack you up after the show.
Guy Kawasaki 3:51
You know, I listen. I've been to this rodeo before. In fact, I've been to 17 rodeos now. And I gotta tell you, man, I I, if you, well, this is a very good HR lesson. I think one of the the most important things that a company can do is they work backwards from the customer, right? So it's what does your customer need, not what you like to do or have to do, or been doing, or been making money doing or getting advances for doing. And I would make the case that if you work backwards from the people who have been your traditional readers, that all they want is information. They want questions answered. And so rather than working forward that I'm an author, I write books, you should work backwards, which is, what do they want? And if you work backwards, it may be that they would rather have a custom, LLM with your knowledge in it. And you the knowledge of, you know, 1200 episodes, what we did, then they want a book. Well,
Chris Rainey 4:56
to that point, that's what we did. And. To that point, but I feel like this. You know, you're right. I didn't think about the because I thought there's probably no need. But then do that now, because we built Atlas copilot for the exact reason they can query, they can ask questions, you know, based on, I saw someone asked recently, you know, what are the top key attributes and, you know, soft and hard skills, I need to be a Sutro based on this content, and it was very clear, clear answer and defined so you maybe you're right. Maybe the mediums changed. I don't need a,
Guy Kawasaki 5:28
you know, like people like me and you we always, we're looking for great examples, like, okay, Kodak. Kodak. Like, stuck to film. They should have gotten digital. Blockbuster. Should Have Been Netflix. You know, there's example, an example, an example of people who just they couldn't adapt to the new needs of customers. And I think if we're really smart, we should apply that to ourselves. And you have, I'm trying to which is to say, Should I write another book, or should I, you know, have the world's best LLM, yeah, it's like, good question these days. It
Chris Rainey 6:05
kind of got to the point for us. And I tried building this about five years ago, before large language models, before OpenAI spent a lot of money, didn't get very far. But the the instrument, the idea was, hey, we've got, you know, 10,000 hours of insights and perspectives from both our podcasts and events. Like, how do I give that our audience instant answers to their queries? I was like, AI, large language is going to be able to help me do that as well. And then, of course, you know, two years later, chat GBC and open AI launches. I'm like, wow, I was a bit early in the thinking of that, and we would have one of the first products in the market in HR. Well, actually, we were the first co pilot for HR to the market, because I'd already been mapping it out for years and years beforehand as well. But I'll be honest, back then, I think five years ago, when I started talking about this, people kind of looked at me in a strange way when I said, this is, you know, they were like, What do you mean? So I want to jump into the book. So you start the book with Apple's think different campaign. You know, what was it about that campaign that you felt that really sort of captured the essence of becoming remarkable, which is obviously what you talk about in the book. I
Guy Kawasaki 7:13
have to take your listeners back in time. So this was about 1997 and believe it or not, in 1997 most people thought Apple would die. Michael Dell has this a famous comment when he was asked, What should Apple do? He said, give back the money to the shareholders and close the company, right? So now you have to put yourself that's what it was like. It's not the, you know, two or three or $5 trillion company that it is today. And so back then, if you use the Macintosh, you truly had to be thinking different, because most of the world was using Windows and, you know, IBM PCs and stuff like that. And so this ad campaign was about how, if you want to be like Picasso or Richard Branson or, Albert Einstein. I mean, you need to think different and don't think like the crowd, and at the time, that truly appealed to Macintosh users. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 8:13
no, I agree, because I remember first sitting down and using your operating system, and it was so foreign, even even down to the way that the mouse worked, where it was very different, because the first ever mouse that was created in that way, and it took a while for me to reset from being a PC user, completely re, re imagined the experience. I mean, this is very brave, which is why a lot of people thought it wouldn't work. Well, in a
Guy Kawasaki 8:41
sense, it's, it's kind of like, you know, because I think a lot of your listeners probably like wondering, What the hell are they talking about. I think if you have been driving a car that's running on gas all your life, and you go and you get an electric car, it's a whole different world, right? I mean, you got to think completely differently about charging and what you're doing and how it works, and, you know, how come it's not noisy? And you know, all these things that I think the adjustment to an electric car is roughly equal to the adjustment to Macintosh, if you were used to using MS DOS or an apple too. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 9:25
I agree. And I also did make that move to a Tesla not long ago. And you know, the regenerative braking, the operating system, everything. You're like, Ah, it's the same.
Guy Kawasaki 9:36
There's no knobs, nothing. No, yeah, exactly
Chris Rainey 9:38
right. It's just one screen. You're like, where's everything? Where's the air conditioning? So how do we then, how do we translate that think different into an organization, though, practically, what does that look like? What is required based on those conversations you had to be able to because you're having to rip up a lot of red tape. You're challenged, having to challenge the status quo, and it's going to be uncomfortable.
Guy Kawasaki 9:59
So Well, I think that, you know, one should learn from the lessons, and I kind of mentioned them already, but you know, does your company want to be Blockbuster and not exist? Do you want to be Kodak? Which kind of exists? Do you want to be a mini computer company or, I mean, even worse, do you want to be a typewriter company, right? So, I mean, I hope people even know what a typewriter is. So I think that you know, if you, if you don't have an attitude, that we're going to work backwards from the customer, and we're going to, like, redefine what we do. So you know, if you're Kodak, if you define yourself as a chemical company, you don't embrace digital photography. But the irony of this is that in 1975 an engineering Kodak invented a digital camera, the first digital camera. But I think Kodak was thinking, we're a chemical company. We're not, you know, we're not an electronics company, and so they didn't embrace digital photography, and that's why Kodak is gone.
Chris Rainey 11:07
Yeah, you mentioned being remarkable. Shouldn't be the primary goal, but rather a natural outcome. What do you mean by that?
Guy Kawasaki 11:18
Yeah. So, you know, I think that there's, there's this, like, market and and customer base for self help books. And I gotta tell you, I I have, I have very mixed emotions about self help books, because a lot of them is like, you know, somebody's trying to say, well, you know, you can be great. You can be remarkable. And read my book and then come to my $5,000 seminar at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay, and over 48 hours, I want to teach you how to be remarkable for five grand. And I'm just not one of those self help gurus. And I think that if you tell people, well, you know the goal is to be remarkable. So you know this is how you position yourself as remarkable. You know you you get on TED TEDx, you write white papers, your social media is always pushing your agenda, etc, etc. So you position yourself as being remarkable. I cannot imagine that. That's what truly remarkable people do. What truly remarkable people do is they make the world a better place. And when you make the world a better place, guess what? The world thinks you're remarkable. So I refuse to believe that Jane Goodall sits around and says, How do I get the people of the world to think that I am remarkable? I mean, yeah, and I guarantee you, Steve Jobs never sat around saying, How can I convince people that I'm innovative? What should I do? You know, what PR for? What executive coach can I hire? He, he made a freaking Macintosh, an iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple Store, genius bar, App Store. Guess what? If you do all that, people think you're remarkable. Whoa, yeah.
Chris Rainey 13:12
Well, that do you think, though that there has to be a blend. Now, though, because you have these remarkable people that are doing those things, but it feels like if you don't have that online presence, you almost don't exist in this day and age. So, you know, so So you there is a balance to that, right? I do agree with your point, though. You know, there's a lot of people with these amazing LinkedIn profiles, and they're claiming to do all these things and actually not doing any of those things that they're doing and vice versa. I meet some incredible leaders and people that are doing a remarkable world you've never heard of because they have zero online presence, and therefore no one knows they exist. So it's kind of like an interest in because you have a great online presence, right? So clearly, yeah, no, you do. I mean, okay, you might not say great, but you have a prominent online presence. So there is value in that, right? There
Guy Kawasaki 14:06
is value in that. But let me just say that if, if you were going to assign your focus and your energy to doing remarkable stuff, versus telling people you're doing remarkable stuff, I would say you put about 80% of your effort into doing remarkable stuff, and 20% into positioning yourself as a remarkable person.
Chris Rainey 14:30
Yeah. Now I'm with you. I think, you know, the first sort of 10 years of my career, I had zero online presence, and I was just in the in the dark, grinding, doing the work, you know, and then kind of with the podcast that came in the second half, I've been doing this around 20 years, and I was like, I have all these incredible people in my network. I want to tell their story. How do I do it? And this was the medium I chose. So for me, this is similar to you. This was my way of sharing the remarkable work that I saw HR leaders were doing. Yeah. So I was like, and there wasn't anything existed in a platform. I was like, wow. Like, all of this amazing works happening in all of these organizations, and no one's talking about it in the specifically in the HR space, and that's kind of where this show came from. So, yeah, it was like, during my journey to and from work, I would listen to podcasts like yours and others, and I'd be like, Ah, this is a good medium to be able to delete. I didn't think we'll be here where we are now. We started off very much as a hobby in my bedroom, so it's come a long way. Well, one of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about is growth mindset. You know, chapter one covers the growth mindset, and in your personal journey with it, I know you've taken up new challenges like surfing and hockey later in life. What advice would you give to people struggling with maybe a fixed mindset? Let's say,
Guy Kawasaki 15:50
well, first of all, if, if I can go and recommend another person's book, which is the truest form of flattery when an author tells you to read somebody else's book, not his book. So you need to read the book called Mindset by Carol Dweck, D, W, E, C, K, and she is the mother of the growth mindset. And basically she says, there's two kinds of mindsets. There's the growth mindset, where you believe you can learn new things and do new things and, you know, achieve new things. And there's a fixed mindset. And the fixed mindset says, I cannot learn surfing, I'm too old. I cannot learn hockey. I'm too old. I cannot learn to use AI, I'm too old. That's a fixed mindset. And there's one more kind of fixed mindset that HR people should be aware of, the fixed mindset that says, I am perfect. I don't need to learn anything more. And that's that's that really is sickening. But anyway, and then the third thing I would tell you the HR listener is that, you know, Carol Dweck focused on the growth mindset, which is between your temples, right? It's in your head. I believe I can grow. I believe I can do new things. And then she had a protege named Carol Murphy. And Carol Murphy, I think just just took Carol Dweck work. Excuse me, it's Mary Murphy and and just expanded Carol Dweck impact, because what her observation was that you have to have a growth mindset in your head, but you need to be working in a growth mindset organization. Because if you have a growth mindset in your head, but you're working for a fixed mindset organization, it ain't gonna work. You need to be in an environment that supports the growth mindset. And that's what HR people need to do. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 17:52
How do we do that? How do we move people from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and create that environment?
Guy Kawasaki 18:00
Well, I think that that environment you have to, like, you have to focus on skills, as opposed to proxies, like, What school did you go to, or, you know, what company did you work for? Because I gotta tell you, just because you went to Yale or Harvard or Stanford, that that doesn't mean you have the skill set. It just means that, boy, it probably means that you come from a rich family, and they had tutors and sat tutors and, you know, essay writer tutors. So the one thing is, you got to focus on skills. You should also focus on not the superficialities. And I gotta tell you, this is something that Steve Jobs really did before it was involved, which is he did not care about what school you went to, what gender you are, what your sexual orientation is, what religion, what color of your skin or your eyes. All he cared about was that you were great at what you did. And I think that is a very powerful attitude that of all departments in a company, HR, should be carrying the flag for us like it to succeed as a company today, it's basically a war for talent, and in this war for talent, why would you limit the pool of applicants you can draw from with superficialities like your degree, where you got the degree, where did you work before? I mean, it's like saying, you know, five years of prompt engineering ness is necessary to work at our company. Well, I hate to tell you, nobody has five years of prompt engineering, because prompt engineering didn't exist until two years ago. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 19:52
no, I love that. As someone who grew up with no education myself and went straight into a. An organization I kind of found like it gave me a bit of freedom in the sense that I wasn't I didn't have to conform to, you know, I studied this and therefore I am that I kind of came in with a completely open, literally, growth mindset of wanting to absorb everything, whereas I kind of realized some of the colleagues that came in from various universities. Was like, I am this, and this is my skills, and that's it. And it was very much fixed on that. And I was like, ah, interestingly, that's kind of some of them, not all of them. It kind of was what was setting them back, because there was this sort of expectation that they deserve something now, and that they have, yeah, they've, they've done all of the learning they need in there.
Guy Kawasaki 20:44
I think another consequence of an attitude like that is that, well, let's build this hypothetical. So let's say that you know you're some kind of math prodigy, right? So you know you're, you're taking calculus at the third grade and, you know, all this kind of stuff. So you're a math prodigy, and one of the consequences of that is, like, the math prodigy doesn't want to try art, or the math prodigy doesn't want to try music, or the math product prodigy doesn't want to try surfing or hockey, because they're thinking, Oh, if I try that and I'm not good at it, then people are not gonna think I'm a prodigy anymore, because I failed at something. And so it reduces risk taking, because they don't want to risk their image and even their mental capacity to think I can try something and fail. It's okay. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 21:41
How would you say you've developed this personally, right? That even now, you still have that hunger to try new things, like when you say hockey, is that roller hockey or ice hockey? Ice hockey? So I grew up playing ice hockey, so I'm one of the very few people in the UK, and my co founder, Shane, we played ice hockey growing up. So I'm with you, not, not, not so much to surf in. There's no waves. Well where we are, but that's like, that's pretty like to start at that most people to be like, the idea of starting ice hockey, which is a very, you know, quite frankly, dangerous and physical sport, is very daunting, just for normal people, young, young kids, even, let alone jump in. Now, what is it that keeps you going and that pursue?
Guy Kawasaki 22:31
Well, I took up hockey at 44 I took up surfing at 60, which is roughly 34 and 50 years too late respectively. Yeah, I don't know. I just have this personality that, like when I fall in love, I just go for it. And, you know, I took a podcasting at, let's say I'm 70 now, so I took a podcasting at 65 so well, one pattern I've noticed is that I take up what my kids are into, as opposed to make them take up what I'm into. Now, one of my sons is into not hang gliding. What do you call that flying squirrel? You paralyzing? Oh, wing suit, yeah. Oh, wow, I am not. I'm not taking up wing suiting because I draw the line there. Even my growth mindset has a limit.
Chris Rainey 23:32
Yeah, you've definitely raised some, some kids open to exploration. I love that you did that, by the way. I know it's a bit of a side tangent, but when Shane and I were my Shane, my co founder, was my next door neighbor, so we grew up as kids, and we're still co founders and friends to this day. But his dad learned how to play ice hockey so he could play with us. Yeah, so he was on the ice at 50 years old, playing with us. And, you know, falling hurting himself, dislocated his shoulder, and he was always part of that, where we know, when we did karate, he did karate with us, and it was like, I never really, probably, you know, appreciated it back then, my mom raised four kids on our own as a single parent, so Shane's dad was very much kind of like my dad, in that way that he took care of myself and his own son, Shane. But I think it's really cool that you do that like, I think, is he a podcaster now? No, he's not a podcaster now, but he's, he He's late. No, he's now. He's in his Rediscovering His Rock Music Days. He's, he's kind of like, now he's got the room sat with all of the guitars, and he's like, he's going back. He's like, I missed my childhood rock days. So he's having a he's going,
Guy Kawasaki 24:44
clearly, he's, he's my kind of guy. Yeah, he's going full circle.
Chris Rainey 24:48
The other thing you mentioned, if you want to try surfing, he would, he's the kind of person that would definitely do that. One of the things, though, which in chapter two, you talk about, which is really, I think, linked to growth mindset, is. Embracing vulnerability, because many people struggle to, like you just said, take those risks. They're worried about failing. What are people going to think, you know, and stuff like that. And therefore, and I'm sure this is why it's in the book, embracing vulnerability is so important to understand that. And I feel like it's a superpower for me to be to be vulnerable.
Guy Kawasaki 25:20
Well, if you take up hockey at 44 and surfing at 60, the flip side of that is you gotta understand you're gonna get hurt. You know you have to be willing to be hurt, because it's gonna happen. And I think if you were going to translate that to HR lessons, it's it's like saying that if you're going to support a growth mindset in an organization, you have to be willing to accept and even forgive failure, because if you expect people to succeed every single time, every product to be Perfect, everything everybody does is perfect, you're not embracing vulnerability. And you know, if people get fired for a failure, that just sends a message to the rest of the organization that failure is not tolerated. You know, this is an organization that does not support learning. Now, I understand the flip side, which is, you know, if you just let people keep failing, and there's no negative consequence, that's also a bad message. But I gotta tell you, I mean, you know, there are lots of people in parts of apple that failed, that went to other parts of apple and did great things. So failure, the, you know, the opposite of succeeding is not failure. In my mind, the opposite of succeeding is learning.
Chris Rainey 26:46
Yeah, you're 100% right. It's only a failure if you don't learn something from it. I think that's super important that Shane, I have a little quote, and upstairs on the wall it says, fail forward. And it's kind of always our mentality to constantly seeking discomfort, as we put it, and learning from that, you know, as well, same way we, you know, spent a lot of money on the first version of our co pilot. Many, many years ago. At the time, it felt like a failure, a huge failure. I mean, shame it was, which was devastating to us as a small team and out of our money, but now I look back at how quickly it allowed us to pivot and get to market based on all of the research and learnings we had. It was a huge success, actually, but sometimes in hindsight, you can't really see that as well. Well, I'll
Guy Kawasaki 27:35
tell you a story from the book as which is that when Christy Yamaguchi the gold medal winner of figure skating and world champion in her first competition, she finished 12, and she went to her mom and she said, How come the girls who finished first, second and third got ribbons, and I did it? Her mother said, because you finished 12. Christy,
Chris Rainey 28:00
Yeah, but how did you come back from that, though, in that story with her and the conversation, what did, what did? What did she share with you about how she came back stronger? Well,
Guy Kawasaki 28:09
I mean, she wanted a ribbon, and so she just, you know, doubled down and started practicing longer and harder and all that, right? I mean, in a sense, I gotta say that failure is sometimes a good thing, if it motivates you, if it just makes you quit, that's another thing, although I will tell you if, if, like, if you were a figure skater and you finished 12th in your first contest and you quit, you were Never gonna be world champion anyway, because Quitters never become world champions. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 28:44
no, that's true. How wouldn't people ask you that question of, you know, how do you then overcome that fear? What do you say to people who say, Oh, that's great, but You're scary. How do I overcome that fear?
Guy Kawasaki 28:55
Well, this is the answer to this question is that's why it's easier to be an author than a doer, because I can just pontificate about stuff, and I don't actually have to do it. You I think you just need to get inspiration that, you know the Christie amaguchi story. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. He started Next, he came back and, you know, Bada bing bada, bang, the next thing you know, Apple's the most valuable company in the world. And, yeah, I think you just need to have these inspirations that, you know, Micah Jordan got cut as a sophomore from his high school basketball team. I mean, it's over and over, like the path to being remarkable is not straight and smooth. It is very indirect and very ragged. The
Chris Rainey 29:48
way I look at it now is when anything like when, you know, again, we went from a digital media company to a SaaS business with an AI. Luck, right for me, the path is through intentionally failing forward and getting as many reps as possible. So I think this, I think this translated really well from me growing up playing ice hockey, right when you first start playing, firstly, you've got to learn how to ice skate right before you know and you fall over 1000s of times, right? And I relate that same to into business. So you get up, you go again. And each time you get better you and the more reps you put in, the better you get, right? And the other thing was that I learned from West hockey was the ability to be coachable so and constantly be learning and growing and and, and guess what? You lose games. You know, I remember Shane and I going home in the back seat of his dad's car crying on the way home because we lost a nice look again, right? Like, devastated, right? But you came back more hungry. You trained harder. We trained in the off season. We both trained in the off season, you know, like when no one was we were like, No, we're not we're not gonna lose. And I think when I came into business, I just brought those same principles, yeah, with me, if that makes sense, yeah. And I didn't realize how important they were until later in my career, to be like, Wow, actually, that really helped translate into into business. When
Guy Kawasaki 31:17
I took up ice hockey, we we put a sport court in the backyard, and we, you know, we bought a net, and I literally took 10s of 1000s of shots in the backyard, like 10s of 1000s of shots, and I ended up with a very good wrist shot. But anyway, and, and, I think that, you know, one of the lessons here for HR is that I swear to god that 90% of the battle is you just keep showing up. Because most people don't keep showing up, right? I mean, you try surfing one or two times, and guess what? You're not a world class surfer after two times, so you give up. And you know, like I've been surfing, I've been surfing 11 years, and one of the biggest goals in surfing, in longboard surfing, anyway, is you pop up and you take four steps, and you get to the nose and you hang 10. Hang 10 is where your toes are hanging over the edge as you're in the water, okay? And that is kind of like the, really, one of the biggest goals of longboarding. So it takes about four steps. And I've been surfing 11 years, and I can take two steps, so I think it takes five and a half years for each step, so I gotta go another 11 years to get four steps.
Chris Rainey 32:46
But that's the thing as well. Like, people want it quickly. That's another thing. People don't have the patience. I feel like to like, again, people see the success of what we've achieved. I'm like, Yeah, it took 20 years, right? Like, you're just seeing the payoff. Like, now it's still hard. I used to be a skateboarder. The most difficult thing I've ever done is skateboarding literally to land, just to learn how to ollie, first and foremost, and then to do a trick. You're talking about 1000s of attempts, 1000s before you land, do an ollie, to do, to do an ollie, yeah, literally. And then now, like, let me try and do up a curb right to do that. And so the idea that you're gonna start something and or learn a new skill, and from day one you're gonna be like, it just works is just so many,
Guy Kawasaki 33:31
yeah, how many times did you break your wrist or your arm?
Chris Rainey 33:34
Oh, I broke. I've wrist. I broke. I've dislocated everything at this point, a collarbone. Yeah, a lot, but yeah, jumping down staircases on skateboards is not vulnerability. Vulnerability, yeah, I tried to, I just started skating recently, and I realized what I can't believe I even did this as a kid like now. It looks terrifying. The idea of doing one of the things I want to talk about as well, you talk about planting seeds, and I love this part, right about diversifying experiences. Can you share some examples in the book of how this has benefited some of the people that you interviewed?
Guy Kawasaki 34:13
So I learned this first at Apple, that when we were coming out with Macintosh, we thought we had a spreadsheet database and word processing computer, and let's just say that we were kind of zero for three there. And the market that really saved Apple was desktop publishing. So you use Macintosh to create documents and books and newsletters at magazines and but that was never the plan up front. And I learned this very valuable lesson that you know what, yeah, you know you you think which. You think you know exactly which seed is gonna turn into an A mighty oak. But really, you really have no idea. And you. And so you got to plant a lot of acorns to get a very few oaks. And I wish I could tell you that there's a way to, you know, okay, here's 500 acorns. These are the five that will become trees. There's no way. You just got to plan 500 and, you know, pray, yeah, that. I think that is true with many things, you gotta plant a lot of seeds. And if you're a young person listening to this, I'm telling you, while you're young, you're in the business of sampling. Yes, you should be trying a lot of different things, because you really, you really don't know, I mean, what's gonna take root. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 35:41
I love that so much. I always say that to people that ask me that advice, like, just taste as many things as possible. The idea that you just do one thing and just be like, That's it is. So do it while you're young as well. And how I never thought I'd be doing this, but, and you know, this is what I do every single day. Now, I get to have incredible conversations and built this business. And it's the same with Atlas. The application of the product from our first version is nothing like what people are using it for right now, like the how they're using our model to build onboarding agents, agents to do pre boarding, agents to upskill their front line managers like, you know, there's so many different use cases that people are using our product for that we didn't even envision ourselves. So the idea that you're gonna put all your time and energy and investment into one seed is is kind of crazy. And by the way, we have many seeds at HR leaders that haven't grown outside of that, but we continue to plant so I love that analogy. And I think it's, yeah, it's what about people that feel like they haven't got the resources to pursue these goals? I think that's an interesting one.
Guy Kawasaki 36:57
Well, I mean, again, I come back to the answer that. That's why it's easier to be an author than a doer. I can just tell you to plan many seeds. And this podcast is over. I'm done now they gotta go do it, you know? Well, first of all, I mean to use the acorn analogy, you know, there is a first pass. So you go and you collect a lot of acorns, you put them in a, you know, a bucket of water, and the ones that float are dead. So you throw out all the floaters. So right there, you know, you probably eliminate 80% of the bad ideas, right? So I'm not saying that every idea should be tried, I mean, but I am saying that rather than trying to make the perfect right decision, what you should do is make your decisions right. So once you take your best shot, make that decision right. Don't give up. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 37:54
no, I love that. I think one of the things that I've seen, and all of all the interviews and people I spoke to, when when you look at people that are highly successful, is there, there's one, one side of the side is people with loads of ideas right, and on the other side is you have the executors right. And that's kind of, I would put myself in that bucket of sometimes I actually even execute too fast, and it gets me in trouble. So my co founder always my co founders like, Okay, we have to have some idea and process and guardrails, whereas I'm always just running into the headwind and executing and learning and failing along the way, right? What? How do you how do you get from idea to execution, right? You know, at Apple, there must have been a million ideas that people had. How does that? How did that go from idea to Okay, execution on that?
Guy Kawasaki 38:51
Well, I think, you know, the honest answer is, you take a lot of shots and you pray. I mean, I wish I could tell you, there is a way to specifically, you know, figure out. I mean, you know, taking our favorite company, apple. You think, oh, Apple. They're so smart. They focused on Macintosh and iPhone, iPod, iPad. Well, I hate to tell you, but there was Apple three, there was Newton, there was Lisa. I mean, Apple has had a lot of failures too. You never hear about them. So I don't want you to think that, you know, Steve Jobs had 1,000% batting average or whatever. You know, you take a lot of shots. You just have to expect that there will be a lot of failures, and that's just the way it is. And, you know, I wish people would write about that, that, you know, if you think that, that you can pick the right one, the right time, the first time I would, I hate to disappoint you. It ain't gonna be like that. It. And the thing that we're very good at in Silicon Valley is we throw a lot of stuff up against the wall in about one out of 100 sticks, and then we go up to the wall and we paint the bulls eye, and then we tell people, we hit the bulls eye. Yeah, we knew that. You know what we should do at HR leaders is help people with onboarding and pre boarding. Of course, we knew that we're so smart. Well, the fact of the matter is, you tried a lot of things and those are the ones succeeded, so you declared victory, right?
Chris Rainey 40:32
Yeah. I think I always hear Mark Cuban say, you only need to be right once. I think it's a famous thing. He always says he's like, you know, people haven't seen all of the failures that he's had. He's like, you only have to be right once. Right like, you know, to really, you know, when he talks about how it became very wealthy as well, but so many people were so scared of the failure and taking the shot, then they kind of sit in the land of, what if I
Guy Kawasaki 40:56
would say to people in companies who are afraid to take the shot is a very good Chinese saying that that is like one of the cornerstones of my life, which is you have to wait by the side of a river a very long time before the Peking duck will fly in your mouth. Which is to say, the peeking duck ain't gonna fly in your mouth. You gotta go out and kill the duck
Chris Rainey 41:26
and cook it. Yeah, love that you're waiting a long time of all of those of all of those interviews that you've done, what are some of the sort of common traits or actions that really distinguish the truly remarkable leader. Well,
Guy Kawasaki 41:42
in a sense, the book reflects, you know, our discernment and our filtering of what really worked and and the book is divided into three pieces. It's growth, grit and grace. And so growth is what we already talked about with Carol Dweck. Grit is the work of Angela Duckworth, where you have to keep persevering in the face of failure. And Grace is when you are at the last part of your career and you realize that you have a moral obligation to pay it back. And I think those three stages are pretty much the definition of remarkable people, they have growth. They went through a lot of gritty things, and at the end, they want to pay back the world. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 42:29
when you think about things like grit, is that are some people born with more a level of grit, or is it something that can be made and refined? And yeah, I
Guy Kawasaki 42:44
mean, I certainly have met people that you know are more gritty than other people. But I think it's, it's a complicated question, because when you discover something that you truly love and you truly feel is important. I think your grit capacity grows up right? Like, you know, I really want to do this. I didn't care that much about surfing. I didn't care that much about hockey, but I really, really love golf. And so you're really, you know, you're willing to put in the price, the cost, and do do what you have to do. So I hope that, you know, to some extent, grit can be built. Because if we only, if we went around thinking, Oh, I'm either gritty or I'm not, I think that'll lead to a lot of self fulfilling prophecy, right? I'm not a gritty person. I can't really do this, and that's kind of the fixed mindset. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 43:44
no. I mean, yeah, I was asking that because I feel, like many people that I've spoke interviewed over the years that have have more great a lot of times, it's not all the time. It's defined by their childhood and other and this and their surroundings and how they grew up, right? And unfortunately, I grew up in a home with a single parent with four kids, and it was tough. We didn't have any money, we you know, we struggled, and that built a level of resilience in me where, well, when people like this is a really hard day, I'd be like, No, it's not. This is fine. This is great
Guy Kawasaki 44:21
to you know, you use the word unfortunately, and it's easy for me to say this, but you know, if you look back, not that you would ever wish this upon yourself or wish this upon people. But yeah, yeah, it may have been fortunate that you know, as opposed to what you're like Donald Trump's son, and you grow up in Mar a Lago, and you know, you got secret servers protecting you, and you got billionaires sucking up to you, and, hmm, maybe that's unfortunate. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 44:55
you are right. I think I used to be a. Ashamed of that, and very insecure about that. And then it kind of dawned on me, maybe, like, five years into my career, that the reason I was growing and and moving through the business so quickly, and it was because of that, actually. So the things that I was ashamed of, embarrassed of, you know, had insecurities about, was actually the thing that made me determined. Constantly have a growth mindset. Always On my first day, I remember the first decision I made. It was a sales role, is I refuse to sit next to anyone but the top sales guy. That was my first demand when I joined the company, because I was like, I need to make money because I have no money in the company. No, I need to make money, and that guy makes the most money, so I have to and they're like, No, there's no space. I was like, No, I'm only sitting next to Cameron, because I need to know how this guy is making five times more money than anyone else in the company and and I refuse to do that, even though I just joined, which is pretty controversial. Like, who are you to make these demands? I was like, No, I need to do that. And I did to do that as well. So yeah,
Guy Kawasaki 46:07
near death experience, if it doesn't kill you, is a very valuable thing.
Chris Rainey 46:12
Yeah, let's not wish those on people, though. Hopefully people have to learn that way as well. What about in terms of making the most of opportunity. And you just, I think you the final chapter, you talk about leave, live, leaving no regrets. Because I think there's a lot of research that shows people, you know, always look back and say, I have a regret. I didn't take that opportunity, or I didn't start that company, etc. How do you see that that plays into this? Yeah, well,
Guy Kawasaki 46:43
you know, this is the work of my friend Daniel Pink, and he had this regret project, and he asked people to, you know, talk about their regrets. And he found out that the two primary regrets people have is that they let some of their social relationships die, you know, with their friends and family, that they should have kept up their relationship. And the other big regret is not that they tried too many things and failed, but the opposite, the big regret was I should have tried that. I should have written that book. I should have tried that company. I should have, you know, moved and I should have tried these things, as opposed to, I tried these things and I failed.
Chris Rainey 47:28
What? What is it that keeps guy yourself? How do you constantly disrupt guy? Well, because you spoke up, we know. We don't want you know, to be honest, you don't want to be the next Kodak or blockbuster. How do you how do you I mean this by the question, how do you constantly you know all the books you've written? Do you know the organizations? Or what do you do? What is it that that you do well to keep disrupting yourself
Guy Kawasaki 48:01
at one very simplistic level. I have four kids, so I had, at at any given point, four tuitions to pay. So I couldn't just be sitting around drinking tea all day. Okay? I couldn't wait for the duck to fly in my mouth. I had to go and kill the duck because I had tuitions to pay, but I don't know I'm just, I just got this personality that I always need to be doing something if I'm like a shark, if I'm not moving, I'm drowning. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 48:34
I can relate to that my wife, who just, my wife, just walked in the studio, and she always says to me, enough, when's enough enough. Because, like, I'm always like, you know, I get to a level of mastery in something and I get bored. So like, you know, I grew up playing ice hockey, basketball, skateboarding, tennis, you name it, and I kind of got all the way to really high level. And my friends would be like, Why do you always get to that really high level and then quit because I'm like, then it's boring for me. It's like the learning and the failing and the getting better along the way, which is like my drug, if that makes sense, of choice to be able to do that and well, I
Guy Kawasaki 49:14
hope I get to the point where I'm bored with surfing.
Chris Rainey 49:18
Well, listen when you drop me a message when you get 10 toes, it sounds like you got another 10 years. It sounds like
Guy Kawasaki 49:30
time is running out. For me, time
Chris Rainey 49:31
is running out. But yeah, but listen, I appreciate you coming on the show before, before I let you go. What would be sort of your parting advice, and where can people grab a copy of the book if they want to, or check out your work? Where's the best place for them to
Guy Kawasaki 49:45
go? Well, I mean, if, if you can't find my book, you probably don't know, use our sale search engine. I mean, that's a good test if you if. Thing that's preventing you from being remarkable, and through the search engine, define my book, you're not a remarkable person. Oh, that's great. That's
Chris Rainey 50:08
a good like everyone's I have to find the book now, otherwise, I'm not remarkable. That's great. That was genius. That was genius. Well,
Guy Kawasaki 50:13
okay, but the other way, you know, the other way to completely defeat my financial goals is that you just go to Kawasaki gpt.com which is my personal LLM, and it has all my transcripts and all my work in it. And you can literally ask guy any question, and honestly, you will probably get a better answer from asking Kawasaki GPT, then you will get asking me in person. So because Kawasaki GPT can remember every transcript, every word of every guess and Guy Kawasaki cannot at this point, yeah, so either buy the book or use the LLM. So
Chris Rainey 50:56
what I'll do next time is I'll just interview guy GPC instead, and it would be better. It probably would already, already be surfing by now as well, right? It probably should come on the show. As I said, I've been following you on LinkedIn for a long, long time, and so super happy to finally get to meet you and individual Thank you, and I wish you all the best until next week.
Guy Kawasaki 51:24
All right, thank you very much, and I wish you continued success. Thanks. You.
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Victoria Klug, HR Director Eastern Europe at Beiersdorf.