Greg McKeown:
Today, we have the incredible honor to be able to have the one and only Guy Kawasaki. This is a multifaceted career with profound insights and innovation. He’s made an indelible mark on the world. His name became synonymous with transformative thinking, groundbreaking ideas, and so on. In so many ways, I would say originally, and I think this is fair to say because he was part of the “Macintosh Mafia,” helping to make that computer bring it to an iconic status at Apple back in the 1980s when he was the chief evangelist there. I mean, that’s a good title to have at any company, and to do it at Apple at the moment of that sort of, you know, that iconic moment is a really great, you know, calling card, that’s a really good mic drop, I would say.
Now he’s the chief evangelist at Canva, he is, or was, a trusted advisor at Motorola Business Unit of Google, and these are just some of the things. He’s also a great author, and we’re going to be talking about his new book today. Also, he’s the author of The Art of the Start, Enchantment, Wise Guy, and in this episode, we’re going to be, well, I was going to say like we were going to take his journey from his being a curious child in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a revered icon in Silicon Valley. But if the pre-bits of this conversation are anything to speak of, we have no idea at all where this is going to go, so tune in as we cover this as part one of a two-part conversation, and this is about the essence of living fearlessly.
Greg McKeown:
Welcome the incomparable Guy Kawasaki.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can I tell you a great story, Greg? You will appreciate this story. So, all the hyperbole about the one and only Guy Kawasaki, blah, blah, blah. So, let me tell you a story. Actually, it’s multiple stories. It’s happened to me dozens of times. People come up to me, and they say, “Oh, your book changed my life. I was directionless. I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I read your book, and it changed everything. I got direction. You know you’re the cause of my success.”
And I say, “Well, which one of my 16 books?”
And they say, “Oh, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.”
So maybe I’m not so unique and incomparable.
Greg McKeown:
That’s pretty funny, Guy. I really believe that story. I believe that.
Guy Kawasaki:
It’s true.
Greg McKeown:
That will have happened a lot of times. My goodness, that’s a funny story.
Guy Kawasaki:
Want to hear another funny story?
Greg McKeown:
But do you just own it? Do you just go, “You’re welcome.”?
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Greg McKeown:
Do you say, “I didn’t write that book. But I’m glad that. I’m glad it blessed your life.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I say, “I’m poor dad, poor dad, not rich dad.”
If you enjoy that story. Do we have a time limit here? If you enjoyed that story, I’ll tell you another great story.
Greg McKeown:
OK, go for it. I want the next story. Go.
Guy Kawasaki:
OK, one day, this is about 15 years ago I had a 911. So I’m driving my 911. You know, you just think you’re on top of the world because you’re driving a Porsche, right, ok? So this is in Menlo Park, and I’m at a stop sign, stoplight, and I look over to my left, and there’s this car with four teenage girls in it, and they’re looking at me. They’re making eye contact, they’re giggling, they’re laughing, they’re smiling, and I’m thinking, “God, you freaking finally arrived. Even teenage girls know who you are because of your writing, your speaking, your work at Apple, blah, blah, blah.”
So, the girl in the front seat? She motions to roll down my window. She doesn’t understand in a 911. You press a button, but that’s a different discussion. So I put down my window, she sticks out, her she goes, “Are you Jackie Chan?”
Greg McKeown:
What did you say?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was so flabbergasted I just laughed and drove off.
Greg McKeown:
And so now they don’t know. They don’t know whether Jackie Chan laughed at them in the 911 in Menlo Park and drove away. They don’t know. They have a story. It’s their biggest story of their life. I met Jackie Chan. He rolled down his window, he laughed and he went away. There’s a split in the matrix because of that story.
Guy Kawasaki:
That just shows that everybody’s a winner when you get involved with me. Well, like there’s a valuable lesson in that story, not about racial profiling and stuff. One of the things I say in this book is that it does not matter how you got motivated or what motivated you. All that matters is that you are motivated. And I can tell you, since that day, in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking, “You got to be successful; you got to make a difference. You got to do this.” Because someday in Hong Kong, Jackie Chan is gonna be in his Rolls Royce, and he’s gonna pull up to a stop sign. Girls are gonna make eye contact, and he’s gonna think, “I’m Jackie Chan. Of course, they know who I am.” Girls gonna roll down the window, stick out her head, and say, “Are you Guy Kawasaki?” That’s my goal. That’s my goal in life. You got to have goals.
Greg McKeown:
Now we have to get Jackie Chan on your podcast, to have to share the story with him, right, like this has to this, this, this. We have to hold this intent of going forward.
Okay, speaking of people, let me tell you how I was actually introduced to you. It was true, something that I was told that you said. You might not even have said it, and if you didn’t, that will be a very bad moment for me. It won’t matter to you, but it will matter to me, and it’s not a particularly nice thing, but okay. So this was when you were at Apple, or at least about your time at Apple, and you said that at some point, they had started having a bozo explosion.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I said that.
Greg McKeown:
You did say it?
Guy Kawasaki:
I did say that.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so that’s a happy moment for me because I’ve been otherwise misquoting you for a decade. That would be a shame, and then I wouldn’t even be able to say it after that. I just have to say, well, someone somewhere thought about this. That’s a good question to jump off, like what did you mean when you said it? What was going on?
Guy Kawasaki:
A bozo explosion. What this means is that one of my thoughts, and I learned this from Steve Jobs, is that A players hire A players, but B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. Because B players and lower, they want to look around the room, and they want to feel like they’re superior to everybody. So if you’re a loser, you hire someone who’s a loser so you can feel better than the loser, and you start from B player and you end up in Z player, and that’s the bozo explosion. So you need to fight the bozo explosion.
Greg McKeown:
Now, did you see it happening at Apple? I mean, were you there through a whole period where that moved in? Was that after Steve left, like what? Or, it was a general observation.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think it’s generally true for companies, and one of the big tells of a bozo explosion is when you start recruiting MBAs. When your company starts recruiting MBAs, you’re on the slippery slope, and I have an MBA.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, good, good, so do I, so that’s nice. So you managed to insult both of us in your answer, which I appreciate.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, it’s a form of humility.
Greg McKeown:
Well, here’s where I want to go with this. So tell people who are listening or watching this a bit about that kind of part of your origin story, right, the Macintosh days, and I’m sure you’ve shared this many times, too many times, I don’t know but the new book also, you know, begins with at least part of that story. So just tell us, assume people don’t know any of that story, let’s hear it from you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, which story? There are like 88 stories in the book.
Greg McKeown:
I’m talking about the opening story of the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, okay, so the opening story.
Greg McKeown:
Then, just other insights about the time when you were working on the Macintosh and the ad campaign and so on.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so the year is.
Greg McKeown:
That was an easy question, guy. I was giving you the easiest author question in the world. I said just give me the opening story to your book. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how much a person is written of their own book. They know the introductory story.
Guy Kawasaki:
The easiest question to ask an author is, what is your book about? Now, I can tell you a story about this, too, before I tell you the story of Think Different. So Tom Clancy, the mystery and thriller writer, was at a press conference, and he was announcing a new book, and a reporter said Tom Clancy, you know what is your book about? And Tom Clancy said it’s about 25 bucks.
Greg McKeown:
That’s it. I like it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, now to the Think Different story. So the year is 1997. Apple’s on the ropes. People think it’s going to die. Michael Dell is saying, “Give back the money to your shareholders and close up shop. Give it up, Apple.”
Greg McKeown:
Thank you, Michael.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, thank you, Michael.
And so I’m in this room with 10 other marketing people, Steve Jobs, he had just sold Next to Apple, and he was kind of on the way back, so he was already a presence on the campus, and this guy named Lee Clow, from Shaiete, showed us the Think Different campaign. And this campaign was the one that highlighted Amelia Earhart, Gandhi, Einstein, and Picasso. But how people who think different are the creative ones and the innovative ones. And back then, if you use the Macintosh, you had to think different because everybody was thinking Windows. And so he shows us this commercials, and we love the commercials.
And at the end, Lee Clow says to Steve, “I have two copies of this videotape. I’ll give one to you and I’ll give one to Guy.”
And Steve Jobs says, “Don’t give one to Guy.”
And I say, “Steve, don’t you trust me?”
And Steve, as only Steve would, says, “No, I do not trust you, Guy.”
And then, and then I’m so proud of myself. I’m so proud of myself. So this was one of those man or mouse moments you know in your life when you don’t want to look back and say, why didn’t I come back at him? So, I was determined not to live with that regret. So I said right then and there, in front of everybody, “That’s okay, Steve, I don’t trust you either.” And that cost me probably 10 million in options. Now I get to tell the story.
Greg McKeown:
So, was the relationship with Steve drained after that, or was it? Did he seem to sort of respect that you came at him?
Guy Kawasaki:
Suffice it to say that whenever people tell you they know how Steve Jobs thinks and what he’s thinking, nobody knows what goes on in that brain. But I’ll just tell you later on. Not too long after that, he offered me a job again, so he didn’t hate me that much. Of course, I leave Apple twice, and I turned him down, so that’s why I still have to write.
Greg McKeown:
What was the second job he offered you?
Guy Kawasaki:
The job he offered me was to head up Apple University and Apple University.
Greg McKeown:
What! Apple University! You said no to Apple University!
Guy Kawasaki:
You know what it is.
Greg McKeown:
I know what it is. I’ve worked with Apple University. I’ve worked with the head of Apple University. I’ve worked all inside of that organism..
Guy Kawasaki:
So you work for the guy who came from the Yale Business School?
Greg McKeown:
I have. Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, that was going to be me.
Greg McKeown:
That was supposed to be your job.
Guy Kawasaki:
He was the second choice.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I suppose there might be some truth to that, but nevertheless, do you wish you’d taken that job?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, if I had known that Apple was going to be a trillion dollars, you know, that’s one factor. But I have to say some of this may just be retroactive, convenient thinking.
But, you know all the things that I learned and saw, and did not all of them positive, because I left Apple. You know, in a sense, that’s the fabric that I became, and if I had stayed at Apple from 1983 till today, I would probably be very rich, but I think it broadened my horizons. And you know, I like to tell this story. It’s a great story, but I don’t really. I don’t lay awake at night thinking of all the money that I passed because of that.
And then, of course, there’s another story like that, which is Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, which is arguably the most successful venture capital firm. One day, he calls me up. I’m living in San Francisco. And he calls me up. He says, “Guy, I got this company here. We need a CEO. Are you interested in the company?”
And I say, “Well, what’s the company?”
He says, “Oh, yahoo.”
And I look up Yahoo and Yahoo’s, you know, in Silicon Valley, and I’m living an hour away. And I look at Yahoo and it’s a collection of Jerry Yang and David Philo’s favorite websites. It’s a directory. So I look at that, and I say so what could the business model be for that? How big could the internet be?
So I say Mike Moritz, “You know what, Mike? I have a kid now. It’s just too far to drive to be CEO of Yahoo.”
Well, I figure that seriously probably cost me $2 billion. Now, you know, $2 billion here, $2 billion there, Greg, after a while, that adds up to real money. So now people are listening to this and are saying why would I buy this idiot’s book? He quit Apple twice; he turned down Steve, and he turned down Yahoo. Now you want me to listen to his advice.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it does bring into question your decision-making process. It does, even though you’re being so gracious and humble in sharing those stories when you could tell other stories that would make you look like all your decisions are right and so on. But I think it does go to the heart of, well, the first section of this new book about, you know, and it’s not a new idea, but it’s a new witness to the idea. And that’s not nothing. And it’s about growth mindset, of course, Carol Dweck’s work, who I know well from Columbia, and then Stanford Days as a professor and the author of Mindset, and so on. But why don’t you articulate sort of what that’s well, I guess you could articulate what the book really is about, why you bothered to write this, why you thought this needed to come forward, and then maybe a little more on why growth mindset takes a third of what you’re offering.
Guy Kawasaki:
So listen, Carol Dweck’s book Mindset changed my life, and I think that’s true for maybe millions of people. That basically she was saying, you know, if you have a fixed mindset, you think you are what you are. You cannot be anymore. You also believe you cannot be any less. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe you can grow, you can gain new skills and new passions and new things. And that it sounds like a no-brainer now, but I mean for the people who believe that you’re born a genius or you’re born an idiot, this is kind of, you know, revelations.
Greg McKeown:
So yeah, I agree with that. I want to ask more when did you read it?
Guy Kawasaki:
I read it in the early 2000s.
Greg McKeown:
And what was it like before reading it? What was it like after reading it? Like when you say it changed my life, changed the way I thought, with there specific results that you were struggling with at the time, that this explained to you and unlocked for you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, you know, I would say that I had been successful in some things, and I thought, “Okay, so that’s your calling, Guy, that’s what you can do.”
You know, and one of the fine points of the fixed mindset is not only do you believe that you cannot learn anything new, but you also believe that you cannot lose anything you already have because it’s fixed. And that is a very dangerous thing because, you know, all of a sudden, you think you’re a prodigy, you’re a genius, and you don’t have to work hard.
Greg McKeown:
So, just to clarify, so did you feel like you were in that kind of like a sort of a hubris story?
Guy Kawasaki:
No, no.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so that wasn’t the situation for you. So, what was the situation for you?
Guy Kawasaki:
The situation for me was I was fat, dumb, and happy, but I was not willing to take RISC into new places and, believe it or not, the manifestation where I really first kind of actuated this was sports because I took up hockey at the age of 44 and then I took up surfing at 60. And those are roughly 40 and 55 years too late to take up those sports.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, I get it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And that’s, you know, that’s the growth mindset. And I have my podcast is called Remarkable People. I’ve had about 200 people on it, from Jane Goodall to Angela Duckworth to Steve Wolf, from Wozniak, I mean Neil DeGrasse-Tyson, you name it. And I’ll tell you something: nobody said, “Guy, I’m a genius. I was born that way. I didn’t have to work for it.”
Everybody grew, and everybody grew, which means he also had grit, and so I created. One of the proudest parts of this book is I have, I love tricholins. You, being OCD, you probably love tricholins too. Right, not only do I have a tricholin, I have a tricholin with alliteration, and not just the first letter alliteration, first two letter alliteration: growth, grit, and grace. I mean, that’s pure literature. Prize level right there.
Greg McKeown:
No, there is something really lovely about it. Like you know, you can. You can see that as a Venn diagram, right, and those really are such vital elements in putting them together and it does conjure an image of someone oriented to the world in a certain way. And what you said about all these people that you’ve had on your podcast is the Remarkable People Podcast, if I’m not mistaken, and one of the things that I think is telling about that in your story about that is that it seems to me that people that have a fixed mindset get like they peak really early. They may peak; I mean, I’m talking literally; they might peak if they were the quarterback in their high school football team, that could be the peak. It could be before then, right? They were popular when they were 12 in a class. It could be that it was a math class that they were ever, you know, the teacher thought they were a genius in it. Like, at some point, the peak happens and then, and then it filters, you know, down afterward, and I think it’s absolutely connected with you’ve been surprisingly successful, like you may yourself have been surprised. “Oh, I’m good at this. I’m getting great positive feedback at this thing.”
You look like, “Oh, I’m doing it.”
And then, because of the fixed mindset that’s there, you immediately then become afraid of trying hard in the future and putting in effort because you think, “Well, that will reveal that I’m not special,” right? That I don’t have the thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
That’s so insightful. I absolutely believe that, and I also think that there’s not only that factor going on. Let’s say you’re a musician, you’re your prodigy in music or physics, or you know, pick something, surfing, whatever. So then, you’re worried about affecting your image and your self-image. And that’s really limiting. And then I think, even worse, maybe is the fact that you think, “Oh listen, I’m so good in music, but it’s so hard to learn to surf. I must not be good at surfing. I can’t be good at surfing because the things that I do so well came so easy.”
You associate effort with impossibility, and that is just pathetic. I mean, I feel sorry for people who say, oh, it took me so long to learn how to surf, so I gave up because it was too hard. I mean that it’s such a limiting thing. They think using Picasso’s first painting was great.
Greg McKeown:
Well, obviously, that is true, but you just framed it as pathetic, which which I can, I can relate to. But I, I feel I just want to push back a little on that because I feel, as you do, I know too, so much compassion for the enormous costs people pay for being in a mind prison of some paradigm they didn’t even know they were in.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Because that’s what the fixed mindset that, when you say it was life-changing, it’s because you were, you had unintentionally, unconsciously absorbed this idea that our raw intelligence is fixed. And, of course, you can go beyond that, as you have done, to say, well, it’s your ability to play a sport that is fixed. I mean, it’s not just academic intelligence, it could be many other areas of development, but so many people have this I don’t even really know why.
I’m actually quite curious about that. I’ve done a lot of research on it, but I don’t know really where the idea stems from. But I was talking to somebody 10, 15 years ago maybe they just turned 65. They were talking about a friend that they’d met, that picked up by cycling, biking, you know, recently, and as he was telling me, he was saying, “I mean, I couldn’t do that. That’s just ridiculous, you know, like I’m too old to do that.”
Well, it’s been another 10 years now. If he’d been doing it for 10 years, he’d be a great cyclist now; you know it’d certainly be healthier and fitter than he was.
And so it is sort of pathetic in a sense, but it’s in its truest sense. It, of course, means dictionary definition. It’s pitiable, it’s a pitiable thing, and…
Guy Kawasaki:
Pathetic is not the right word.
Greg McKeown:
But pitiable, I think, is closer. It’s so sad you know there’s so much potential is held on to that could be opened up.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think you bring up a good point, which is that was too harsh of judgment on my standpoint. Now, you know, I also think that there may be cases where maybe you’re a single mom, and you have three kids, and you have two jobs, and you always wanted to be an artist. I would say that it’s not necessarily pathetic that you haven’t strived to become an artist. Your circumstances are so difficult you just couldn’t do it. That I understand, that I understand. But if you have the flexibility and the means to try stuff, man, I sure hope you try stuff, because life is so much more interesting than what you may already know, and it’s a life is so great, right? I mean, there’s so many. Look at all the books on your shelf. Imagine if you only read one of those. Life would be different.
I hope people you know, and I think that we have, at least in America I think we have this assumption that you need to find your passion in life. And you know it’s like 18 years old, what do you mean? You haven’t started your not-for-profit yet. You haven’t built a school in Africa yet. Like, what are you going to put on your application for Yale and Dartmouth if you haven’t done these things and you’re already 18?
I think the word passion is a negative because it sets up too high a fence, a barrier. A goal is too high and what you should do is you should have many interests in life and scratch all of them until you knock on wood. You may find a passion, or a Japanese word is “ikigai”. But to say that you know I’m looking for my passion, it’s going to be first love at first sight and just going to change the rest of my life. I think you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
Greg McKeown:
Well, this is something. One of the chapters in your book is explicitly on this theme of having many, like many seeds, you know, and we could give it another linguistic term is, asymmetric bets, where you say, look, if, as soon as you well, as soon as you can exit fixed mindset and enter growth mindset, which is saying you can get smarter through trying things through, through learning. You don’t just learn a new thing; you expand your mind. So it’s not fixed. You didn’t have the capability before, but now you do.
And, of course, you can just see, for those that maybe are still learning about this for the first time, how dramatically different that is. If you are threatened that you could be discovered at any moment as not being the genius that people thought you were because you’re bad at something right or not gifted at something because you suddenly aren’t good at that thing, it will inherently stop you from the correct behavior, which is to try it to be game to, to have a shot at it again at any point in your life. Can you talk more about this idea of, like, you know, multiple seeds or a story from the book about somebody that illustrates this principle?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, and you know what. Well, before we leave the growth mindset part here. But you know, I recently interviewed another professor from Stanford. Her name is Mary Murphy, and she’s Carol Dweck’s protégé. And she, I think, has even improved the work of the growth mindset because I, and to this day, I believe many people who are aware of the growth mindset think that it’s all inside your head. Right, it’s your problem; you own it; it’s your mindset.
Mary has made the observation that it also takes the right environment because if you have a growth mindset but you’re in a, she calls it a culture of genius, and in this sense, genius is a negative because a culture of genius means we hire only the best and brightest. They’re all geniuses; they’re all A players, A+ players. They don’t need any growth, they don’t need any training, they don’t just all freaking brilliant already. And if you have a growth mindset and you’re in a culture of genius and you’ve been labeled not a genius, there’s no opportunity for advancement and growth. So you need to have a growth mindset and be in a growth environment to truly pull this off, and that’s an important point.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, Murphy’s work on this is, you know, I mean, first of all, it’s consistent with work that I collaborated on years ago in what was first a Harvard Business Review article and then a book, but it was all about being a multiplier, and this idea of the kinds of people that multiply the intelligence in others and that I think is consistent with what Mary’s work is is it isn’t just you that might, and I love it because that at first level, one that allows you to go, oh well, the thought came from somewhere. Like, I got this from someone. I didn’t just, I wasn’t just born with a fixed mindset on intelligence. My family of origin might have been a family that thought about intelligence as a fixed view, and then you go to a school that might be thinking about intelligence as a fixed view. You know, people are just great, gifted or not, and in fact, there’s been a shift. Even the word genius itself. We’re not going to be able to undo this, but the word genius used to mean like it was more like having, you know, I’m trying to remember the word we use now. We say, somebody, somebody, you know, they’re in music, they get the. What’s the word that you get the? What’s the word?
Guy Kawasaki:
Gifted.
Greg McKeown:
No, not gifted, no, no. It was completely different to that. It was like, well, it was; you have the genius with you. That was the connotation. I was writing this book, and, and, and the genius came into me, and so it’s. It was. The idea was that it could come and go with someone. It’s like we would say the muse, now you know, it comes, it goes, and genius was like that. So it’s like the ultimate victory for a fixed intelligence mindset to take the word genius and make it a permanent the characteristic of a person because, of course, then it completely obliterates the idea that it can be available for everybody and it also, as you already said, it obliterates the humility that, well, I could, you know, I could lose it if I behave incorrectly, you know and in this idea of I have to live in a certain way, let’s say, a state of humility and openness, almost like a childlike attitude, in order for that genius to be with us and to and to and to help us along in whatever pursuit we’re trying.
Guy Kawasaki:
I interviewed a woman who ran the MacArthur Foundation Fellowships. You know, the so-called genius award, right? And I was not aware of this kind of definition of genius, and I dare say that when you look at it this way, you would not want your fellowship to be called the genius award because if you look at those people who won those fellowships, they were, you know, 20 years being an improv, or 20 years on this or 20 years on that. It wasn’t like they came out of the womb, and they’re like, all of a sudden, they’re automatic geniuses.
Greg McKeown:
There was an article years ago that was that someone told me about. I’ve never read it, but the title is its own message. It says, “No More Child Prodigies, Please.” That was the title of the article, and I think it’s because of exactly what we’re talking about here. When whatever kind of success comes early and defines a person, and then it gets, they’re just stuck. They arrest their development, like literally arrest the development, and so you have to somehow undo that, otherwise someone will be frozen in a version of them from before. Right. They’re frozen as the quarterback from high school. They’re frozen as that whatever the math nerd, even that was really good at that math, or the debate champion or whatever it was. When you peak, and I say it to my children all the time, I’m like, “Just don’t, like, don’t peak early. We’re like we’re just late bloomers in our family. We’re just going to keep on learning like lifelong learning and lifelong fitness and lifelong like we got a long game to play here. It’s not about peaking at these key moments in your life.”
Guy Kawasaki:
If you think about it. These kids are brought to light and highlight, and when you read these stories about kids who graduated college at 15, it’s only really interesting because they did it so young. What’s the follow-up test? What are they at 25? What are they at 50 and 60, right?
Greg McKeown:
No, it’s not a pretty picture. Yeah, it’s not a pretty picture, and it’s because of combining a lot of attention on an early achievement that you then freeze people in that version of themselves, and I think it’s it’s a very, it’s not really a gift we’re giving them. It’s damaged that we’re giving them a damaged paradigm. So I have a curious question about this. So would you say, would you say that Steve had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset when?
Guy Kawasaki:
I interviewed Mary, and she was describing this culture of genius. I said to her you know, as I look back, I don’t think the Macintosh division had a culture of growth. I think it had a culture of genius. And we label people as bozos or not bozos, and you are a player or not, then blah, blah, blah.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, that’s how we started our conversation. Go ahead, yeah, and then.
Guy Kawasaki:
I can’t tell you. If you think that Steve Jobs took you on the side and discussed your life goals and your path for Improvement, and how you can be better, I hate to disappoint you. Yeah, that conversation never took place. So I was all depressed, thinking, “I work for a culture of genius, not a culture of growth. Oh, you know. Oh, thank God, Guy, you got through that relatively unscathed.”
But then, as I thought about it some more, maybe the Macintosh division was a culture of growth. It’s just that the judgments were very harsh compared to most places of growth.
So it’s not that Steve believed you were a genius, or not permanently, forever, but he expected everybody to be genius, and so he had the ultimate environment of growth. He expected you to be a genius, which you know. Sometimes, if somebody expects you to be a genius, you become a genius because of that expectation, right? And so maybe he had the ultimate culture of growth, and like, right now he’s in heaven, and he’s like laughing at you, “Guy man. It took you that long to figure that out?”
But Greg, by the way, Greg is another word that starts with gr, so I can’t have what’s beyond a tricolon: growth, grit, grace, and Greg.
Greg McKeown:
I like it. I like that. I’m adding in a little illegal addition to your to your literature model in this book. So the Steve question is like a really interesting one. I mean, my story for this is that I mean I love what you just said about it, so that’s a really nice way of thinking about it.
It also seems to me that he himself doesn’t. There’s no question at all in my mind that he had a growth mindset in his own life like that I don’t have any question about, because you cannot evolve at the speed with which he was willing to, whether you even just look at the product journeys. But it’s not even that you know, in that period, those 10 years when he’s at next right, he that’s when he gets married, he has children, that’s when he’s over at Pixar, effectively being taught, even though he’s trying to be useful, he’s also being taught hey, there’s a different way to make decisions than the way you’ve been making them. There’s a different way to manage the way you’ve been managing. And so he comes back to Apple as a significantly different leader. And that doesn’t mean that he’s suddenly perfect. There wasn’t anything that he got wrong. Obviously, that’s not true, but the media image never seemed to catch up. They missed the story of growth. You know, yeah, maybe it’s a meta-level exactly what we’re talking about, because, at some level, this growth mindset for other people, this growth culture, is allowing someone to grow. You know, it’s a, it’s saying yeah, your reputation used to be this, but I see that you’ve grown into this.
Guy Kawasaki:
You could make this case, although we’re one game shy of the fairy tale, right? But the quarterback of the 49ers was drafted last, or you know whatever, right? He wasn’t first round, and he took this team to the Super Bowl. I mean, that’s got to be a growth mindset, right? I mean he wasn’t the Heisman Trophy winner, and so how did he do that? And that’s a growth mindset.
Now, I think when you look at Steve, listen, if anybody tells you he wasn’t a genius, and I mean that in a positive sense, they’re just jealous. So, I would say that if you have a growth mindset, you’ll do well. If you have a genius, if you are a genius, you might do well, but if you’re a genius with a growth mindset, you are unstoppable.
