Guy Kawasaki | How to Make a Difference

Hello and welcome to today's meeting of the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California, our new name. After merging with World Affairs near the end of last year, I'm Eric Siegal chair of the club's Personal Growth Forum and your host for today. We also welcome our listening audience and we invite everyone to visit us online at Commonwealth Club. Dawg. Our main speaker, Guy Kawasaki, is the former chief evangelist for Apple. He was the rejuvenate year of the Macintosh cult is an executive fell

ow of the High School of Business at UC Berkeley and currently is chief evangelist for Canva, which produces a suite of visual design tools. He's also the author of more than 15 books, including Two on Personal Growth. Hindsight's published in 2009, and his new book, Think Remarkable Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference, which is the subject of today's discussion. Guy is going to be joined this evening by Madisun Newsmaker guys, coauthor and the producer of His Remarkable Peop

le Project on podcast. Guy Madsen's book, which is based on hundreds of interviews with remarkable people. It's about improving your own life or making a positive difference in the world. He has indeed created an easy to understand how to do it. Guide that is to use an old phrase for the rest of us. As Guy explains, it's not just about building a foundation of knowledge and relationships and then finding a worthwhile goal. It's also about how to move beyond that initial feeling of Eureka and exc

itement to sell ideas, lead a team and inspire others. I know that some of us, including myself, have struggled with this topic and I'm really looking forward to this evening's discussion, which will, I'm sure, give us lots to talk about. So it's now my pleasure to ask you to join me in welcoming Guy and Madison to the club and to our podium. Good evening. Thank you very much for joining. You know, it's it's kind of I know people always say that when they start speeches, but truly, to be a Commo

nwealth Club speaker is an honor. I really do believe that. And so I'm I'm very happy to be here. I think I've done this one or two other times, but the thrill never wears off. Now, Madison is obviously much younger than I am, so I wanted her to have exposure and see what it's like to be at the Commonwealth Club. And by my calculation, I think the first time I spoke at the Commonwealth Club, I was probably 45 or 50. So she's probably 20 years ahead of me. All right. So I want I'm going to let Ma

tt is the nicer the producer of the Remarkable People podcast and my coauthor start this presentation. Thanks, guy. Yeah. Thank you all for coming. This is super exciting and new to me. So thank you. So, yeah, the foundation of this book, you know, starts with our podcast Remarkable People. And Guy believes it's his greatest work, and I have to agree with him on that. And on this podcast, we've had people like Mark Rober, Jane Goodall, Olivia, Juliana, and we've also had a lot of people too, tha

t just have regular stories that are beautiful and we found inspiring. So and our podcast Total has accumulated to be about 250 hours. And when we started writing this book, we printed out all the transcripts from the episodes and we had about 5000 pages. And that's kind of where we got the foundation of the book. And we condensed this book into 8 hours, 170 pages and idiot tactics. So so we're going to go through a list of ten things. And the first one I'm going to present, and it's called the

Sweat, the Small stuff. And when I first started working for Guy, I didn't really have that concept master down at all, something as small as my email address, which was something very complicated like mmn ui semi r Yeah, nothing like super plane that someone could just know. So he taught me little things like making a signature, changing my email address to be just plain and yeah, just added to my credibility. So yeah, little things add up I guess. So that's, that's item number one. And the way

that Madison and I met was through rigorous searches of online databases and using indeed, and you know, all the monster jobs and all that. Actually, not at all. I mean, when we met surfing, believe it or not, and we were surfing and I needed help with my podcast and I know there's a lot of time between waves when you surf. So we got to talking about what she's doing and, you know, where she gradually added what school and all that. And then I said, you know, what do you do? And she told me wha

t she did. I was like, Do you have spare cycles? Can you help me Do research and stuff for the podcast? And she said, Yes, and that was the start of it. It's it's surfing brought us together. It really is. Yeah. It's a funny story of I don't think that that's how, you know, Tom Peters met his coauthor probably they they probably met at McKinsey, but Madison and I met surfing. So yeah so when when we first met, I she had like the world's hardest to remember email address. And I said, Why are you

putting all those triple M's in there, Just like, put your name? And, and she had a avatar on LinkedIn that was you must have been 12 years old. I mean, it was like her baby picture. LinkedIn is your professional representation. You got to, like, you know, have a good picture. And that. Did you even know what a signature was in an email? No, I mean, well, yeah, I'd like seen it, but I had never been in a position where I like really needed one. So. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're not familiar with a si

gnature is it's most emailed clients you can set up what's called your signature. And in your signature you put like Guy Kawasaki, Chief evangelist, Canva email address, cellular phone number. I put my cell phone number. I don't hesitate to do that. And that's at the bottom of every email so that, you know, God forbid if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, they don't have to like, go look through all the old emails to find the one with your cell phone number. It's there every time. And I h

ope all of you embrace that. So we started off this presentation because I think that it's important to sweat the small stuff that every day we're making judgments about people, you know, should we contact them? Should we return their call? Should we invite them on the podcast, should we listen to them and all these kind of things and all these little pieces of evidence add up? And I'll tell you, that is sometimes I see people who reach out to us and their email address is at AOL dot com. And I

got to tell you, when we see an email address from AOL, the car is like, do we even need to bother with this? And so I hope none of you have AOL dot com. The e-mail address is. So. So you know we're we're one recommendation into this. Okay. So that's number one. I don't I'm just going to click. So number two are we see. Yeah, yeah. So number two, we are both devotees of Carol Dweck. Carol Dweck is the author of Mindset from Stanford. And you know, when an author tells you to read somebody else's

book, there is no higher form of praise. And I'm telling you, every one of you should read Mindset by Carol Dweck. She draws this dichotomy between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The fixed mindset says that you can't learn, you can't try new things. You know that you're set and it can be your set at a low place or you're set at a high place. And many people have the fixed mindset that they're a genius and they don't have to work, they don't have to apply, they don't have to learn because

they're set. And that's as bad. I think, as a fixed mindset that I cannot learn, I cannot grow. So either of those six mindsets are bad. The growth mindset means that you believe you can improve, you can learn new skills. And you know, I started telling you about how Madison and I met surfing, and I'll tell you that one of the most obvious manifestations of my growth mindset is that I took up hockey ice hockey at the age of 44 and that's like 40 years too late to start hockey. I'm from Honolulu

, Hawaii, and there's not a lot upon hockey in Honolulu, Hawaii. I mean, we have shaved ice, but we don't have pong hockey. And then at 60, I took up surfing and let's just say that's about 55 years too late to take up surfing. But if you have a growth mindset, you know, you you take up hockey at 44, you take up surfing at 60. So that's recommendation number two. Recommendation number three is the flip side of that, which is if you have a growth mindset, you have to embrace vulnerability. The wo

rd vulnerability comes from the Latin root, meaning wound w or unda. So you have to be able to tolerate being wounded. And Madison can attest to you that, you know, if you saw me surfing, you'd understand why I have embraced being wounded. Surfing, surfing is a very difficult thing. And but it's true that if you if you want to learn, if you want to grow, you are going to face setbacks. one of the bigger problems of a fixed mindset is you believe that if you try something and it's hard, you shoul

d not proceed because you're not a natural, right? But if you think about it, whenever you try something new, it's going to be hard. You're going to be vulnerable. And so you need to embrace this vulnerability. Vulnerability is a way of, I think, mediocrity leaving your body. So I was very vulnerable in hockey and surfing all the things that I tried. And I think you just have to embrace that. So embrace vulnerability is a good thing. Number four. Number four, we learned from a guy named Andrew Z

immer and Andrew Zimmer and had bizarre foods. He goes around the world eating like, I don't know, in Iceland, like salted sharks or whatever, and guinea pigs in Peru and all this kind of stuff. And Andrew Zimmern had problems with substance abuse when he was younger. So at age 30 he was an intern. And believe it or not, he was the world's oldest intern. And he being the overachiever that he became, he was an intern at three companies at once. And he said that, you know, one day a mentor pulled

him aside. Is that Andrew? You know, if you want to be successful, you have to make yourself indispensable because the indispensable people, they get more responsibility, they get more freedom, they get more rewards. Everything is better for an indispensable person. So naturally we have to ask him, So, Andrew, what makes a person indispensable? And he said about 80 or 90% of it is just showing up. You just have to keep showing up. The second part of making yourself indispensable is you just have

to do the crap work that nobody else wants to do. So he tells a story in our book about how the producer of the TV channel that he worked for one day asked, You know, we have to lay some cable. Who can help? Andrew raises his head. We have to set up lighting for an interview. Andrew says, I'll do it. He says, We need someone to edit a lot of video. Andrew says he'll do it. He basically said yes to everything. Now I realize, particularly for Gen Z and stuff, it's it's about boundaries, right? An

d, you know, work life balance. Madison and I have somewhat different opinions about this, but I think that if you want to make a difference and you want to be remarkable, you're going to have to put work life balance a little bit on the back burner that you just have to pay the price. That that's been my experience. And listen, I have kids who are 19, 21, 28 and 30, so I know all about, yeah, we're going to like do our 3 hours of work from Bali and then we're going to go to Cancun and then we'r

e going to go to Lisbon. And you know, at the companies we work for, we don't have to show up. We can always be remote. I understand that. But I think that if you truly want to be remarkable and make a difference, you're going to make yourself indispensable. And showing up is part of being indispensable. It's a cost of doing business. I'm not saying it's the only way or I'm not saying it's the optimal way, but that's our observation. Remarkable. People show up and they do the work that nobody el

se wants to do. Number five. Number five, I don't know if I could say that word on Commonwealth Group. You could say that. Okay, so you know, I think that people I don't want you to get the impression that we wrote a self-help book. This is not a self-help book in the sense that it's not about this executive coach has written a book based on his experience working with Silicon Valley SEALs about how to reposition yourself, how to rebrand yourself, how to make the case that you're a visionary and

a thought leader. And then, you know, if if you can't get enough from the book, then this weekend at the Hyatt Embarcadero, he has a two day seminar and it's $5,000. And, you know, for after spending 48 hours with this guru, you're going to be a remarkable person. You know, And listen, I've been in so I've been to somebody so, you know, in the in the first session, the opening session, you know, he gets everybody to stand up and, you know, you you greet the person on your right and you say you

are remarkable. And then you meet the person on your left and you see you're remarkable and you all stand up and you shake, you know, then you do yoga and then you do transcendental meditation. And 48 hours later, you're out five grand and you're no more remarkable than when you were. But anyway, so I'm telling you this whole diatribe, because the way you be remark able is you do good shit. So the way it works is you do good shit, you make a difference. You make the world a better place. It coul

d be just for one person. Maybe it's just a foster child, right? Maybe it's yourself. Maybe it's a classroom. If you're a teacher, maybe if it's. It's a team. If you're a coach, maybe you cleaned up a sidewalk or a stream. But the point is, you make a difference. You do good shit, and then people will have no choice but to consider you remarkable. And I can guarantee you the two most remarkable people that I know are Steve Jobs and Jane Goodall. And I can guarantee you neither of them ever got u

p and said to themselves, How can I position myself as remarkable? I guarantee you, Steve Jobs wanted to make people more creative and productive. He was what we call in the book. We have a whole discussion about ourselves in the book. Okay. And fundamentally, there's two kinds of assholes. So there's one who's an egocentric asshole. It's all about me, myself and I glorification of myself. There's also the mission driven asshole and the mission driven asshole only cares about accomplishing the g

oal of making a difference. So Steve Jobs was that kind of asshole. He was driven by making people more creative and productive, and all his asshole and isms came about because he was so dedicated to that mission. He did good Shit. Macintosh one Apple one, Apple two. Well, let's forget the Apple three, Let's forget the Newton and let's forget the Lisa then Macintosh, then iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple Store, Genius Bar, App Store. You know, he made things that made a difference. And that's why we th

ink he's remarkable. And same thing with Jane Goodall. She didn't wake up in Africa thinking, how do I position myself as a thought leader, as a pioneer and primatologist? She just wanted to understand chimps, right? That's what she did. That's how she made a difference. So the bottom line is, just remember, these three words do good shit. That's it. Number six. Number six is that even with the intent of doing good shit, many people think that the hard part is the idea, right? Like, why don't I

make a graphical user interface computer that's easy to use with the weak pruning with the weak display, but it's a brilliant idea. It's easy to come up with that idea. The hard part is getting beyond the point of Eureka. I have the idea. The hard part is implementation, and I think the the most important thing you can do to get beyond Eureka is to build a prototype, a prototype of the website, a prototype of your computer, prototype of your book, prototype of your surfboard, your skateboard, wh

atever you're building, you need to build it so people can feel it and touch it and use it. And that's the step to get beyond Eureka. Number seven is that talking about vulnerability and growth? There are a lot of people talk about faking it until you make it. And I cannot say that like I completely agree with this concept. Now many people have misinterpreted fake it until you make it. It means that, you know, you sort of make stuff up and you lie, right? So you say, my machine could take one dr

op of your blood and do all this diagnosis. Right? And then I'll show you the results. And they literally were faking the results. Fake it until you make it. Really. It's when you are in a situation where you look around the room and you just got appointed to the board of directors of a company or something, and you look around the room and there's a CEO and a CEO and a guru and a, you know, Commonwealth Club speaker and you say, I don't belong here. Who am I? I'm not worthy. They're going to fi

nd out that I'm a fake in that situation. And you should know that anybody who's not a delusional psychopath probably has imposter syndrome just like you. I would make the argument if you don't have a bit of imposter syndrome, you're probably delusional. I mean, you probably are. And I could tell you, right, Madison, that some of the 250 people we interviewed, probably 150 were women. We were heavily slanted towards women. I told Madison once, Why don't we just do only women? We just, like, make

it remarkable. Women forget the people part. But anyway, and I could tell you that many, many women said we had imposter and not one man ever mentioned having imposter syndrome. You think about that for a second. So that's fake it until you make it face it until you make it means that when you are on a growth path and when you're feeling vulnerable and you're afraid, you have to face your fears, not fake your fears. You have to face your fears. And the extreme example of this is a guy named Gar

rett McNamara in our book and podcast. Garrett McNamara is a big wave surfer. There's an HBO series about him called Hundred Foot Waves, so he lives in Navsari part of the year, and he literally surfs 100 foot waves, which is roughly 98 feet bigger than the waves I surf. And the he told us this, that he said at at the time he was completely afraid of anything from 8 to 10 feet or higher. He would not go out 8 to 10 feet. And finally his friends forced him and he faced his fears and he went out i

n eight or ten feet and that just one thing led to another. And now we have Garrett McNamara at 100 feet. So, you know, Madison has not made a lot of public presentations. And I said, you're just going to have to face your fears. You're going to go speak at the Commonwealth. And, you know, this is sitting here at this organization, this kind of thing, like there are many SEALs who practice for weeks and they're scared stiff of being in this chair. Believe me, I know some, but we're going to make

Madison face our fears right now. Yeah, I'd much prefer being go home. Okay. So think of Garrett McNamara. He went from ten foot to a hundred foot wave. Okay, The thing is that the remarkable people we notice, they take the high road. They do not believe that life is a zero sum game, that, you know, someone's loss is my gain. Someone's gain is my loss. They believe that the rising tide floats all boats. They also believe that the falling tide takes all boats down. Right. And so when you take th

e high road, you believe that life is not a zero sum game, that we can all succeed. And that's a very important attitude. I don't think any of the people we interviewed really had this kind of, you know, give and take. If you gain market share, I lose market share. If you succeed, I fail. If I succeed, you fail. It wasn't that at all. It's not like Jane Goodall said, I've got to figure out chimps before anybody else does because I want to like own the market for the expertise in chimpanzees is s

o take the high road, give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to tell you, only because we're in San Francisco. My wife and I, we had one son and she was pregnant with our second son. We were living on Union Street where Union Street Dead ends into the Presidio. So you're from San Francisco? You know, that's a very nice area, right? so one day I can tell you the address. If you live in Presidio, it's 2820 Union Street. So you drive past 28, 20 Union Street. That's where I used to live. A

nd so one day I'm out in front of 28, 20 unions, and I'm cutting the bougainvillea hedge. Okay? And this older white woman, she comes up to me, she goes, Do you do lawns? And okay. Okay. So there's a message about racial profiling, right? The Japanese guy cutting the hedge must be the yard man. So but, you know, you may think that's the punch line and that's the lesson of this story. But it's not. It's not. This is a story of taking the high road. And one of the the most crucial times I learned

to take the high road was several weeks later, my father came and I'm third generation Japanese-American. He second he he served in the US Army, you know, and our generation, second and third. We were more intent on proving we love America than finding our roots and, you know, maintaining the Japanese culture. We wanted to prove that we were Americans. And that's why you hear these stories about people who were in the internment camps during World War Two, still served in the US Army. And, you k

now, the most decorated battalion in the for 42nd, all those kind of things, Right? So the country that put me in a concentration camp, I'm now going to go fight for. It's because the Japanese Americans wanted to prove how much they loved America. So now I'm telling you this story. So I think that I'm like, I'm thinking my father is just going to frickin lose this when she hears this story. So I tell him this story and he says to me, You know, son, statistically, you cutting a hedge on union Str

eet, most likely you were the yard man. So get over it. Take the high road. Don't look for problems. Enough problems exists. Don't go looking for problems and trying to create a problem. And I think that's the thing I truly learned about taking the high road. You know, maybe she just wanted to know if I did Lance It wasn't because she had me stereotyped, right? And so I, I, I remember I tell that story a lot. I think it's a very telling story in my youth about taking the high road. So that's num

ber eight. Number nine, speaking of my father, when I was in high school, he pulled me aside one day and we come from a lower middle class family in Hawaii. If any of you from Hawaii were from Cali, he Valley and Cali, he very let's just say it's not like Union Street, okay? And but we we were lower middle class but I think I had a wonderful childhood it's not like I suffered I don't I don't have this kind of life where I can tell you that my family was just dirt poor. And, you know, my grandfat

her and grandmother, they caught the last helicopter out of South Vietnam, you know, the embassy. And then the US Army dropped us off in Fresno with one suitcase and we work for 7-Eleven and, you know, my mother cleaned houses and I don't have that kind of story. I had a very happy, lower middle class family life, and he pulled me aside. I said, You know, son, we're very fortunate. And so I want to explain to you the concept of noblesse of leash, which means that the nobility have a social and m

oral obligation to the people who are less fortunate. Now, I have come to dislike the term noblesse oblige because I don't like the term nobility. Right. The nobility. I think it's open to this, abuse it like, you know, I'm Prince Harry, I'm from the royal family. And because I'm such a wonderful person, I'm going to take care of you peons. Right? And so Meghan and I, we are just such wonderful people. We're going to take care of you. I think that's total bullshit. So I have coined the term succ

ess. Publish success simply means that when you are successful, you have an obligation to society to help other people be successful too. Because no matter how much growth mindset you've embraced, how much vulnerability you've been through, you are where you are because of luck. And some teachers, some coach, some boss, some buddy gave you a chance. And so when you walk through that door, you have a moral obligation to keep that door open. If not expand the door for others. And that's a success,

I believe. And I would say everybody we interviewed believe they had a success of leads. When you when you when you read this book or you listen to our podcasts, they all mention about what's important to them now. And it's not that they can walk on the campus of Harvard and see a building named after them. It's not that there's, you know, this kind of trophies. It's all about how we are helping young people, whether it's Jane Goodall or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stacey Abrams. Everybody wants to

help younger people get through that door. That's number nine. Number ten. Number ten is that I think especially in Silicon Valley, we are so obsessed with making the right decision and right. So we use big data. Now we're using AI to make the right decision. And the thinking is that with enough study and intelligence that, you can pick the absolute right decision. And when you do that, then implementation is easy. My experience is that making the decision is not that hard. Implementation is the

hard part. And so I think we noticed that lots of people not on our podcast but lots of people other than the people on our podcast, they are always talking about making the right decision. And what we learned in talking to them is instead of making the right decision, what remarkable people focus on is making the decision and right. So there's a lot of times, no matter how much data, how much analytical skill you have, you simply don't know if you're making the right decision. I'm not saying m

ake dumb decisions. I'm saying you take the best shot and then you dedicate yourself to making that decision. Right. I'm going to show you a little video. And I honestly don't know when click next if it's going to immediately start playing. I don't remember. You know it with PowerPoint, it's always a little bit of a crapshoot. What's going to happen. So I'm going to tell you a lot about this video before I click next, because I really I don't know if it's going to automatically play or not. So t

he scenario here is that this is a short video of a woman at a surfing competition in Manhattan Beach, California, about six months ago and Manhattan Beach. The way the wave breaks, it breaks very fast on top of you. Whereas for people like me, I want to wave the brakes very slowly because I take about 20 seconds to pop up. And so this is a completely different beach. And so in this surfing competition, you see surfers and they're always looking out to the ocean and they're trying to pick the tr

end to make the right decision the right way, the right place to set the right time, to turn the right angle to turn. And the amount of right effort, should I paddle fast, should I paddle slow or should I paddle hard? You know, there's there's all these variables. So you try to make this right decision, but sometimes you make the wrong decision or sometimes the ocean has a mind of its own and it makes its own decision. I'm going to show you this video. I get to control it. That's good. That's go

od. Okay, so here she is. She's looking out to sea. She's trying to see, you know, I'm going to make the right decision, going to pick the right way. So now she's looking. She's looking, my God, I'm in the wrong place. I am in the wrong place. This wave is going to break right on top of me and it is going to crush me and I'm going to be landing up on the sand. And then I got to paddle all the way out like everything is going wrong right now. This is not the position you want to be in when you're

surfing. Let's start again. So. my God. Now, if this were me at this point, I would be flipping over and I'd be. I'd be. I'd be held on there and I'd be thinking, man, that was like I'd been under the water for 30 minutes. It's a wonder I didn't drown. But really, it's about 10 seconds. Not even tens. It's like 2 seconds, right? But you really think time really changes when you're being tossed around. And this is on a, you know, four foot wave. Not a lot, 100 foot wave. So anyway, at this point

, she's in trouble. She does nothing she can do. She's just at the mercy of this wave. But this is when she begins to instead of trying to make the right decision because she made the wrong decision. Now she's making this this wrong decision right. So she, in fact, still stands up and she catches the wave. She's still getting tossed and she's going to do this cross step, which is the whole purpose of a longboard competition. This is a metaphor for life that I think that when you look at people w

ho are remarkable, they make the decisions that they made, Right? That's the key. Make your decision. Right. As opposed to only trying to make the right decision. So that's the last lesson that we want to talk about in how to be remarkable. We have books out there and this is what the book like like and the we we really, I don't know, matter some. We really love the most flattering thing is that we can help you make a difference. Like when I die, I want you to say that I helped you make a differ

ence. I hope you make a difference in my writing, my speaking, my podcasting, my investing, my advising. That's that's how I want to keep score. Madison doesn't think about when she's going to die because she's a lot further away from dying than me. But I think about it all the time. So. So don't be scared. It's just the book. It's just the book. And then this is my last slide. To the page. So we noticed that not everybody likes to read books and you can only get a physical book tonight. You can

go to Amazon and you can get the audiobook. But we have one more path for you, and this is that last path. So we're working with Canva. We have created a free online course about how to be remarkable, and it's meant for you to just take this course. You don't have to read, you know, like a book. You don't have to listen. And there's videos in there from people like Jane Goodall recorded a video just for us and Mark Rober. Andrew Zimmer. And so it'll put your cameras on that and go to that websi

te because if you don't feel like buying the book and helping Madison and I make a meek living from writing, then you can take this free online course. And you know, if you know teachers and people that maybe can use this course in their classroom, you don't even have to be a registered Canva user. You'll just go straight to the website and it teaches you how to be remarkable. So that's that's our last slide. And now we'll be happy to take you in there and one more thing I need to tell you befor

e we start Q&A, which is violating all HIPA regulations, I am deaf and and I am deaf, but I have a cochlear implant. And this cochlear implant takes you from being deaf to just having really hearing, which, believe it or not, is a miracle. Like it. For a while I was more or less deaf. Deaf? No cochlear implant. And let's just say that it's very hard to be a podcaster when you're deaf. It's hard to interact with your guest, although we talk about that in the book too, which is like when I was dea

f, I had to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson when I was basically deaf. And we use the chrome transcription window. Let's just say that's not 100% and let's also say that Neil deGrasse Tyson is brain runs faster than the chrome. Transcript. So it was difficult to put it mildly. So I'm telling you this whole story so that I am deaf. And if you ask, I may not be able to comprehend what you're asking. Maddison has perfect hearing, and among the many tasks that she performs is as a producer of the podc

ast. She sits in on every podcast because I cannot hear if there's a buzz or there is humming or, you know, something bad is happening to the audience. So she sits on every podcast. And so I'm just telling you all this, you know, ask anything you want and I may or may not be able to hear it, but then I have my ears and translator here also. So we'll, we'll get it into my brain. You can just ask her directly. I'm sure she can answer you. Okay, so let's take questions. You know, we'll have a a mic

runner so just when you're recognized, wait for the microphone. Or do do you want to pick someone and. Here we go. Thank you. That was most interesting. My question, what did you tell that woman about your lawn sculpting skills? I could hear what she of. Well, my first reaction, I told her. So you think I'm Japanese? So you think I'm the yard man, right? Literally, that's what I said. And she said, No, I just see you're doing such a great job when you're bougainvillea is. I just want to know if

you do lawns, which I thought was a bullshit answer. Now, now, I got to tell you, this is a there's another chapter to this story. So my father convinces me to take the high road, not look for problems where they don't exist. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she just wanted to know if I was a yard man, You know, she wasn't making some racial remark. And so I went for years thinking like that. And then we interviewed. Was it Frederick Joseph? Yeah. So then we introduced interviewed a bla

ck activists on the podcast, and I told him this story and he said, you know, God, now because of the state that America is in what you should do if this happens again, is not just take the high road and laugh it off and go on. You should take it. Tell her that you know what you just said. It can be interpreted as you're making this racial judgment that because I'm Japanese, I'm a yard man, or if I'm a mexican, I'm immigrant or from a black person, I'm a basketball player. You know, you're makin

g all these inferences and that is not accurate, that is not fair. And it can be incorporated. It can be interpreted by people in negative ways. And you should be sensitive to this and maybe you even know you're doing it. But but you should be aware that, you know, this can harm people and hurt people. And when he told me that, I said, Yeah, you're right, I should do that. So now so now I go outside. I cut the hedge. I'm just waiting for that. I'll thank you. So many people, great ideas, great v

isionaries, artists, practitioners, abounding talent and vision might or often don't get noticed. But more don't get harnessed by those who have the capacity to take those talents and put them into the higher, you know, influential sphere. What do we do with that? This is for you. Is this are you? You know why? Because he's asking about Mary Murphy. And the environment. Yeah. So I'm going to let you answer that question. Yeah. I think like we, we can't necessarily like, say yes, everything I see

with guy, like when answering, I'll help him with his email sometimes and we get like so many inquiries every day about him helping. Right? And it's like the way that we go about choosing that is like within the little things and say, for instance, somebody like sends a subject and it's like a message. It's like, Hi guy, but you can tell like Guy was just inserted. It's like a different color and font and you're like, okay, automatically know, like you really don't care. You've probably sent th

is to like many people, you know but then yeah, offering the ones that like, you know he really thinks are worth it a chance and doing so in a way that like with the books he's offering for people to buy 25 copies and giving them like a 30 minute like one on one where he reviews the pitch and the deck and doing so in a way where they're like giving forth also receiving a lot. Yeah, it's hard to say yes to everything. And I well, it's not me really. It's him saying yes, but no. But remember what

Mary Murphy told us about Advisor? It's not just Carol Dweck. What's in your head? It's also the environment. yeah, like so environments can also be like with the growth mindset, like growth environments and making that within workplaces. So like, yeah, it's not just like everyone can get a chance kind of. Yeah, it's, it's not just what's in your head that has to be a growth mindset. It has to be the organization's right. So and I think that evidence of a growth mindset in an organization, she s

aid, Didn't she say something about when you're interviewing, you should ask the interviewer, Is it okay to ask stupid question, right? She said, Yeah. And I think another great tell for a growth organization is that they have D-I programs that they believe that people can learn. We need to invest in our people, we need to have programs for our people. And so if you see an organization that has no D-I, that that you know, that they think that people are what they are, they cannot be any more. Th

ey're probably not going to utilize the smart person. Right? They're just going to say, you know, I got you for this I hired you to be a yard man. That's all you can ever be. And so look for D-I programs now, you know, 20, 24, lots of people are wiping out the programs because of political pressure, which I think is just the stupidest thing ever. And I you know, listen, I got into Stanford in 1972 from Hawaii. I don't think I would get into Stanford today. And I will tell you that I got into Sta

nford in 1972 because I was Japanese-American, not because I was really in. And I mean, listen, I am so old. I got into Stanford when being Japanese-American was considered a negative. I me I had to overcome the racism that I had today. If you're Japanese-American, you have to have a higher score, right? You're out. You're in a different kind of disadvantage. You know, all these tiger moms are going crazy because they're perfect. Little children can't get into private schools. Right? I'm so old

that, you know, I'm an oppressed minority. You got to give me a chance. Stanford. I mean, make up for your internment camp. I mean, you know, it was a whole different attitude. So I think you look for D-I programs, they look for flexibility, you look for you look for diversity in their employee base and you look for I'll tell you a story that when I worked for Steve Jobs in the mid eighties, at that time already half of his direct sports reports in the Macintosh division were women. The person w

ho ran the factory was over in the finance were a woman. h.R. Was a woman. That's a bible, you know? Yeah. About six report. That's three right there. There were women, and this is before there was all this activism and wokeness. I personally think woke is a positive word, but that's just another question here. So Steve Jobs was way ahead of his time, I believe, even in that it's a it's not a highly known and appreciated fact about Steve Jobs. He was. thank you. Thanks so much. So, so interestin

g. Mike, I have kind of two questions for both of you. One is this intergenerational partnership, how that's playing out for you. And then the other is just sort of when you say do good shit, what do you mean by that? Okay, you can answer the first one. Okay? Yeah. So, yeah, there is a little bit of like a generational gap and. It's. Not all bad. Like, I think we've learned from each other. You know. Guys always supported my work life balance, like with surfing or traveling. He's really cool, bu

t he does expect high quality work and he expects you to work hard. And he holds me to certain standards, which I'm super appreciative of. But yeah, I think there's then we communicate really well too. Like I'm in touch with him more than anyone. But yeah, there's definitely a bit of a gap, but I've learned a lot. Maybe he's learned a little too well. You know, I think one definite dividing line between this two generations is I respond to email 24 by seven 365 and Friday night at six email stop

s for her and it doesn't kick in till Monday morning at nine. I requested that I. Did like give me Saturday, Sunday. You know, speaking of intergenerational, so now one of the one of our favorite people in the book is a woman named Kelly Gibson. She's a element of she's a high school teacher right in Rogue River, Oregon, you know, population 2500. And we became aware of her because she was in a Wired magazine about the impact of A.I. on high school education. And we we just got to know really li

ked her. She's terrific person. You should look at her on tech talk to Kelly Gibson. And we sent her the manuscript and she came back to us and she said, You know, God, I hate to tell you, but I teach school juniors and seniors, and I read the first third of your manuscript, and my students will not know who you are talking about. Yeah, some may now know who Jane Goodall is. They don't know who Kristi Yamaguchi is. You know, they don't know these names. So you're using all these examples and if

you want this book to be relevant to Gen X, you're going to have to change your examples. You're going to have to add people. So I of course as well, who does Gen X look up to? And she says, Olivia. Juliana, How many of you know who Olivia Juliana is? Basically, none of you exactly joined the club. That's what I said too. So Olivia, Juliana is a 19 year old Latina activist from Houston, Texas. And when I tell you the story, you recognize who she is. So Matt Gates, the congressman from Florida, h

e was speaking to a conservative youth organization, and he basically said, why is it that short, fat, ugly women who look like thumbs are the ones who are always worried about abortion rights? Nobody wants to have sex with them. They're never going to get pregnant. Ellie, can you even imagine that coming out of the mouths of a congressman? Okay. So anyway, so so she sends a tweet back to him saying, I'm 511 without shoes and six four with shoes. I like to stand tall because I want men like you

to know where you stand. And then he retorted on her. And then she turned this whole controversy into a fundraising effort for abortion rights. So she raised two and a half million dollars. Well, so, yeah, now, for now, you know, there's a hundred people more in the world who know who Olivia Giuliani is. And so if you have teenage kids or grandkids or, you know, whatever, you go up to them and you see, you know, who Olivia Giuliani is and you're going to impress them with your knowledge of X act

ivism, and then if you really want to drive it home, how relevant you are. We also added a guy named Mark Rober. You tell them who Mark Rover is. yeah, he's pretty well known on YouTube. He's done things like Special Olympics and like exploding shipping boxes. Most kids know him. Yeah. So we went to his lab in San Jose, called Crunch Labs and we interviewed him and he just went to South by Southwest with Guy and yet here he's really like Gen Z knows him really well, connects to. His 30 million f

ollowers on YouTube. And so you go home and you tell your children or grandchildren, yeah, you know, I love that new Mark Rober video. You know, you don't even have to say what it is and your kids and grandchildren. So, yeah, I really I watch our binge watch. I watch every scripted Olympics. I watch every exploding Amazon shipping box, the fart gas and glitter bombs. I mean, it was just fantastic. You get such cred. Another reason to buy a book. yeah. Yeah. The second question was what do you me

an by do good shit? All right. See, that's that's another illustration of generational gap because this that I do a lot of Q&A and I hate when people say, I have two questions for you because I answered the first one and I cannot remember the second one a little early. I cannot so do good shit. You know, just as brand is a brand, this brand, they spend whatever brand is, whatever is a famous citation of him when he was ruling in a pornography case and he said something like, You know, it's very

difficult to define pornography. You know it when you see it. And that's the same thing with doing good shit that, you know, if you see a macintosh, you can even you can infer that it is good shit. Somebody really cared about a macintosh, right? You can't say that about Windows. And so good shit for me is about making a difference. Making the world a better place. It could be a computer, it could be a book, could a song, it could be art. It just. It makes the world a better place. It brings you

joy, it makes you happy. It makes you feel positive. That's what good shit is for the good shit you were. So guy you. Talk about Steve Jobs is. Remarkable. Where is Steve Wash neck in this? Steve Wozniak also in the book. Yes. But do you think he's as remarkable? Absolutely. Absolutely Steve Wozniak is, I think, the purest form of engineering I think that I've ever met. He is just a nerds nerd and he he I mean, you could make the case that Steve Jobs without Steve Wozniak would not have succeede

d, although you could also make the case the opposite way to that. Steve Wozniak without Steve Jobs would just still be a nerd. But the two of them, it's a very important concept that you need complementary skills. Right? And those two complement if two people if you have two co-founders and they both are good sales, well, what are they going to sell if you have to nerds who are good engineers, who's going to sell it? You need one of each. So we interviewed Steve Wozniak and he told all the stor

ies about Apple. And, you know, from the horse's mouth, I'll tell you that all these movies and books about Steve Jobs, they're kind of true. But it's hard to if you weren't inside the tornado, it's hard to appreciate what it meant to be inside the tornado. And I have no regrets about working for him. I would not be where am were it not for Steve Jobs and I all my career to Steve Jobs and I lived in fear of him when I worked for him. But you know, I think one of the realizations of this book is

that when you look back, the bosses and the teachers and the coaches who are the toughest on you are the ones that help you make the most progress. It's not the ones that let you get away with murder, that make you be a better person. It's the hard ones, right, Madison? That's why I'm so hard on you. That's what I tell her. Yeah. So I was a very remarkable first. That is the purest form of engineering that I know. Yeah. Okay. Hi, my name is Ron. Thanks so. Much. This was so fun. And I learned a

lot. I recently took up surfing and so I gave a great metaphor of surfing in terms of make the decision. Right. Is there are there some. Life metaphors, both, you. Know, for Guy and for Madison that you can see surfing translating into. Life? absolutely. So you can go first, like. I. Can go for like half an hour on this, but maybe that should be our next book. Yeah. I think, like with the tides in the swells changing and, like, you're having to use different boards and different wetsuits and dif

ferent gear and just like, always being willing to what's the word like, be flexible and adapt, I guess. Yeah, it's always changing and being humbled as well. The ocean can definitely be scary, like it can be a humbling experience. So yeah, not hearing too high of an ego I guess. And I would add to that that, you know, Wayne Gretzky once said that you miss 100% of the shots. You don't take. The same thing is true of surfing. If you never turn in paddle, you'll never catch a wave. And so some of

it going back is that, you know, yes, you try to the right decision, but at some point you just got to turn and burn and you just have to adjust and try to catch the wave. And that's like life. If you never if you you know, if you're an entrepreneur and you're waiting for that perfect moment when you have the world class team in a world class market with all with a world class technology that nobody else is doing, you are never going to start a company, right? I mean, you you have to start a com

pany when you have a crap team with an unproven technology in an unproven market. But that's how it works. And the same thing I think is true with surfing. At some point you just have to turn and burn and make your decision right. Is there a time limit? Well, I will. Timer will count down eventually. I'm looking for four things from. that's coming down. Yeah. we got five more minutes. Yeah. I didn't know anything. Okay. Yeah, I had a question from when I was reading it. There was you talk a lot

about pursuing interests and not passions, you know, and what's an interest, what's a passion and and how, you know, in a sense, your life purpose can catch up with you that way without your directly going after it. Yeah. So he's talking about that into the interest and passion. Okay. Having it come up under you like a wave? I suppose. So. I think that many management gurus, the kind that have $5,000 seminars at the higher the Embarcadero, they're always talking about You need to find your passi

on and in life, Right. And hopefully you find your passion before you have to write your college essay because your colleges should be all about your passion and how at 18 you've started a not for profit building churches in Africa and feeding people in Haiti. But I think that that does a disservice to people because now we have all this expectation that I'm going to find my passion. It's going to be love at first sight and I'm going to dedicate my life to it. I just don't think that's how life

works. And I think what happens is if you have a growth mindset, you're open to things that interest you. It could be surfing that interests you, it could be art, it could be programing, it could be photography, it could be knitting. I don't care. But, you know, this thing just strikes your fancy. And if you have a growth mindset, you pursue these things that strike your fancy. And over course of your lifetime, maybe you'll find two or three things that go from interest to passion. Or the Japane

se have a word ikigai. It's like your meaning of life or for life or of life. And so I think that telling kids, you need to find your passion. You're 18 years old. You haven't found your passion yet. my God, what's wrong with you? You know, that's a horrible disservice to them. We should just tell them right now, when you're young, I mean, you need to do a lot of sampling, do a lot of sampling, and then, you know, knock on wood. I mean, I hate to I can I can almost everything in surfing or datin

g analogies. So I'm going to switch from surfing to dating. So so telling people you need to find your is like telling people you're 18 years old, you're not married yet. What's wrong with you? You should have found your life partner or your true love by now. What's wrong with you? So why don't you go out there and, you know, find your passion? You need to find that perfect man or woman or he she it they. Whatever it is, you know, it's So you set up this expectation that, my God, I'm like, I'm 1

8. I haven't mid married yet. What's wrong with me? Something's wrong with me. I haven't found my passion. Well, I'm. I'm telling you, I think when you're young, you need to do a lot of sampling. How you define sampling is up to you. But I think you need to do a lot of sampling before you discover your passion. Yeah, and I recommend the book Ikigai by Hector Garcia. We had him on the podcast and it is more of like an accumulation of, like interests, something that you're good at and something th

at you can make money from. And that also comes from trying many different things and planting many seeds, which is also a concept in the book. So it may be one more question. We have a we got a one minute and 33 seconds. Yeah, well. I don't have another presentation till tomorrow night, so I can be here. Hello. Hi. My name is Nigella. Great presentation. Thank you very much. So being a chiropractor and chiropractic coming from 1895 and the story of chiropractic Tick actually in a deaf person at

17 years old, the guy was deaf for their whole life and having a growth mindset. Have you discovered chiropractic for yourself or have you experienced that kind of care for your own self? Come and inside out rather than outside in with your cochlear procedure? And my question is, how long was the deafness and what was the reason of that? Actually, I am a doctor of chiropractic, so I had to I had to check on that. But it's a. Little bit of hip hippo violation. But that's okay. You know. He wants

to know the. Person's my history of deafness. Okay yeah. So I for about 20 I've had what's called manias, disease and manias, diseases. When you have three symptoms, it's hearing loss, tinnitus, which is a constant ringing in my ear and sporadic attacks of vertigo. So I used to have vertigo attacks where I would be on the ground and you know you're crawling to the bathroom to throw up the the nature of Manila's disease. And I had an operation for the for the vertical. And so that knock on wood

has I haven't had vertical or serious vertical for ten years or something like that. Of course, you know, for someone with inner ear issues, what two sports should you take up? hockey and surfing. That makes sense, right? Right. Why don't I take a piano too. While I got it? So I had Meniere's disease for years and then about about two or years ago, I really started having hearing loss and eventually I completely lost it in this year. So to this day I still have tinnitus. But about two years I co

mpletely lost my hearing in this side. This side was perfect, and now it's about 50% gone too. So there may be a DUI. I have to go clear implants. And I will tell you that the cochlear implant really was a miracle because it it enabled me to hear and a cochlear implant you can pair to your phone and so I can my phone I can I can be in areas where the phone is Bluetooth connected to my implant and I can be hearing anything I want. Nobody in the world knows that anything is playing in my head. It'

s just like it's God talking directly to me. And but, you know, a cochlear implant does not work in the water. You cannot wear a cochlear implant in the water. So that that actually has its advantages because a lot of surfing, there's an etiquette to it. And when you take somebody else's wave, lots of people yell at each other. But you hear. Not me, I don't give it. You can yell all you like I'm not hearing you. And well tell the jury Lopez story about not talking in the lino. yeah, just one of

his rules. Jerry Lopez is like a really famous surfer, and one of his roles is not talking one up, and that guy just kind of sits out there and, yeah. He's in his. Own little world, so. Yeah, Yeah. It helps you focus. improved. Listen, not the cause of my hearing loss, and I attribute it to I was a venture capitalist for about ten years and I heard so many shitty pitches. I lost my hearing. This is all. This is an occupational hazard. You know, you shoot a listen. No pun intended, but I'll tell

you some pitches that I heard one company. Or. One wanted to build a hotel over San Francisco, supported by balloons. So it was to be a hotel looming over San Francisco. It was a dirigible hotel. That's number one. Number two, another company wanted to buy the state of Israel to turn it into an amusement park. Another was well, well, this is this is really this is this is we're at zero. But I'm. Well, what what are you going to do, not invite me back? Not a chance. Okay. This is a good story abo

ut being venture capitalists. All right. Okay. So as a venture capitalist, we get this idea that this is back about 15 years ago, that, you know, when you dropped your computer and if it had a hard disk in it, as opposed to SSDs right now, which has no moving parts but hard disk, you to have this platter spinning in this thing going up and down reading it. So if you drop that, that, that thing reading it could embed itself in the disk, You'd be in a world of hurt because you'd ruin your hard dis

k. So this company had invented a way to prevent when you drop your computer hard disk, getting damage where I tell you that now and if you're old enough to have had a computer with a hard disk in it, you know, that's a big deal that you can drop a computer and not worry about it. So so we hear this idea and the founders of this company were from a company called Seagate, which is a company that made the hard sort of thinking of this. They have industry relevance, they have industry experience,

they know what we're doing. So we jump in our car, we go, I've never told you this story. We jump in this car, we go down there and we were in there a waiting room, and the receptionist comes out and says, they're a little bit behind because they're talking to IBM's division that sells laptops. And IBM is interested in our technology right now. I don't know if they made that story up, but it was it was. I, I appreciate that. If it's true, I mean, even if they made it up, it's a good story so now

we're like I like or were salivating about this great technology and it it must be this magical, you know, some kind of gyroscopic chip that senses that it's falling faster than it should. So it immediately parks the head that everything is going to be great is great technology, you know, and all that. Okay, now here comes the part where I promise you, I'm not making this shit up, okay? I promise. Yeah. So finally we get in, we meet with them, and I swear to God, I swear to God. The guy brings

out the prototype, and it's a hard disk. And it's a hard disk with foam around it. And he says, Yeah, this is Mil-spec 6587 special form that a zero tested to withstand drops of up to six feet. And so now you wrap this phone around your hard disk, you put it in your laptop, we drop your laptop. No problem. IBM is really interested in and we're going to get a lot of requests for a bid very shortly. And I swear to God, I swear to, God, I was sitting there thinking, I'm having an out-of-body experi

ence. So these three clowns from Seagate, you telling me that their patent pending curve jumping, paradigm shifting technology is wrapping. Foam. Around the heart this? And and my first reaction was. This. There's there's hidden cameras. Right You must see. There's hidden cameras. And these people are calling up all these voices and they're doing this and they're videotaping them to see which one of the VCs are so frickin stupid, they're going to invest in mapping form around the hard disk. So t

hat's the nature of being a venture capitalist. Is there any wonder that I lost my hearing? That's my point. So that was my point. Yeah. Yeah. And on that note, let that be a lesson to all of us that no idea is too foolish to. We will give it a try, you know? Yes. You know what? There's a limit to the growth line. There's a limit. You can you can. Can we let Madison bang the gavel? Of course. Yeah. Okay. Do you know about this? No. Okay. Commonwealth Club. You start with this and you end with th

is. So I got to give my little closing talk and then. Madison. Yeah. So you're going to pound this because. Yeah, three. Times three. So. Gently. Yeah. Don't recall. What. Would in this make her the youngest person to ever do this. Probably. Congratulations. Doing all. Right. Our gratitude to guy in Madison for being with us today. We're also grateful to our audience here, as well as to those listening to the recording. And now this meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California commemorating it

s 121st year of Enlightened discussion is adjourned. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait. we've got to get a video in. But we'll have a video. Okay. 100. And twenty-firsts is. Okay. Adjourned. Yeah. Thank you.