Lessons - The Man Who Launched the Macintosh Says Ignore Every Motivational Speaker | Guy Kawasaki - Fmr Apple Chief Evangelist & Bestselling Author

In this lessons episode, discover why chasing interest leads to greater fulfillment than obsessing over finding a single passion. Understand how experimenting with new opportunities helps uncover meaningful work, explore a practical way to redefine purpose beyond money and talent, and uncover the mindset that reveals when a career or pursuit is truly worth committing to. When you wrote this book, there's sort of two things I want to pull out of this. First of all, I know for a fact that you don't like when people... Forget Kodak. That's an enterprise example. When people starting businesses follow their passions. Because I think that... I've heard you say this before. It's really bad advice. Tell somebody to go follow your passion. But... There's another thought involved in this. You can comment on both. As you start the book with the Think Different campaign that Apple ran in 97. And thinking different probably also ties into the fact that the way you build something is not about following a passion. It's about reverse engineering something that maybe only you see that you can solve for. I don't know if that's a fair through line to those two ideas, but I think there's something there because if you didn't think different, then you would follow your passion and you do what everyone else is doing and you do what the market's doing and you'd probably have a hard time doing it because it'd be a very messy space to get involved in. Okay, this is a deep topic. So everybody hears, follow your passion, follow your passion, find your passion, do your passion. And I think that that sets you up for failure because it implies that everybody has this one particular calling. And, you know, at an extreme, it's like, Oh, you're 22 years old. You haven't found your passion yet. What kind of underachiever are you, right? And so ideally you would find your passion before you have to write your college application essay, which is total bullshit. Well, most of those essays are all bullshit. At least ChatGPT is generating them so it's easier to generate the bullshit. Now you don't have to waste the trash doing the bullshit. Exactly. So what I'm saying is give yourself a break, okay? I think you should just pursue your interests, which is different. It's a much lower bar than passion. Passion implies that it's, you know, you found your calling in life. I'm 69 years old. I found my calling in life maybe three or four times, you know, and It's not that easy. And so what I think you should do is, when you have an itch, scratch it. It may be photography. It may be the viola. It may be surfing. It may be podcasting. It may be writing. You know, you're going to have all these interests. Scratch them. Scratch them. Scratch them until you decide that you don't like it at all. And then if you're lucky over the course of your lifetime, you may discover something you truly want to dig deep and dedicate your life to. But to use a dating analogy, if somebody told you, oh, you're 22 years old. You haven't found a man or woman of your dreams yet. What's wrong with you? Well, what I'm advocating is if you go out in the world and you say, I'm going to find the person that I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. That's my goal. What you should do instead is you should pursue people who you find interesting. It's like sampling theory. Do a lot of sampling. I'm not advocating, you know, being noose. I'm just saying you should pursue a lot of interesting people until you find the one that you want to settle down with. But to say that, you know, You got to go find your passion. Go from point A to point B. I think you're setting yourself up. Do you, you know, using you as like a case study or an example, people listening to this would look at you and say, you know, guy is successful. He's had a great career. Do you think that you found something that you can say is a passion? Because you scratched a lot of itches in your life with the different things you've taken on. So has it just, has there been one or has it just been success at a multitude of things that you've liked to do? Okay, so... First of all, I want to burst a bubble. It's not like I sat down with my life coach back when I was young and we decided the arc of my life, all right? So basically, I've gone from one interest that became passion to another. It started with Macintosh, right? So with Macintosh, I thought Macintosh... When I first saw MacPaint and MacWrite, the scales were removed from my eyes. It was a religious experience. The only two or three other religious experiences in my life have been, like, the first time I played hockey. The first time I surfed and the first time I met my wife. So, you know, it doesn't happen that often. So, you know, as you go along, and then, so, first there was Macintosh. And then I got to tell you, you know, Canva became a passion. And to use more sports analogies, I discovered Macintosh. basketball and then I started playing tennis and then I started ice hockey at 44 and then I started surfing at 60 okay so just using the sports metaphor I found passion four times but it was because I tried a lot of other stuff and and so I I and okay so now fast forward till today Writing books has been a passion. You don't write 16 books because you hate it. And I think even more important now, I discovered podcasting. And I discovered podcasting about four years ago. And I'm telling you, I was born for podcasting. I was made for podcasting because podcasting to me, it requires several things. First, you need access to people. And the kind of podcasting I'm talking about is like what we're doing, which is a guest. So number one, you need access to people. Not necessarily that you know them, but they have to know of you. Luckily, because of my Macintosh work, many people know of me. So when I asked them to be on my podcast... And most all the time they say, oh, yeah, you know, I used the Macintosh. I knew all about you. I'd love to get on your show. That's a huge advantage, right? So now you've got to have access to the Jane Goodalls of the world. The second thing is, once you have access, you've got to know what the hell to ask Jane Goodall. All right. And then the third thing is you not only have to have access and you have to know what to ask. You got to have the balls to ask it. Yeah, it's true. It's stressful. It's very stressful. Yes, it's very stressful. So, um... I've just been fortunate that those three things lined up for me. And so podcasting, like, I'll tell you something. So I have done about 200 episodes of my podcast. I think roughly 100 or so were sponsored. Okay? But for the last two years or something... I'm operating my podcast at a total loss. I don't have sponsors. I don't have an advertiser. I just do it out of pure love and OCD-ness. And, you know, I think my podcast is the best work that I've ever done, and it will not be appreciated until I die. Not that I want to try that experiment. But, you know, so a lot of people say you need to use a Venn diagram. And the Venn diagram is what you love to do, what you're good at, and what you can make money at. Right? And when you can draw those three circles, you look at what's in the middle. That's what you should do. Well, that's your, what is that? Is that the concept of Ikigai? I can't tell you that I love the concept of Ikigai, but I think our Western minds has perverted that concept because the concept that you gotta love it, you gotta be good at it, and you gotta make money at it, I think is a bastardization of the concept of Ikigai. Now, don't get me wrong, okay? I may be Japanese, but I was born and raised in Hawaii. It's not like I've been spending 20 years of, you know, my life in Japan and I'm a Buddhist monk and I like, you know, I'm a whole Shinto scene and all that. All right. I'm as freaking American as Eric Trump. And you're a little bit Canadian. That's an insult. I know it. First of all, I never met a Canadian I didn't like. Seriously, I cannot say that about Americans. But anyway, so, okay, if you want my definition of ikigai, it's kind of the opposite. So many people believe ikigai, what you're good at, what you love to do, and what you can make money. My definition of ikigai is it's something that you do even if you're not good at it, even if you can't. You know, you can't make money at it. And even if you're not good, so you're not, wait, I said it right. So you're not good at it. You can't make money at it, but you still love to do it. That's your ikigai. That's the ikigai test. And I'll give you a related concept. So I interviewed Mark Manson, the guy who wrote the subtle art of giving a F-U-C-K, right? And, or not giving. And he, in our interview, he gave me this, like, really, brilliant insight. And he basically said, you're going to know when you found your passion or your true love or your ikigai when it involves shit sandwiches. And these shit sandwiches, everybody looks at you and says, that is a shit sandwich. There's no way I'm going to do that. But you love the shit sandwich. And I got to tell you, when you find yourself doing something that involves shit sandwiches that everybody else tell you you're nuts, You probably found your icky guy. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.