How remarkable people think: mindset lessons from Guy Kawasaki

Executive overview

Most people plateau because they believe their abilities are fixed — either "I can't learn this" or "I'm already great." Growth mindset, a concept from Carol Dweck, is the alternative: the belief that skills are learnable at any age. Every remarkable person Guy Kawasaki has interviewed over 250 episodes shares this trait without exception.

Shifting into a growth mindset is mostly awareness, then deliberate discomfort, then environment.

Recognising you have a fixed mindset is already 70–80% of the shift.

What a growth mindset looks like in practice

• Kawasaki took up ice hockey at 44, surfing at 60 — by adopting his children's hobbies rather than expecting them to share his
• Growth requires embracing vulnerability: learning something new means getting hurt; that's a feature, not a bug
• A fixed mindset also shows up as "I'm already too good to improve" — not just "I can't learn this"
• Surrounding yourself with a growth-minded environment matters; a growth mindset inside a fixed-mindset company won't thrive — get out
• Persistence is underrated: Andrew Zimmern's rule is that 90% of success is simply showing up when others don't

Hiring and leadership

• Hire people better than you in their function; wanting to feel superior to your team makes you, by definition, a losing leader
• Complementary skills beat duplicative ones — Wozniak built it, Jobs sold it; both being engineers or both marketers would have killed Apple
• A leader who assembles a team of people better than themselves becomes paradoxically indispensable — almost no one is willing to do it
• The servant mindset: you are there to serve the team and the mission, not to have the team serve you

Mission-driven intensity vs. ego-driven behaviour

• There are two kinds of difficult leaders: ego-driven (it's about me) and mission-driven (it's about the work)
• Jobs was the mission-driven type — terrifying, but you'd learn from him and wouldn't trade the experience
• Kawasaki's test: when Jobs showed up with a CEO whose software he'd just called mediocre, honesty was the only safe answer — Jobs would have caught flattery instantly
• Canva's Melanie Perkins proves you don't need to be difficult to be remarkable; mission-driven intensity is one path, not the only one
• Almost all remarkable people are complicated; the lesson is to extract what's useful without dismissing the person entirely

Adversity and remarkable people

• The most surprising podcast guests weren't Nobel laureates — they were a man sentenced to 40 years at age 16 who became an artist, a woman with ALS completing marathons in all 50 states, people raised by crack-addicted parents
• Adversity isn't the determinant; what you do with it is
• Privilege (Ivy League → Goldman → McKinsey → hedge fund) doesn't make you remarkable in Kawasaki's definition — it won't get you on his podcast
• The journey is the reward: Kawasaki did 45 triathlons with zero chance of a podium finish and gained fitness, self-esteem, and a better self-image regardless

Doing things that make you uncomfortable

• Kawasaki learned standup comedy before COVID — a 15-minute set in New York — and brought more freedom and range into his public speaking as a result
• Vocal improv (making unplanned musical sounds with strangers) felt more exposing than being naked, but created a breakthrough in vocal range
• You don't have to keep doing the uncomfortable thing permanently; doing it once and integrating the lesson is enough
• 10,000 hours doesn't guarantee mastery — but it can guarantee enjoyment, growth in self-image, and presence

Planting oaks you may never sit under

• Kawasaki replaced 150 eucalyptus trees on his property with native oaks grown from acorns
• Of hundreds of acorns planted, four became saplings — you can't know in advance which four, so you plant hundreds
• Oak trees take 20 years to provide shade; he may never benefit from his own planting
• The lesson: some of the most valuable work is done for people who come after you, and may never be attributed to you
• Japanese companies historically took this long view; most Western public companies optimise quarter by quarter instead