From the course: Guy Kawasaki on Turning Life Wisdom into Business Success

Grit (work hard and follow your passion): Lessons from my parents

From the course: Guy Kawasaki on Turning Life Wisdom into Business Success

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Grit (work hard and follow your passion): Lessons from my parents

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- So if there is a single biggest secret, secret in quotes, to my success and I think to many peoples success, it is grit. It is the willingness, if not the total enjoyment of working hard. So I've never considered myself particularly smarter than anybody, more technical, more visionary, anything like that. What I can do is outwork people. And I enjoy the work, it's not only true in my, sort of day job of Chief Evangelist of Canva or working for Apple or when I started companies, it's true of my writing. I think that the most enjoyable part of writing for me is when I have the rough draft and then I spend months and months and months perfecting and editing the rough draft. That's the most enjoyable part of the process for me. And that is hardly a common attitude among authors. Most authors hate the editing process, I love the editing process. When I'm about to finish a book, I put it out there and I let literally hundreds of people read the draft and dozens of people submit the word document back to me with comments in it and I go through each and every comment and look what people said and make corrections. There's two lessons with me and sports, so I took up hockey at 48 and I took up surfing at 62. Both are not exactly the ideal time to take up hockey or surfing. And for me, it's a very good insight into my personality and grit. It's not like I was a natural, I just got up on a surfboard, or I stepped on the ice and started scoring. It was definitely very difficult for me, surfing is maybe the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. And this means that, you know if you start that late and you're not a natural, you have to outwork people. So I surf more, I do dry land exercises, when I was playing hockey I did a lot of work in the the backyard practicing shots and all this kind of stuff. That's the trajectory of my life. I just, I'm a gritty person.

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