Yes, I have a new mentor and his name is Guy Kawasaki. He doesn't know he's my mentor yet but I'm sure he won't mind - he seems like a nice chap. For those who don't know anything about him; Guy used to be "Chief Evangelist" for Apple (I think that was his official job title), he's written a bunch of books on startups, marketing and business wisdom, and these days he seems to be a VC. The "Filmloop" technology featured on his blog today looks quite interesting - I'm guessing he's involved with that company somehow.
But none of these are the reasons he's my mentor - I want to emulate his absolutely shameless climbing of the Technorati blog popularity ladder. He's been in the top 100 blogs for a while (he's about number 39 now I think) and he makes no secret of his desire to hit the top 10. I've seen people try and insult him for being shallow in his comments but you can't insult him! He freely admits it's a shallow goal and I love that he embraces that.
Now, a lot of what I write leans heavily to the sarcastic/cynical/ironic end of the spectrum and you'd be forgiven for reading this post in that light. But it's the honest truth - I respect that he's so open about this goal and as anyone who reads my posts about visitor stats will know, I'm also shamelessly obsessed with making my blog popular. My current goal is to reach Technorati's top 100,00. Not a very lofty goal compared to Guy's but he's someone and I'm nobody. I don't mean that in a woe-is-me way or even in a self-effacing way, it's a simple truth. Guy Kawasaki is famous (in his own way) and I'm not. So I'm taking small steps at first.
Beyond the shallow popularity goal, Guy has a pretty good blog, particularly if you're into business/technology/marketing issues at all. It may surprise some readers to discover I have an interest in this area but I work in IT and a lot of what Guy writes has direct application to my day-to-day life. Even if he's a tiny bit more upbeat than me. His "lies" category is particularly good.
So I think I have a holy trinity of role models now (that's my Catholic upbringing coming out). Stephen Colbert remains unchallenged as god, I've decided Ian McKellen can be the holy spirit and Guy Kawasaki can be little baby Jesus.
Clearly I'm going to hell.
4 comments:
the filmloop people were interested in recruiting me recently, but after i looked at the application a bit, downloaded it and ran it for awhile, i decided it was extremely annoying. a matter of personal taste i guess ...
Yeah, the first time I saw something like that was years ago on a porn site. It seems to better executed now, but still...
Shameless self promotion? Disgusting!
How does he do it, inquiring minds want to know.
Michelle: he does talk about it a lot on his blog. I can't bring myself to do everything he suggests but he has some good ideas.
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