Martha Stewart: Lessons from Martha on Perfection and Life

Guy Kawasaki: Martha Stewart is the original influencer. She created a personal brand long before anyone with a phone and Instagram account could do it. Stewart's brand was not based on preexisting start-up in television, movies, music, or sports. She built her brand on the quality of her catering, cooking, and entertaining.
Everyone who uses social media for branding and promotion can learn from her and is indebted to her. To use an athletic analogy, she is the Roger Bannister of social media. Bannister's the first person who ran a mile in less than four minutes, a record that experts thought was insurmountable. After Bannister, more than a thousand other people have run a sub four minute mile. Once Bannister did it, other runners knew they could do it too.
The same phenomenon is true with Martha Stewart. She inspired hundreds of people to build the brand with mad skills and hard work. In the spirit of Roger Bannister, this is a sub four-minute interview. I want to show you how much can be accomplished in such a short time, if you're a Martha Stewart. We cover four topics: switching careers, pursuing perfection, judging others, and leaving a legacy. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now, here's Martha Stewart.
What did it take to make the transition from stockbroker to media mogul?
Martha Stewart: Well, it took reduced commissions. Commissions started to be negotiated and I thought, “Oh, you know what? I'm going to try something new.” I was making a lot of money as a stock broker, but I really wanted to raise my daughter. I had a child by then. I wanted to decorate my new home, an old farmhouse in Connecticut, and I wanted to just branch out. And that's exactly what I did. I started my own business, a catering business, which led to the writing of books, which led to the creation of the Martha Stewart Living Omni Media Company.
Guy Kawasaki: What skills did it take? I understand why you did it, but did you have to make a total transactional relationship as a stockbroker? And now you're...it's a very different world.
Martha Stewart: The skill sets were pretty much the same, believe it or not. And when you're a stockbroker you're dealing with people's money, their appetite for growth in their financial wealth. In catering, which I then went into, you're dealing with another appetite. You're dealing with people's desire to entertain their friends and to eat delicious foods. So it wasn't so different. And they were the same kind of people, actually the same people. I just transitioned from advising them on stock investments to advising them on entertaining.
Guy Kawasaki: My impression of you is that you're a perfectionist. And I have this question that, do you think your perfectionism caused success or did your success cause perfectionism?
Martha Stewart: One of my first television programs, my very smart nephew pointed out that I said, “Perfectly perfect,” 22 times. And that made me think, “Uh-oh, I better stop talking like that because people are going to start making more fun of me than they have already.” But actually, I really feel that if you're going to be a teacher, you should try to do whatever you're doing as perfectly as possible. You cannot teach a math equation and have an imperfection in it, if possible. You cannot teach a chemistry formula and have something go wrong. That's not good. So you can't make a recipe that's half good or will only work up to a point. It has to be perfect. So I think it started with perfectionism and ended with success.

Guy Kawasaki: If you were to tell me to put three names together, Snoop, Martha Stewart and Justin Bieber, I would have told you, “Impossible. That's impossible, no overlap Venn diagram.” And yet, it obviously happened. So what have you learned from Snoop?
Martha Stewart: Oh, I've learned a lot from Snoop. I've learned a lot about growing up in a totally different environment that I grew up in, a little town in Nutley, New Jersey, where everybody cares about your education and cares about what you do every single day and the life that those children led at the time of Snoop's growing up in Compton, California. But I did meet his mother, and I must say, her values were pretty much the same as my mother's values. So we're not so different. People in America are not so different from one another. It's environmental. And I think that, our desires are to learn, to be good, to create and that's what I think we learned from each other.
Guy Kawasaki: Do you think people are more similar than they are different?
Martha Stewart: I think people are a lot more similar than they are different.
Guy Kawasaki: What comes to mind when you think about what you want your legacy to be?
Martha Stewart: Well, I'm the daughter of two teachers. And I think my business has really been teaching through the pages of our magazines, through our television programming, through whatever we do in terms of product development. I think I teach people how to live better. And I think my legacy will be is, one of a group of people who really did teach a lot of good things.

Guy Kawasaki: So there you have it. In less than four minutes, the dynamics of switching careers, how pursuing perfection leads to success, the Zen of judging people, and why leaving the legacy of teaching is a fine goal for us all.
I promise that you'd learn how to shell garlic in this episode but couldn't fit it into the interview and meet Roger Bannister's record. So I'll tell you the foolproof, time-tested, Martha Stewart way to perfectly shell garlic cloves. Put them in a bowl and hold a plate over the bowl or use a sealable plastic container and shake as hard as you can for thirty to forty-five seconds. Voila, perfect cloves.
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to my perfect producer, Jeff Sieh and my perfect promoter, Peg Fitzpatrick. Mahalo to the people at the Elevate Conference in Toronto for helping me gain access to Martha Stewart.
Next week episode features Mr. Influence, social psychologist, Bob Cialdini. If you ever have to change people's minds, you cannot miss it. This is Remarkable People.