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Leonard Kim

Goodreads Author

Born

in Los Angeles, The United States

Website

http://www.LeonardKim.com

Twitter

mrleonardkim

Genre

Self Help, Business, Nonfiction

Influences

James Altucher ...more

Member Since

September 2014

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/leonardkim

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Leonard Kim is a marketer who wins a lot of awards despite being a self-described expert at failing. But failing can't be the only thing he is good at since Fortune 500 companies, NYT bestselling authors and venture capitalists, book publishers like McGraw-Hill Business, large media publications like Forbes, CMO, Fast Company, Fortune, Adweek, Entrepreneur, and hundreds of others, and more than 500,000 followers think otherwise.

Leonard was raised by his grandparents, of which his grandfather, Robert L. Landis, was an all American hero who served in the United States Air Force, fought in three wars and retired from both the Military and Armco (AK Steel), the biggest steel manufacturer in the United States.

Leonard's story began in 2010. He st Leonard Kim is a marketer who wins a lot of awards despite being a self-described expert at failing. But failing can't be the only thing he is good at since Fortune 500 companies, NYT bestselling authors and venture capitalists, book publishers like McGraw-Hill Business, large media publications like Forbes, CMO, Fast Company, Fortune, Adweek, Entrepreneur, and hundreds of others, and more than 500,000 followers think otherwise.

Leonard was raised by his grandparents, of which his grandfather, Robert L. Landis, was an all American hero who served in the United States Air Force, fought in three wars and retired from both the Military and Armco (AK Steel), the biggest steel manufacturer in the United States.

Leonard's story began in 2010. He stopped paying his electricity bill for six months, had to shower in the dark, then was served an eviction notice. He thought he would spend the rest of his days living under a bridge until he called his mother who then called his grandmother, about how Leonard was about to be homeless. Surprisingly his grandmother took him back in (even though she originally disowned him when he was 16).

According to his TEDx Talk, Why You Should Let Your Fears Guide You (recognized as a top TED Talk by Inc., Forbes and Mashable), by the end of 2011, Leonard was so fed up with constantly failing year after year, that he wanted to end it all. Luckily for us, that didn't happen. That's because sharing these struggles and hardships is what led his content to being read over 14 million times, while either touching or inspiring the lives of people all across the world.

One thing Leonard does extremely well is within the niches of marketing people and professional development, most commonly referred to as personal branding. He holds workshops at companies, speaks at conferences, works hands-on with executives and entrepreneurs who run 8 figure+ businesses, provides consulting and teaches his craft through online courses.

Leonard also coauthored a book with his business partner at InfluenceTree, Ryan Foland, called Ditch the Act: Reveal the Surprising Power of the Real You for Greater Success and runs a weekly radio show called Grow Your Influence Tree, where he does free personal brand consulting live on the air.

What brought Leonard to where he is today is a mixture of transparency, vulnerability and being his true, authentic self. So many people talk about the importance of these things, but how many people really know how to implement it, let alone teach others how to do it? Leonard does, and he shares the steps through two formulas:

Book: The eight-step brand process teaches readers how to own and expose who they truly are, form meaningful relationships that move the needle and ultimately, uncover the greatness that already exists from within, to stack success

Workshops and Courses: The four V's teach attendees how to claim their vision, discover their voice, turn up the volume and command validation

Leonard lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife Angie (who after one year of meeting him, is now heavily invested in growing her personal brand) and their very lovable chihuahua, Roo, who loves to eat peanut butter and bananas.

P.S. As people are only great at two to three different things in life, whatever you do, do not take any advice that Leonard provides on how to diet (because he eats too many cookies and cupcakes) and on how to save money (because he is often seen indulging too much at the Viceroy Hotel in New York).

Email: Hello@LeonardKim.com
Websites: LeonardKim.com | InfluenceTree.com | DitchTheAct.com ...more

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Popular Answered Questions

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Leonard Kim

If you want to become a writer, you need to start thinking like a writer.

What's the easiest way to do that?

Copy books word for word. It allows you to…more

If you want to become a writer, you need to start thinking like a writer.

What's the easiest way to do that?

Copy books word for word. It allows you to subconsciously understand the author's tone of voice and writing style.

If done enough, you will be able to change writing styles as you please. Personally, I can write in many tones, from legalese, business speak, technical writing, advertising and speech writing. However, I prefer to write in my own personal voice. As time progresses, you will also find your own personal voice.

Practice. Write your thoughts out for thirty minutes.

In most cases, what separates great writing from poor writing is editing. Due to this, as a beginning writer, it is in your best interest to write down every thought that comes to mind.

Does it have grammatical errors? Does the sentence not make sense?

It's okay. None of that matters. Just keep writing consistently for as long as you can.

Then when your thoughts run dry, go back over your content with a fine tooth comb.

Read what you wrote aloud.

Does it make sense?

If not, make edits. If you're a beginning writer, then most of what you say won't make sense, so you will have to edit heavily.

While editing, you want to make your writing as easy as possible to understand. I read two pages of that Game of Thrones book. That was written at a fifth grade level. However it was brilliant enough to be turned into a HBO series. Not everyone who will be reading your writing is college educated. Writing to appeal to the masses so they can understand your message is key.

If you have an Apple, keep the dictionary open and use a thesaurus on certain words that bring more emphasis. The thesaurus and dictionary will become one of your best friends.

If you want to improve your writing even further, start to write collateral material, such as sales brochures, tri-folds and product descriptions. My job used to be to make all the collateral material for companies, from training manuals to the brochures the end user would read.

Why are tri-folds so important?

Because it forces you to take a big picture and condense it down to a few paragraphs. It makes you sit there and think of what data is just used as fat, or filler information and what data is actually the meat and bones, or hard data to influence emotions, of your message. This practice will force you to sit in front of your writing and consistently edit away at it until the message is perfect. This is best done in a group environment.

As time progresses, your writing will get better and better. At some point, your writing will become substantially good. At that point, you will face a hard decision. Do you want to keep your audience engaged or do you want to write to a smaller audience geared more towards novels?

Either choice is fine. It's all personal preference. However, some people get too into their writing and carry an aura of authority everywhere they go. I suggest to skip this step. Instead, follow these three steps:

Stay humble. Stay hungry. Stay honest.

I originally wrote this on Quora: https://www.quora.com/I-want-to-becom...(less)

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Leonard Kim’s books

Average rating: 3.03 · 66 ratings · 28 reviews · 4 distinct works

	The Etiquette of Social Media 3.02 avg rating — 42 ratings — published 2014	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ditch the Act: Reveal the Surprising Power of the Real You for Greater Success by Leonard Kim (Goodreads Author), Ryan Foland 3.22 avg rating — 18 ratings — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Etiquette of Social Media: How to Connect and Respond to Others in the World of Social Media 2.50 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2014	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ditch the Act: Reveal the Surprising Power of the Real You for Greater Success, Library Edition by Leonard Kim (Goodreads Author), Ryan Foland, Kathleen Godwin (Narrator) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Turned Down by Stryker Digital for Digital Marketing Services? There’s Still Hope…

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Were you turned down by Stryker Digital for digital marketing services like SEO or paid ads? There may still be hope for you out there.

Hello local business owner. I know how it feels to get turned down when you really want to do something. I wanted to go to NYU Stern for their master’s program right before the pandemic, but my job at USC wouldn’t give me a time sponsorship, so I wasn’t qualified

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Leonard Kim wrote a new blog post Turned Down by Stryker Digital for Digital Marketing Services? There’s Still Hope… Were you turned down by Stryker Digital for digital marketing services like SEO or paid ads? There may still be hope for you out there. Hello local bu Read more of this blog post »
May 21, 2025 02:59AM · like

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