Gary Vaynerchuk — “Crush it!” summary
Great book, fast read. 170 pages. Gary is phenomenal guy. Here is my summary — just the highlights — takes you 10 minutes to read but gives incredible value.
Gary book “Crush It!”
Everyone — EVERYONE — needs to start thinking of themselves as a brand. It is no longer an option; it is a necessity.
Learn to live your passion, and you’ll have all the money you need plus total control over your own destiny. That’s a pretty comfortable place to be, wouldn’t you say?
Don’t worry; skills are cheap, passion is priceless. If you’re passionate about your content and you know it and do it better than anyone else, even with few formal business skills you have the potential to create a million-dollar business. Here’s why: let’s say you love to fish, and you happen to know a load about worms. In fact, you’re embarrassed at how much you like worms and like to talk about worms. But there’s no way you can make money on worms, right? Wrong. You can use the Internet to build a platform where you can talk about worms to your heart’s content. Passion is contagious. If you channel it into creating amazing content and distribute that content using the social media tools I discuss in this book, someone like me who rocks at business development will eventually find it and become a fan.
Social Media = Business. Period.
Stop hustling, and everything you learn here will be useless. Your success is entirely up to you.
The Internet makes it possible for anyone to be 100 percent true to themselves and make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand. There no longer has to be a difference between who you are and what you do.
Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.
Wine Library TV was never about selling wine on the Internet. It was always about building brand equity.
Developing your personal brand is key to monetizing your passion online. Whether you’re delivering your content by video, podcast, or blog, it’s the authentic you, the one thing that is guaranteed to differentiate you from everybody else, including those who share your niche or business model. The thing that most people don’t realize is that in today’s world your business and your personal brand need to be one and the same, whether you’re selling organic fish food or financial advice or just your opinion.
You see where I’m going with this? The first generation built their brands on television and movie screens, radio, magazines, and newspapers, and the new one will do the same online at a much lower cost, with no need for a gatekeeper’s approval. Get into position, because the big killing is coming around the corner. The field may be different, different, but the game is just the same.
So no matter how you shape and color your personal brand, honesty has got to be at your core. All I’m doing on my blog is being myself and voicing my opinion loud and clear. When you launch your videos, blogs, or podcasts, you are doing the same.
When you’re thinking about your personal brand, don’t worry that it will have to lookanything like mine in order for you to crush it. You’ll crush it as long as you concentrate on being yourself.
Embrace your DNA, be yourself, put out awesome content, and people will be interested in what you have to say. Believe me, if you’re that good, people are going to find you, and they’re going to follow you, and they’re going to talk. And getting people to talk is the whole point.
If you don’t plan ahead and decide where you want to go, you’re in big trouble. My feeling is that no matter how much you like your job, you should aim to leave it and grow your own brand and business or partner with someone to do so, because as long as you’re working for someone else you will never be living entirely true to yourself and your passion.
You can monetize any passion, but the level at which you can monetize will be affected by the size of your niche and whether you are able to differentiate yourself enough from the other players in it. There are a lot of pockets out there today, however, that can sustain a nice forty-to-seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a year business.
There are people who belong in front of a camera, there are people who belong in print, and there are people who belong on the air. These are the extraordinary people. The ordinary ones, the ones like the vast majority of businesspeople and entrepreneurs out there, don’t have the showman DNA.
Now though, you’re earning the same money talking about something you are crazy about. It’s a good deal. Take it. Know yourself. Choose the right medium, choose the right topic, create awesome content, and you can make a lot of money being happy.
To my mind the most effective content medium is video, and that’s the one I prefer to focus on. It’s just easier to grab people’s attention and draw them in, especially a public who reads less and less. I also think letting people see you is a major plus when you’re trying to sell a personal brand. Don’t think any subject is off-limits for a video blog. If your passion is sales, do a show about sales.
The most important thing to remember is to be authentic, to be yourself. That authenticity is what will give you your greatest chance of success.
I want to share with you the best business tweet of all time: “What can I do for you?”
You’re going to do your content better, and you’re going to do it your way using the tools we just discussed.
Vitamins can give your body a real boost, but they won’t do you much good if you don’t also incorporate exercise, proper nutrition, and even vaccines into your healthy habits. The same goes for all of these platforms. Each one individually gives your personal brand strength and reach, but if you use them together properly, they can turn you into a force to be reckoned with.
authenticity We’ve talked about paying attention to your DNA, but while the concept of authenticity is closely related it’s not the same. Your DNA dictates your passion — whatever it is you were born to do; being authentic, and being perceived as such by your audience, relies on your ability to ensure that every decision you make when it comes to your business
authenticity
We’ve talked about paying attention to your DNA, but while the concept of authenticity is closely related it’s not the same. Your DNA dictates your passion — whatever it is you were born to do; being authentic, and being perceived as such by your audience, relies on your ability to ensure that every decision you make when it comes to your business is rooted in being true to yourself. For example, I would love to change the opening of my show. It starts off the same almost every time. “HELLO EVERYBODY AND WELCOME TO WINE LIBRARY TV. I AM YOUR HOST GARY VAY-NER-CHUK AND THIS, MY FRIENDS, IS THE THUNDER SHOW AKA THE INTERNET’S MOST PASSIONATE WINE PROGRAM.” It’s not exactly what some wine lovers are looking for in a wine expert, and I lose about 12 percent of my viewers right off the bat because I yell and scream like a maniac. For a businessman like me, that number is intolerable. I desperately want to change the opening of my show to something a little calmer, more refined, something that won’t scare people away. But I can’t, because that yelling, screaming, superexcited guy is who I am. If I tried to tone things down and make myself appealing to that missing 12 percent, I can guarantee that everything I’ve built until now would start slipping away, because now every time I’d get in front of that Flip Cam I’d be putting on an act. I’m not putting on a performance when I do the show or my blog posts — I’m just being me. — -> ROCK
I only invest effort and thought into what I care about and what I need to create great content.
As long as I get my point across and feel like I delivered the message in an authentic way, I don’t care.
The celebrities of today, the ones who are making it huge by connecting with their fans, whether on the screen or online, are all about keeping it real and being themselves. No matter how big or small you want to go, your authenticity will be at the root of your appeal and is what will keep people coming to your site and spreading the word about your personal brand, service, or whatever you are offering. If you want to dominate the social media game, all of your effort has to come from the heart; and it can’t come from the heart in the passionate, irrational, wholehearted way it needs to if you’re trying to be anyone but yourself. Authenticity is what will make it possible for you to put in the kind of hustle necessary to crush it.
hustle
I’ve said over and over that if you live your passion and work the social networking tools to the max, opportunities to monetize will present themselves. I’ve also said that in order to crush it you have to be sure your content is best in it’s category. With one exception. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it. Without it, you should just pack up your toys and go home.
The thing is, if you’re living your passion, you’re going to want to be consumed by your work. There’s no room for relaxation in the flop-on-the-couch-with-popcorn-and-watch-TV kind of way, but you won’t need it. You’re not going to be stressed or tired. You’re going to be relaxed and invigorated. The passion and love for what you do will enable you to work the hours necessary to succeed. You’ll lose track of the time, go to bed reluctantly, and wake up in the morning excited to do it all over again. You’ll be living and breathing your content, learning everything you can about your subject, about your tools, about your competition, and talking nonstop with other people interested in the same thing you are. As hard as you’re going to push yourself, don’t plan on seeing results right away. I’d say that this leads us to the number one issue that trips up a lot of otherwise savvy entrepreneurs trying to build their brand online.
People listen to me talk about what it takes to monetize their personal brand and sometimes I think they filter out the parts they don’t want to hear. They think, I’ve got the passion, I can do hustle like nobody else. Patience? Leave that for the other guys — I’m gonna turbocharge this sucker. But patience is the secret sauce. Once you put up your site, you don’t want to start and stop, backtrack and second-guess. It’ll make you look insecure and foolish. If you’re patient, you’ll be more likely to plan and prepare and make sure everything is in place before making the big moves that are going to monetize your brand to the fullest.
It was patience that helped me grow Wine Library, too. I was twenty-two years old and running a ten-million-dollar business. I did it with good old-fashioned hustle — every customer who walked in got monetized to the fullest. If they walked in for one bottle, they usually walked out with three.
And I was being paid $27,000 a year. Most young people who take a business from four to ten million feel they deserve a watch and a car and a cool apartment as rewards for their savviness and hard work. Get over that. You come last. Before you invest in yourself, you have to invest in your long-term future. That means your profits should funnel right back into your research, your content, and your staff should you have any. The sooner you start cashing in, the shorter window you have in which to cement your success. So hold off as long as you can.
How did someone like me, who is so obviously not a patient guy, cool my heels for so long? Because I was 100 percent happy. I loved what I was doing. I knew down to my core that my business was going to explode, but even if I had fallen flat on my face, I would have had no regrets because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it. Now do you get why it’s so, so important for you to center your business on your passion? If you enter a niche because you’re following the dollars, you won’t keep it up. It’s too much work, and you will get tired and frustrated and you will eventually fold. You have to think about building your brand in terms of a marathon, not a sprint. It will take longer to see results, but in seven or nine or fifteen years you won’t crack, you’ll still love what you’re doing. What exactly are you going to be doing that’s going to be so time and labor intensive? You’ll be studying your topic, researching your platforms, drafting your blog posts, doing whatever it takes to become the foremost expert and personal brand in your field. But most of all, you will be creating a community.
To create an audience for your personal brand, you’re going to get out there, shake hands, and join every single online conversation already in play around the world about your topic. Every. Single. One.
Building and sustaining community is a never-ending part of doing business.
Don’t get obsessed with how many friends or fans are following you — the stats are only marginally important. What’s important is the intensity of your community’s engagement and interaction with you. At this point the quality of the conversation is much more revealing than the number of people having it. If your content is making people talk enough so they start to make some noise, I guarantee you’re going to see more people show up to your party. As long as you’re seeing your audience grow, even modestly, over the first four or five months, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.
I’ve repeated over and over that in order to build a winning business you have to go whole hog with your passion. True. I’ve said that if you don’t plan ahead and decide exactly what you want and where you want to see your business end up, you’re broken. Still true. But what is also true is that as committed and obsessed and goal oriented as entrepreneurs need to be, they also have to be willing to practice what I call “reactionary business,” which at heart is about being willing and able to adapt and change. This is where most companies and businesspeople lose the game, by refusing to admit their mistakes or neglecting to look ahead to see what could negatively impact their business. Nothing in life ever goes exactly the way you think it will, and that goes for all of your carefully planned entrepreneurial dreams and goals. Reactionary business allows you to make a couple of crucial moves when the landscape starts to change.
With every e-mail and video and blog post and tweet and status update, we add to the real-time documentary of our lives. For the person who thinks of himself or herself as a brand — and remember, everyone needs to start thinking of themselves as a brand — the ability to spread your great ideas and share your triumphs is a golden opportunity. The downside to this, of course, is that when you mess up or things go wrong, there’s no longer anywhere to hide. The public can be forgiving when it wants to be, but rather than test its generosity, I urge you to start training yourself to think through the consequences of every business decision you make before you actually make it. Perhaps that sounds like obvious advice, but I know for a fact that many people have a hard time thinking long term. Successful entrepreneurs are like good chess players; they can imagine the various possibilities ahead and how each one will trigger their next move.
hard time thinking long term. Successful entrepreneurs are like good chess players; they can imagine the various possibilities ahead and how each one will trigger their next move.
Achieving 100 percent happiness is the whole point of living your passion, of course, but to my mind that happiness is unachievable if you don’t recognize that with every decision you make, you’re building more than just a business, you’re building a legacy. For all of us made of ambitious, competitive, hungry DNA, the urge to take our personal brands as far as they will go is second nature. But let me assure you that if you’re coming exclusively from the monetizing angle, you’re going to lose. How you build your business is so much more important than how much you make while doing it. Yes, I want to buy the Jets. Yes, I intend to crush it. But as I build my brand and make money and work to achieve my goals, I am always hyperaware that everything I’m doing is being recorded for eternity.
Legacy always wins.
Legacy is the mortar of successful, lasting brands. I’ve known this since my days in retail. There was one year where I found out that a customer in Westchester, New York, hadn’t received her case of White Zinfandel. It was December 22 and there was no way FedEx was going to deliver the wine in time for Christmas. My ordering department had received the complaint, but because the customer was neither a regular nor the order particularly large, they hadn’t brought it to my attention. By the time I got wind of the problem there was only one thing left to do. I threw a case of White Zinfandel in my car and drove three hours in blinding snow to the woman’s house. Did I mention that she lived in another state? That it was our busiest time of the year? That my time was much more valuable in the store during those six round-trip hours? And believe me, there was no angle. The customer was an older woman who lived far away and wasn’t about to start hosting a lot of parties and using us as her exclusive wine supplier. Yet I knew that it was up to me to set the tone at the store, and that this was a perfect way to do it. Our corporate culture was cemented the day I delivered the case of wine to that woman. I follow the same philosophy when I answer every single one of my e-mails. Making connections, creating and continuing meaningful interaction with other people, whether in person or in the digital domain, is the only reason we’re here. Remember that, set the tone, and build legacy.
Whatever you do, don’t read this book and take everything I say word for word. I’ve offered you a blueprint of the step-by-step process of taking advantage of what the Internet has to offer you now, which has worked well for me. But in six months the environment will have changed again. If you see something — a platform, a trend, a social pattern that makes your radar go off, you should absolutely follow it. Don’t ever be afraid to put your feet in that water, whether I’ve said a word about it or not. Listen to your DNA — it will always lead you in the right direction. If there’s any message I want you to take away, it’s that true success — financial, personal, and professional — lies above all in loving your family, working hard, and living your passion. In telling your story. In authenticity, hustle, and patience. In caring fiercely about the big and the small stuff. In valuing legacy over currency. Social media is an important part of it for now, but maybe it won’t always be. These concepts, however, are forever, no matter what the next business platform or social phenomenon turns out to be.
