3 Ways To Start Accomplishing Your Goals

If you want to start accomplishing your goals you need to understand that your reputation, a.k.a your “personal brand,” is what you trade from in your personal and professional life.

As I take a moment to reflect, and think about how my profile has expanded dramatically on Instagram, YouTube and iTunes through my Podcast and Playlist over the last 15 months, I have begun to see my audience and the attention that I have on social media shifting significantly younger.

As I realize that I am now impacting more 12-22 year-olds through the content that I produce, I am well aware that there’s a real opportunity to lay the foundation and set the blueprint on things like positivity, empathy, kindness, hard work, gratitude and more. My hope is to use the attention I have been gifted with to try to break through to at least one person on every single post, every single day for the rest of my life. That’s what I want. Hopefully, that will be my legacy.

As I continue to study consumer attention and try to reverse engineer what people care about in culture and why, I have started to notice an enormous amount of stress, anxiety, and misunderstanding for a lot of these 15 to 25-year-olds as they try to navigate the next chapter of their lives. On a phone call to a member of #FirstinLine I was able to create and articulate some of my points of view on specific pillars I think that everyone should be thinking more about when it comes to considering the traditional pathways to “success.”

As most people’s stress and anxiety in life stems from where they will potentially work or spend the majority of their adult life, trying to pay the bills and support themselves or their family, a lot of this advice centers around the traditional pathways of “getting a job.” Obviously, there are a million ways you could go about doing that beyond the standard 9-5 route but for many this is still a concern.

For those of you that might not know, I’ve written two books, Crush It and Crushing It!, that give you an in-depth blueprint for alternatives to the corporate path.In this article, I am not talking about the endless ways you can pursue your passions but more so the three pathways I currently see that can set you on the right track.

1. Why You Should Go to School

When a lot of people think about being “successful” or achieving a major milestone in their life, they think about graduating from school.

This is by far the easiest one for everybody to understand, and probably the one my blog and others that read this will resonate with the most. I am more than confident that there’s a high percentage of my over-40-year-old crowd that will accept it, agree with it, believe it is the best, if not the only way to succeed, and I get that. I have a ton of empathy for the brand promotion of a top-tier college degree.

I still think a college degree has utility and purpose in a pre-2017 work-force and can definitely help sort you or validate you from a societal or historical point of view. That’s why so many of you still consider it the right move.

However, I would be remiss not to mention the topic of conversation around college debt and the fact that many employers, VaynerMedia included, aren’t over-indexing against where our employees, or potential employees, went to school.

School is certainly one path, but in a 2018 world, it’s certainly not the only one.

And look, I get it. For so long a college degree has been this symbol, and medal of some kind which serves as a line item on your resume and your LinkedIn profile that can bring instant credibility to your know-how and experience. It funnels you into a network and it gives you a common shared experience with other employers or employees and alumni who have went through the same thing. I for one, was a D and F student and chose option 3 for myself, which you will read about in a moment as a way to succeed. I did not go to a top tier school, and I got terrible grades, yet I still turned out okay.

So my point is that there are definitely other ways, and if you can’t get into a good school, or you don’t want to go to college, you shouldn’t feel bad about that decision. Because of the internet, there is plenty of opportunity and access to the information you need to help you succeed.

2. How To Get A Job With or Without a College Degree

Number two, as a new way of considering how you might enter the workforce, is this idea of working for someone you admire or want to be like, in any capacity for as little money as you possibly can.

One concept that has really emerged over the last five years is the question to myself that “If I had to do it all over again, what would I do differently?”

Obviously, I had the fortune, and the ability to go and work for and build my family business for my parents, but I also felt the gratitude and excitement to do so. In hindsight, the only option that I would have even considered besides what I did was if I would’ve gone and worked for some of the top entrepreneurs in the world at the time, even if it meant I had to be poor and get a job at midnight on the side to help support that lifestyle.

I think a lot of the time when I talk about providing value or working for somebody who you want to be one day, people often say, “Well, Gary… You can afford it.” But there are many many people in the world that are living on $10 or $12 or $15 an hour. I would do anything to work for Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Jack Welch at a low wage because I know the upside, the leverage, and the education from doing so would be enormous.

Not to mention that, unlike in 1998 when the only side-hustle you could have had to be done in person like shoveling snow, shining shoes, getting coffee, etc., today, you can have a side-hustle selling knick-knacks online. All of the opportunity is literally right there on your phone and your fingertips. If you just went on Craigslist and researched the free section, and sold things or flipped them on ebay, Amazon or Facebook Marketplace, you could very well make an extra $300 week from your iPhone or pc. You’d have to put in the work, but it’s definitely possible.

How to ACTUALLY Make Money for Free | The Craigslist "Free" Section

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