Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too

by Gary Vaynerchuk

“The biggest mistake I see influencers make is, they’ll work with every brand on the planet. It’s all about how many brands can they work with, not about the audience, not about the readership. I see no longevity there. I’m more focused on building my own brand than other people’s brands.”

Everyone says put yourself out there, be your authentic self, but when your authentic self is not what they like, they talk back. It was a very weird experience. But instead of silencing me, I’m just going to continue to put myself out there even more.

Passion I know many people working in jobs that make them heaps of money who aren’t happy, but I don’t know anyone who works around their passion every day who isn’t loving life.

We’re on this earth for only a short time, and the bulk of our adult days are spent at work. It’s worth taking the steps necessary to make sure those hours are as rewarding, productive, and enjoyable as possible.

Interestingly, many of the people we interviewed pointed out that you don’t even have to be passionate about the product or service you’re offering. What’s imperative is that you are passionate about giving.

when you eat shit—passion makes it all go down easier.

When this person asked for the answer to be simplified, they were scoffed at. . . . Basically, there were artist types of people asking a question and heady engineering types refusing to dumb down the answer. I was once one of those “artist types” of people in the very beginning. So, once I figured everything out on my own, I simply made sure to explain things in a very easy-to-understand-and-digest manner so others could learn more easily.

That led to questions from customers, which added to the number of hours Brian spent replying to comments and answering e-mails and even phone calls. He finally published a series of e-books to consolidate all the information he was disseminating.

Embrace Your DNA: “I probably owe my marriage to this idea. Before reading the book, my wife and I were trying to do everything at once—design new products, build them, market them, find new retailers domestically and internationally, keep up with customer service, ship everything in a timely manner . . . manage employees, etc. This created a lot of friction because I really sucked at everything except designing new products, creating content, and talking to new and potential customers. After reading the book, she and I decided to outsource everything to outside contractors or hire people that brought in the qualities that I did not

Storytell: “At the time, many of the other companies were faceless. I simply started being myself in an authentic way and became the first president of a musical instrument company who did his own product demos. This was very odd at the time to many other companies. However, our customers loved it! They realized that I was an actual guitar player who happened to make pedals, rather than an engineer who happened to dabble in a little bit of guitar. This difference, though it may seem minor, was huge for us, and a key to our success.”

Go Deep, Not Wide: “Analytics don’t tell the whole story. In a nutshell, I decided to stop chasing numbers and focus more on creating content that brought more value to our customers. A thousand views and a hundred comments are much better than ten thousand views and one comment.”

Everyone Needs to Become a Brand: “I insisted that everyone who worked for me become a face of the company alongside me. They had to understand that everything they posted online reflected the brand. Equally important to me, by understanding the fact that everyone is basically a brand, they would have an advanta...

You Got to Be You: “I jumped in with both feet, convinced that, if I followed my passion with extreme vigor, something, somewhere would happen. . . . I just had to be patien...

Remember, you’re only crushing it if you’re living entirely on your own terms.

You have no reason to start acting like something special until you actually have something special to show for it. Even then, don’t act special; the moment you do, you’ll start moving in the opposite direction. Take my advice: eat shit for as long as you have to. That means be a bigger man or woman than everyone around you. That means the customer is always right. That means you put your employees ahead of you.

Be patient. Be methodical.

‘What’s a Foolie?’ And I said, ‘I guess somebody who’s dumb enough to try something and figure it out in the end.’”

They did what Alex calls the Daymond John effect: “Put it on one person, take a picture, you take it off. Put it on another person, take a picture, take it off. Because you don’t have money so you can’t give shirts to everyone, but if you can post pictures on Facebook and Twitter and make it seem like everyone has a shirt, maybe other people will want it, too.

He came up with clever ways to deliver an extra special experience to his customers. When he had a special sale, he’d send customers who bought a shirt a custom link to a YouTube video of himself singing a song with their name in it, or some other personal message. He shipped the shirts inside miniature paint cans, the idea being that when you opened the can you’d be releasing your dreams. And he’d send a handwritten letter to every customer, along with a dream journal, “because that’s the biggest thing that people don’t do: they don’t write their goals down, so they can never manifest and come to life.” As soon as customers received their order, they’d post a picture to social media. Except, interestingly, sometimes they didn’t post the shirt—they posted the letter, the can, or the dream journal. They’d thank Alex, saying it had been years since anyone had written them a letter, and some attached the letters to their refrigerators or bathroom walls.

“Oh, you need to expand and talk to all these people,” and I’m like, “Gary gets it.”

Speed I love a good contradiction, but this isn’t one. Patience is for the long term; speed is for the short term. The pressure that builds between the two produces the diamond.

You need to constantly be in do mode. I see you out there overthinking your content and agonizing over your decisions, taking forever to make up your mind. Your confidence is low, and you’re worried people will call you a loser if you make the wrong call. Get over that quick. I love losing because I learn so much from it. The reason I don’t talk about my failures much is not because I’m hiding anything, but because once I’ve seen I’ve made a mistake, in my mind, it’s over.

Hear me now: you are better off being wrong ten times and being right three than you are if you try only three times and always get it right.

if you really feel like you’re good at something, if you put in the work, I guarantee you, you will get somewhere.

When you first start out, there is no time for leisure—if you want to crush it.

The only additional thing you will have time for is your family. They deserve to get the best of you, so make sure you don’t let the work creep in to all of your time with them—unless you can make them part of it, which would be wonderful. Bring them in on this adventure with you! Many people interviewed for this book have done this.

You have to decide how you’re going to spend your time. Start by blocking off the hours you must spend on your obligations—your job, your kids, your spouse, your aging mother. If you’re serious about crushing it, every minute not spent on those obligations should be spent producing content, distributing content, engaging with your community, or engaging in business development.

How to distribute my time

Do things! Create content daily. Biz-dev daily. Meet with two or three people per day who can get you awareness, distribution, or sales—somehow closer to your goals.

Be practical. Raising your self-awareness and suffocating any self-delusion is a crucial piece of keeping you on the path to success, however you define it.

A successful entrepreneur is one who puts in enough energy to move the gears and executes well enough so the work isn’t wasted.

Attention Where are the eyeballs going? What are your customers talking about? What are the newest trends in your field? What are the biggest controversies? You have to pay attention to everything.

Knowing how to spot underpriced or underappreciated attention is a key influencer skill.

There are a lot of you whose competitors were mastering Instagram five years ago just in case it got really big, while you were still debating whether to get an account. Don’t make that mistake again.

My passion was branding myself to become this DJ, this facade, this brand. There’s a psychological quality to branding and marketing that’s sometimes hard to quantify. You have to care and show people the quality of who you are and what you do.”

“You can brand yourself all you want, but if you don’t have credibility or have not done anything, it’s almost worthless. You can only sell something that’s actually good.”

word. I exaggerate a lot for emphasis and entertainment, but I am not kidding when I tell you that if you scrimp in any way on any one of these building blocks, you will falter. It’s just the truth.

There’s an eighth essential. It’s the only one that has seen some significant developments over the years. It’s so important, it deserves a chapter of its own.

To monetize your personal brand into a business using social marketing networks, two pillars need to be in place: product and content. —Crush It!, chapter 5

It’s still true that the right product and content will be key to building a vibrant personal brand.

I should have specified that I didn’t mean you should pump out the same content across multiple platforms. Rather, I wanted you to develop high-quality native microcontent.

For those of you new to this, that means content that is specifically and perfectly designed to suit the platform you’re using to disseminate it. The audience on Twitter isn’t looking for the same kind of content as Instagram followers. A Facebook post will have greater impact if it’s not just a cut-and-paste job from your blog or a ten-minute video that should actually be living on YouTube. Even if your audience overlaps among the platforms, people are in a completely different mind-set when they’re visiting one platform than when visiting another. If they’re on Twitter, they’re likely trying to keep up with current news. If they’re on Facebook, they’re probably catching up with friends and family. They may go to Snapchat to consume a blip of entertainment on their lunch break, but they’ll go to YouTube when they’re in the mood to settle in for the evening with some long-form video, the same way previous generations watched TV.

Creating all that content can seem daunting, but it’s a lot more manageable if you focus on creating one big piece of pillar content that can be splintered into other smaller bits of content—content that breeds like rabbits, if you will. The concept can best be illustrated by a chart my team and I created for VaynerTalent, a division of VaynerMedia I established for influencers who have grown their personal brands as big as they can on their own and need extra help to keep growing. It’s a service for the 1 percent of the 1 percent. If you’re reading this book, you’re likely not there yet, but I hope to teach you what you need to know so that if you get good enough, you’ll need us one day.

great content is a result of passion plus expertise.

to have a prayer of becoming even the eighty-eighth best whiskey Instagrammer, you’re going to have to make sure that you are constantly updating your knowledge and providing information and insight that people can’t find easily anywhere else.

Moreover, you’ll have to do it in a unique and memorable signature style. There’s no way around it—your content must be amazing.

Document, Don’t Create

Since then I’ve come to realize that, actually, the learning process should be your content.

It’s true that great content hinges on great storytelling and that every story in the universe has already been told. But not by you.

POST THIS

Don’t worry about getting people’s attention by plotting a poetic YouTube video or writing four drafts of a snappy Facebook status post. Instead, use every platform available to document your actual life and speak your truth.

Sorry, there’s no skirting the fact that any success you achieve will be predicated on the quality of your content.