What Gary Vaynerchuk Taught Me
Passion is everything.
What does he mean by that? He means that, if you’re living your passion, you can get up every day pumped because you get to do what you love the most in the world. You don’t work for vacations because work, play, and relaxation are all the same. You would do this for free. You don’t even pay attention to the number of hours you’re “working.”
Don’t differentiate between your work life and your personal life.
If you stop hustling, it will all crumble. Your success depends on you.
If you do what Vaynerchuk says the way he says it, you’ll work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life.
Social media is not broken.
Myspace, Twitter, Youtube started out, on the user side, having nothing to do with commerce. Your first priority on those places should be to engage socially and make friends.
Those 1,000 true fans (or 10,000 true fans as Robert Chazz Chute says he wants) should be our friends.
“I wasn’t gonna use video blogs to sell wine, I was gonna use [them] to build a whole new world for wine, and for myself.” “Wine Library TV was never about selling wine. It was always about building brand equity.”
He says that he didn’t use it as a way to increase sales. He never stocked more than 15 cases of any wine featured on the show, because the show’s point was to increase brand equity, not sales. So what’s the root of what he did?
He used a social media platform to engage an audience that was into what he was selling. He put his name out there. People liked him. Later on he published books. Lots of people who watched Wine Library TV bought those books because
1: They liked him.
2: They saw his success at the wine shop.
3: He had already given them lots of fun, free content. They were willing to pay for more content.
Your personal brand matters.
Understand what makes you different from everybody else. That’s your personal brand. What quirks in your personality set you apart? What’s different about your books? Your podcast? What makes your email list so fucking attractive?
Never ever use your personal FB account to publish those awful fucking “buy my book” posts. Instead, do what another of Vaynerchuk’s books says: give give give give give, then ask.
Put out stellar content specific to each platform, but do so using your personal brand, which should be synonymous with yourself. If you’re an entrepreneur living your passion, you are your business.
No more resumes.
Resumes are irrelevant. Okay, okay, so entrepreneurs don’t really apply for jobs, so we have almost no need for resumes. V says that your latest blog post, your latest tweet, your latest comment of FB, your latest book or podcast or amateur sex film is your new resume. (I added those last three.)
Everything you say is now relevant. It’s relevant because it’s you; it’s your personal brand; it’s your business; it’s your resume.
Quality is everything.
Duh. Still though, it’s always good to keep this at the front of your mind.
“You can hustle and market and network all you want, but if your sports drink tastes like trash, or if you’re putting out bad information, you’re going to lose.”
Great content is what’s gonna attract people to you. So you have to be the best. Not only the best, but unique. You have to know your subject(s) like nobody else and be able to synthesize all your passions together. Passion plus expertise.
“Do your homework. You should be reading and absorbing every single resource you can find — books, trade journals, newsletters, websites… classes… lectures, and conferences.”
Find all the great blogs and forums on your subject(s) and interact with people there. There are a billion free open-source courses online in a hundred gajillion subjects.
“You can even make the learning process part of your content.”
Fail publicly.
Chronicle your failures and turn churn out some content that’s a sort of memoir about when you sucked.
Go write a blog called How To Fail Fast At ________. Make it funny, make it engaging, make it you.
V’s test is: Is _____ my ultimate passion? Yes/no. Okay, am I good enough (or do I want to become good enough) to be the best _____ blogger in the world?
If your answer to both questions isn’t an emphatic YES, you’re gonna go nowhere.
“If you’re not happy, you’re gonna be just another boring blog on the internet.” The author of any given boring blog should probably, according to Vaynerchuk, be talking about something else:
“something that makes him shine, that gets him excited, that allows his personality and his passion to burst through your monitor and demand that you pay attention no matter whether he’s an introvert or an extrovert.”
Find your voice.
What’s your medium? Where’s your best voice? Is it writing? Video? Spoken word? V says there are people who belong in print while others belong on camera or behind a microphone.
None of this means you’ll be a millionaire unless you’re an exceptional showman. What you are more likely to accomplish is to gain roughly the same income you would make “the same amount as you would were you schlepping into somebody else’s office every day. Now though, you’re earning the same money talking about something you’re crazy about. It’s a good deal. Take it.”
Keep it real.
“I’m not putting on a performance when I do my show or my blog posts — I’m being me.”
“I only invest effort and thought into what I need to create great content.”
On hustle
Your content has to be the best in its category. You’ll make plenty of good money if its the 4th or 9th, but if you wanna really kill it, your shit has to be at the top. V says there is one exception: the chick who has less passion and less talent and has poorer content can still beat you if she works longer and harder than you.
As authorpreneurs we do have flexible schedules, we are our own bosses, and we’re doing what we love, but:
“assuming you’re doing this right, you’ll be bleeding out of your eyeballs at your computer. You might have thought your old boss was bad, but if you want your business to go anywhere, your new boss had better be a slave driver. Too many people don’t want to swallow the pill of working every day, every chance they get. The only differentiator in the game is your passion and your hustle.”
If you’re serious about this, no more Wii. Your only free time is gonna be reserved for meals and catchup time with the sig other and the kids. Every other minute belongs to your business. If you’re focused on your passion though, you won’t need relaxation time. 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.”
Be patient.
Nothing happens overnight. Well, unless you’re Jim “18-year overnight success” Kukral.
“Patience is the secret sauce.”
Reinvest as much cash as possible back into your business. This may be the time to find a smashing editor and a holyfucktits amazing cover designer. You get the idea.
Bleed from the eyeballs.
Why is all this gonna be so labor intensive? Because you’ll be “studying your topic, researching your platforms, drafting your blogs, and doing whatever it takes to become the foremost expert and personal brand in your field.”
Also, you’re gonna be creating community, which means you have to engage in all the blogs and et ceteras related to your field. This is where I really struggle with Crush It. The book is written for people who are in a particular field, such as wine.
But what about we authorpreneurs who write in several genres in both fiction and nonfiction? Should we stick to just one? Or would that be betraying our personal brand?
For example, here’s a short list of the things I’m extremely interested in right now: selling books (obv), entrepreneurialism (obv), the history of Mexico, plant medicines, beer, wine, hard liquors.
I can see myself going down a rabbit hole in almost all those subjects and researching the fuckjesus out of it. The problem gets a little bigger when taking into consideration the advice from people like Tim Ferriss who say to become a generalist rather than a specialist.
How can I be the best at one thing when there are so many other things I’m interested in? Plus, if I’m gonna be a well-rounded person, I would also like to learn a ton more about personal finance, bitcoin (or digital currencies in general), man-skills like electrician…ness and plumbing and cars, not to mention self defense. I think the best tactic is to pick one subject at a time.
Right now (and probably forever), I would suggest that you and I become the world’s leading experts on writing and selling kickass books to awesome people. If writing is your business you owe it to yourself to know at least 8 books-worth of material regarding this topic. This is a business and we gotta treat it as such. Get passionate about it. Get learnin.
Then there’s the problem of how literally to take his advice to join every single topic currently taking place in your field. “Every. Single. One.” Every single one about how to write better prose? Better pacing? Better story arcs? More compelling characters? Participate in every KBoards conversation in the Writer’s Cafe? Go find every authorpreneurialism blog and join in?
He might just be crazy enough to tell us “yes, you lazy shitheads.” And he might be right. But then again, our job is to write books. So what should be our ratio of blogging to forum participation to actual book-writing?
Yes, you’ve got to create your community, but your fans are waiting for book 4 in your series.
At multiple points in his book, V makes sure to let you know that you can contact him. He gives out his email address right there in the book. Over and over he says “if you have questions, let me know.” And he’s fucking serious.
Authors, you absofuckinglutely have to follow suit. You have to be available to your fans. Do not wall yourself off. Do not hide behind your books. You must engage.
Get a website, make it pretty if you can afford it, upload little video blogs, get a FB fan page and a twitter page that are both linked to your website, get TubeMogul and Ping.FM accounts to basically syndicate your video and text blogs across all the social media sites, educate your community, put out as much content as you can, get in a conversation with everybody in your field, search for key words related to your field and engage the people talking about them: that means everybody on Twitter, FB, and blogs (among any other social networks you like).
Do all that stuff over and over for as long as you’re in your field.
Give away content.
Are you a nonfiction author with a book that can solve someone’s problem? Find people on social media tweeting about a related problem and offer them a free copy of your book.
One idea is to do speaking gigs for free while you build your platform and grow your brand. V says you can charge later on, but you should start for free because you get to (1) talk about your passion, (2) build credibility, and (3) do so in front of interested people, some of whom might have interesting proposals for you.
Adapt.
Sure, you’re writing to capture that lucrative 41-year old polyamorous lesbian audience, but one day you find out that most of your fans are Hell’s Angels. Embrace your audience.
“No matter how big you get, every email, every customer, every friend, every single person with whom you come into contact matters and deserves respect and attention. Not because you never know who’s gonna be a good contact or resource later on, although that’s definitely true, but just because. If someone takes the time to reach out to you, it’s your obligation to reciprocate.”
“Listen to your DNA — it will always lead you in the right direction.”
People love communicating, which is the only reason social media works.
Care first, don’t sell first.
Happy customers are worth more than any other kind.
People prefer to hang out with people they like. They also prefer doing business with people they like.
A note on rhetoric: V says social media isn’t media at all. It’s a profound cultural shift in how people communicate. While he doesn’t like to call it “social media,” that’s what everyone calls it, so that’s what he’ll call it.
That’s an important point that too many people don’t understand. I come from the far left, where our theorists are always trying to redefine words. They do it mostly as a way of remaining relevant to the 6 other people who read their poorly written drivel. “Using the term ___ is factually incorrect because…” blah blah whatever.
What they fail to realize is that nobody cares whether we should actually use the term or not. The term already exists and everybody uses it. Period.
People don’t talk about things they don’t care about. You have to make your customers care. Then they’ll talk.
When he started tweeting, nobody knew who he was. He searched for people talking about Chardonnay and answered their questions. He didn’t link to his blog or website. He didn’t tell them to buy his shit. He just started a conversation. Some of those conversations grew into relationships. Some of those relationships became profitable.
Don’t price yourself out of a job.
“There’s only so low you can go on price. There’s only so excellent you can make your product or service. There’s only so far you can stretch your marketing budget. Your hearth, though — that’s boundless.”
Do not ignore comments.
Go for a policy of “No Interaction Left Behind.” What pays off most is showing you care “about them, about their experience with you, about their business.”
Be old school in your approach.
He talks about how business used to be in the old days. Think something like 1950s America. Yes, I know, it’s a cliché, but I think V is on to something here, because I see a lot of what he talks about with old school local family businesses still taking place.
I live on the outskirts of a medium-sized city in Mexico. Around here there’s the guy a few doors down who sells cheese. Around the block there’s the woman who sells tacos. Around the other corner there are the girls who sell tlayudas (basically a giant flavorless taco in a tortilla harder than cardboard). They run the businesses out of their homes. They work with their husbands and wives and kids and brothers and cousins, et cetera. You get to know them by name. The locals here have mostly known each other their whole lives. If the cheese guy sells you shitty cheese, you complain about it to friends.
But he never sells you shitty cheese because that’s his livelihood. Cheese is his life. Selling good cheese is how he feeds his family. He’s in the game for the long haul. Plus, his customers aren’t just dollar signs (peso signs); they’re friends and family.
Business on the internet is bringing our disconnected American culture back to that place, at least in part. People who choose to take part in online discussions about X subject are choosing to become part of a community.
Now you’re selling books to friends and online neighbors. Mind your manners.
SEO is not the future. Word of mouth is. V’s success at the wine shop wasn’t due to the videos he put up, but to the hours he spent afterward talking to people online.
Don’t be a phony. Don’t underestimate the sharpness of people’s BS detectors. Most people who don’t get anything out of social media aren’t using it correctly.
The hierarchy of relationships based on ROI: Family>Friends>Acquaintances>Strangers.
Without social media, your potential customers are strangers. With it, you can move up the ranks by becoming acquaintances and eventually friends.
Hierarchy of customers: Advocates>Committed Buyers>Casual Browsers.
The most valuable customer is the Advocate. You must bend over backwards to turn customers into Advocates. And that means making them your friends.
Customers are more likely to talk about bad shopping experiences than good ones.
Having meaningful conversations with readers is likely to increase your reviews.
“Social media relationships and personal relationships work exactly the same way — you get out of them what you put into them. You can’t buy them.”
Paraphrase: If you get so complacent that you think everything is fine, you deserve to go out of business. It means you’ve stopped caring. A competitive author is always on the offensive. Always always always.
When V started out, he didn’t have the name recognition in his field to talk about himself or his wine shop, so he talked about wines in general. Talk about your field in general. Don’t do that hard-sell bullshit. Nobody cares.
“Social media is a long-term play… it’s a marathon — you cannot reach the finish line without patience and determination.”
Related fields.
Do more research. Engage more people. If you’re writing nonfiction, think of all fields peripherally related to yours.
V gives the example of a concrete company. He says their job isn’t to sell concrete to everyone on Earth; their job is to sell concrete to everyone who needs it. Not only that, their job is also to sell concrete to people who don’t even realize they need it.
How do you do that? Reach out to people in “building, expansion, real estate, parking, wherever concrete gets used — that’s where you should be listening and talking.”
My book is about the craft of writing, book marketing, entrepreneurship. V’s advice would be to talk to those people, but I don’t want them as my audience. With the Authorpreneurship Masterclass, I’m trying to give myself the best education available in this field, but the best education will not come from talking to wannabes labeling themselves “content marketers” who write more than they read and almost definitely have a much lower words per minute rate than I do. At the risk of sounding as confident as I truly am, those people are shit writers and won’t last. I’m playing the long game here. I don’t give a shit about SEO. My goal is my craft. If it takes me 5 or 10 or 15 or 100 years to start making money, fine. Good. Great. I’m building a more solid foundation than any “content marketer” or “SEO expert” could ever dream of creating.
There are a lot of clowns out there who think they’re entrepreneurs, but should really just get a day job and leave writing to people who are truly in this thing to dominate it. Yeah, sure, they saw a Gary V video and now they think they’re social entrepreneurs, too. Fuck them. The world already has one Gary V. Nobody is gonna come along and be the second. Go be you, don’t bite someone else’s shit. Does Condensing The Gods count as biting someone else’s shit? Oh well.
Obsess.
Obsess over your customers. Obsess equally over your employees or partners.
How does this apply to writers? If you hire a cover designer or an editor, you already see where I’m going with this. But you should also obsess over your beta readers. Your street team. Anyone involved in promoting your books deserves to get the gold star treatment. You need to over-deliver to your customers AND your employees.
Think about it. Why do employees at the world’s biggest fast food chains always steal food and stand around like they don’t give a fuck about their jobs? Because they don’t give a fuck about their jobs.
Why?
I’m willing to bet that the majority of them would care if they got paid an acceptable wage and felt invested in the company. Pay your editor more than she asked for. More than you agreed to.
As for your customers, the power of SEO is going to diminish. So you need to create a community.
Don’t control the message.
“We live in a capitalist society, but the majority of businesses are taking a communist approach toward allowing their employees to use their voice on social media. They don’t wanna get the wrong message out.”
Steal.
Steal your competition’s fans by caring more than they do. This works better for nonfiction authors. One idea: who’s your competition in your space? Go find their Twitter followers and follow them, then engage. Find everybody talking about your subject and engage. Care more than your competition.
You have to keep working at all your relationships in life; the personal and the professional. If you ignore your wife for years, she’ll leave you. So will your customers.
Go out there and steal everybody’s wives.
“The Thank You Economy works when you build a sense of community around your brand, not when you simply sell to it.”
Handle negative criticism publicly.
Try to convert it.
Some places engage the reviewers by offering a free meal. One restaurant even offers free meals until the customer finally feels the restaurant got it right.
Sure, customers can game that system, but it works for the restaurant in the case study. So what do authors do here? Sometimes there’s not a lot we can do. Sometimes the reviewer is just a hater, but if you decide to read your reviews, like V did — in fact he took all valid criticisms and used it to make his 2nd book better — then you need to decide whether the criticism is justified or not.
If it’s not justified, ignore it.
It it is justified, fix the problem and thank the reader for pointing it out. Imagine if you could leave a review of your favorite author saying you found a problem and that person actually responded and fixed the problem. Pretty cool, no?
“…pursue one small victory at a time.”
Go first.
Do everything you can to “gain first mover advantage… Businesses that can see the potential of emerging platforms will always have an edge over their competition.”
If you’re the first one on the newest social media platforms, you could reap rewards.
“Fish the small ponds.” Find the smaller social media places and become a big fish.
Phones are everything.
Everybody is on their phones all the time. We already know that. Still, it’s important. Take advantage of it.
The power of email ads, banner ads, and SEO is diminishing or already dead.
Native content.
The first rule of native content is to have good content. Work on that first.
All social media platforms have their own language and atmosphere. Your content on each platform should be appropriate to the environment. If you’re gonna be on social media, you should understand the nuances that make each platform unique and interesting.
The core of marketing is to tell your story in a compelling way. Only the platforms change.
Executives at big companies will check out the newest social media space for 5 minutes, seeing 25-year olds posting bikini shots. They’ll conclude that the site is a waste of time.
The entrepreneur goes to the same site, sees the same bikini shots, and thinks “how can I do better?”
The big companies (and, most likely, the big authors) are playing defense instead of offense. We can turn this into our advantage as the little guys.
Boxers study the competition for hours, learning their flaws and strategies. As with most of Vaynerchuk’s stuff, I see more obvious applications for nonfiction authors: consume all the content in your niche and write books that fill in the gaps left by the more famous authors. Then work to steal their fans by offering something a million times better.
Quality over quantity, sort of.
Sure, that’s great. But to pull ahead in the social media game you need quality AND quantity. Every blog post has to be great. (Don’t think it can be done? Just look at the work of Johnny B Truant and Sean Platt.)
“Content for the sake of content is pointless.” It has to mean something.
“Social networking sites light up people’s dopamine pathways and the pleasure centers of their brain. Your content must do the same.”
V talks about an “ad impresario” called Leo Burnett who offered the following advice about making great content:
1. Make it simple.
2. Make it memorable.
3. Make it inviting to look at.
4. Make it fun to read.
5. V adds one more: “Make it for your audience, not for yourself.”
Over deliver. Always.
Over deliver without selling. “When you jab, you’re not selling anything.”
V’s point in my own words: Don’t put those fucking ads that black out the whole screen. Don’t make your audience hunt for the tiny fucking X in the corner to get rid of it. It only causes irritation. If people aren’t signing up for your email list, it’s because you suck. Stop sucking.
Micro content.
“Integrate your content into the stream, where people can consume it along with all their other pop culture candy.”
Your posts don’t always (or even mostly) have to be behemoths. Post bite-sized content: memes you create, funny pictures, et cetera.
Keep over-delivering.
It’s your only hope. Don’t just create great content, make content so great that people want to engage with it.
You love your brand to death because you have to. Your audience usually is not as attached.
Get to work before your competition’s alarm even goes off.
Your website ain’t everything.
There’s no central hub anymore. (Basically, your website doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.) People are gonna find you through a million different portals.
Long term.
By having a big future goal, V stresses less about the short term stuff and instead sees it all as a chess game that he’s playing to one day own his favorite football team. So what’s your big goal?
(Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week might help with defining your big goals.)
Forget the nonbelievers.
People who don’t believe in your field don’t matter. V is not concerned about converting marketers to the new world of marketing. He only speaks to the converted. If, for example, you’re selling a fax machine in 1980, you should not focus on convincing people to buy fax machines. Find people who already believe in the future of fax machines and sell to them. But:
“If you’re too early in a theory or a business, you’ve lost.”
He says some people think he’s Nostradamus; that he’s far ahead of the market. He says no, he’s not ahead of the market. He’s just practical and he’s selling to the people who already believe in what he’s selling.
I love this approach and will incorporate it fully into my work. There’s no point spending even a second trying to convince someone that writers need to be businesspeople as well. “Don’t waste energy on people that can’t consume it.”
“Searching on Twitter is gold.” Agreed.
The sector that struggles the most on social media is nonprofits. They ask and ask and ask every single day trying to get a donation, “without even saying hello.” They never engage their audience, just like those authors who install tweetbots telling you to buy their book every hour.
Nonprofits and tweetbot authors deserve to fail.
Boring doesn’t exist.
A viewer asked how to make interesting content for a boring subject like a hardware store. V’s response was: “a hardware store is far from boring.” They can put out great videos doing ridiculous and instructive things with hammers, nails, saws, paint, etc.
V says the fact that you say your industry is boring means you need to change your mindset. Got that, nonfic authors?
If you want it to be easy, you’ve already failed.
“Everybody’s looking for tactics to make it easy, but putting in the work always, always matters.”
Value up front.
As much as possible for as long as possible. Everybody is trying to close too early. They don’t provide enough value. They lack patience.
You need to put out free stuff, free entertainment. You have to reply to people.
Should you share content before you’re an expert?
V says “map that journey, baby.” He says he’s pissed that he couldn’t put out videos in 1998. There are no experts.
“Chops, skills, the goods… they have a funny way of working themselves out. So if you can bring it, it’s a hell of a lot more consumable.”
Your website is not everything.
It’s a good idea to push someone to a website if you’re selling something, but if people can buy your book right on Facebook or Twitter, is it necessary to push that person to your site? He says no.
“Friction sucks. Consumers do not want friction. Anything that allows you to execute within the place you’re in, that’s what you’re gonna like.”
The fact that you can buy something right on FB and Twitter has eliminated a lot of the need to drive people to your website.
Hashtags.
Any tips on making an unknown hashtag popular? V says no. Don’t try.
He’s big on this. It always comes up, from what I can tell. I’ve seen him deal with this question in at least two or three episodes of the #AskGaryV Show. There must be a lot of clown entrepreneurs out there thinking that somehow a hashtag will rocket them to the top of Twitter. V asks:
Why do you want it to trend? You don’t own that hashtag. There’s no upside. It’s better to just make fun, funny content around hashtags that already exist. Plus, nobody is going to jump on your fabricated hashtag bandwagon.
Free daily content.
Pump out great daily content. That’s how you’ll build a following from nothing. Don’t sell stuff that should be free.
“Trying to make a right hook feel like a jab is what 99% of salespeople and businesses do that end up failing.”
The point of his show is to provide you (the viewer) entertainment, information, value for free. However, in a year or so when he has a new book, he is going to ask you to buy it. Like an adult. Like a professional. No lies. No bullshit. No right hooks designed to feel like jabs.
When you sell, you sell. You feel comfortable because it’s a mutually beneficial transaction. You’ve provided tons of free content and are offering a new premium package for those who want to go deep.
Trying to turn jabs into right hooks is a losing mentality.
You have to do things free. Yes, just for exposure. A lot of artists get upset when people ask them to do things for free, but V says exposure is actually a very valuable asset. He himself still does things for free.
It’s a strategy. You do things for exposure that then lead to bigger things. Money is not the only way to pay.
James Altucher’s No Complaints Diet, Gary V-style.
Don’t fucking complain. “The only thing you should complain about is the unfortunate luck of health.” If you and your friends/family are healthy and alive, shut the fuck up.
“I’m an offensive player. Complaining is defense.”
Work harder or smarter?
“People tell me ‘I don’t work hard, I work smart.’ Well hey, dickface; I work both. I work ridiculously hard and I work obnoxiously smart.”
1. V gets so into what he’s doing that he forgets about other stuff.
1. Focus in. Zone in. All in.
1. Get in there 100%.
How to sell your book.
A viewer asked what were the 3 most effective things V did to increase sales of his books. V says you sell your book a year or 2 before you actually sell it. He says his free #askgaryvee show is a way for him to sell his upcoming 4th book. If you’ve been with me every step of the way on this Gary-V-as-mentor journey, you’ll know why he says that.
It’s because he’s building a relationship with you by providing great free content, which makes you wanna say “thanks, Gary,” and hopefully buy his book or recommend him to a friend or a million other things that are valuable but — in some ways — intangible.
He prefers time over money. It’s more valuable.
PCBC 2014 Keynote at Moscone Center
Phone calls suck.
V said “by a show of hands, how many people actually get upset when another human being calls them?” Then he made them stand up. There weren’t many. Maybe 10.
I would be one of those 10 people.
Then V said “let’s clap for those pioneers,” because when he asks that same question in 2017, 85% of the room will stand up.
“They don’t understand why you are calling them on your time and disrespecting their time.”
You can text or email instead. Time is our most important asset.
Privacy.
“Nobody actually gives a shit about privacy. You think you do, but your behavior proves you don’t.”
Romance.
“The quickest way to go out of business is to be romantic about how you make your money.”
Social Media State of the union Keynote — NERVE 2014 — Philly PA
Focus on your strengths.
Too many of us try to fix our weaknesses instead of doubling down (or quadrupling down, in his words) on our strengths. (Your dark horror books are great. Your literary fiction is steaming dogshit. Produce more dark horror.)
Why he shares his secrets.
“I don’t really wanna share with you my secrets, but I’m lucky enough to know that 99% of you are not gonna take my advice anyway and thus I’m just going to be historically correct and continue to build my brand, which is why I’m about to tell you what I’m about to tell you.”
It’s the same logic I apply to the Authorpreneurship Masterclass. It may potentially benefit me to keep the thing private, to never publish. But I’m counting on 2 things:
- Making money off of lazy people who just wanna pretend to be writers and whine about why they can’t sell any books. In other words, people who pay for and read this book, then don’t put the core advice into practice.
- Inspiring my competition; putting out great content that gives my competitors the exact roadmap I’m using for my publishing business. This way they stay ahead of the curve with me and we forever duke it out in the bookselling world. If my competition is always at the top of its game, our battles will always make me stronger. I will have to put out more and better books than them.
Clowns, idiots, and content marketing experts.
“We have a ton of people who wanna be pundits and very few that are practitioners.”
“The supply and demand of storytelling.”
“Before you tell me your story, you need my attention.” Nobody pays attention to TV advertising. Nobody pays attention to billboards, to the ads in newspapers. No. Fucking. Body.
“We have a very big problem in 2014 in the supply and demand of attention.”
Storytelling is especially useful because consumers have tuned out the hard sell. “That right hook is hard to land because we’ve all stopped jabbing. And when you know the right hook is coming, you duck.”
Here is How Amazon Put Borders Out of Business
The things you value are: 1. Your money 2. Your health 3. Your time
Amazon is setting up same-day delivery warehouses. Their product is time. They are going to sell you time. And you WILL pay them for it.
Amazon came along in 1995 and got a ton of hype. Then the internet bubble popped in 2000 and “Amazon lost 91% of its value in the stock market. Not in how they were doing with customers; in the stock market.”
The executives at Borders thought that was important. They thought it would give them an advantage over Amazon:
“so they let Amazon do their online distribution. They didn’t build their own capabilities. And Amazon paid them”
Amazon paid them to do that.
The executives laughed at Amazon, because Amazon was doing all the work for them and paying them for it. “Meanwhile Amazon was just collecting customer data, and in 36 months Borders was basically out of business.”
ROI.
Everyone wants to know what the immediate ROI is. But V says that just because you can’t calculate the ROI-of-this-exact-second on any particular action, it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to do the action.
“Who here actually cares about their customer? Who here wants to have a customer forever? It starts with having a great product,” but it also means you have to properly storytell “in the world we actually live in.”
Q&A Session with Contently
Listen first. Social media is about cocktail party skills, but everybody wants to talk. Why not just listen and then add your 2 cents?
How do you maintain company culture as you grow?
You need to know what all of your employees want in their lives. V spends all his time trying to build trust with his employees so that they will tell him the truth about what they want.
If they want to make 500K a year and not work a lot, cool.
If they want to steal 7 of his employees and then start their own business, cool.
If they want to be CEO, cool.
If they wanna learn everything they can from him and then build a startup and say they worked with Gary V, cool.
He doesn’t care. He just wants his employees to tell him honestly so that they can map the journey together.
That requires a whole lot of listening.
Gary Vaynerchuk, Author and Loic Le Meur, Co-Founder, LeWeb — LeWeb’13 Paris — Plenary1 Day2
The first mistake is that people have decided they’re entrepreneurs, but they’re not.
Second problem: people think it’s way easier than it actually is. He gets a bunch of Ivy League kids coming up to him saying they’re entrepreneurs, but they crumble in the face of adversity.
“For every Instagram, there are 5 million Instashits.”
We are in an entrepreneurship bubble.
Sometimes you have to fire your best guys.
He has had to fire some of his most talented people because they weren’t team players, they weren’t right for the culture.
The government spying on citizens
He says everybody is voluntarily on the internet 24/7 anyway. He lives his life thinking that everything he does is always being looked at. He thinks the lack of privacy will be beneficial.
One audience member brought up the fall of privacy being historically tied to the rise of totalitarianism. He said that’s probably true and we are “grossly, grossly, grossly underestimating what’s going on right now” with the internet and the massive culture shifts that accompany it. We’ll be blown away at how the world looks in 15 years, he says.
LeWeb 2010 — Gary Vaynerchuk, Host, Wine Library TV, Author, CrushIT
His biggest piece of advice to a young entrepreneur: don’t apologize. To anyone. “Execute on who you are.”
He says he does 99% of activities poorly, so he focuses on the 4 to 6 things he does well, and he doubles down.
“If you know what you’re good at, execute harder against that.”
“For me to play a game where I can’t be the ultimate winner makes absolutely no sense.”
My SXSW14 Keynote (How to Rock SXSW)
Allocate 20% of your time to reinvesting in relationships you already have.
One of the reasons he has had success through the years is that he’s always on offense. “I’m almost incapable of playing defense” in business. Defense is spending time looking at what others authors or brands are doing on social media. He respects and understands why people want to do that, but he can’t. He spends all his time looking at what real people are doing and figuring out how to bring them value
Profanity is good for you.
“I sometimes use cursing to filter out people who are only willing to look at surface level, who are not usually the kind of people I wanna do business with in the first place.”
Not everybody is an entrepreneur.
“We are living through the greatest generation of fake entrepreneurs in the history of our time.”
IQ<EQ
This is the worst time to be information smart. The internet has all that information you’re trying to carry in your head. And it’s easier to access it online. “Everything you want to know is in your hand, on your phone.”
IQ importance is declining. EQ importance is rising exponentially.
Fireside Chat at Startup Grind New York
Entitlement kills.
V started Wine Library TV on Youtube in early 2006 and “for 19 months I did that show 5 days a week and nobody gave a shit.” So now when he gets emails from people asking him if they should give up on their blog or vlog. He asks how long they’ve been doing it. They respond saying 4 months. “I’m like, fuck you. You want this to be your life and you’re giving up after 4 months? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m like fuck you.” -Gary Vaynerchuk.
Interview with Chris Farrell
Connect with the gods.
“For everybody who’s watching, think of 3 people who you desperately want to connect with, go find their email, and email them right now. ‘Hey, Tim Ferriss, I wanna have lunch.’ 99.999% of the time you won’t get it, but that .001% is a game changer.”
I’ll up the ante. I am going to engage absolutely everyone I mention in Condensing the Gods and The Authorpreneurship Masterclass, just to thank them for being a mentor. That’s what, 30 to 50 people? Most of them won’t respond, but that’s fine. I’ve already gotten immeasurable value from their books and podcasts.
Losing is good for you.
“I love losing. I love the process of the climb more than victory. I loved being underestimated. I loved losing clients when I started because I didn’t know what I was doing at first. I loved it. A true entrepreneur loves losses.”
Most people won’t do the work.
“I’m very realistic. Most people don’t wanna put in the work. They wanna watch webinars, read books, complain about it not happening. They don’t wanna put in the work.”
His hope is that 6 people watching actually put his advice into practice.
99u Keynote: How to Storytell in a Fast Paced World
- Attention is the most important commodity.
- “A funny thing happens when you give a fuckload of value up front: you guilt people into buying shit.”
- Ya know what? This whole video is gold. It’s a great synthesis of a lot of his thoughts. It’s short. 16 mins. Go check it out.
The Future of Social Media Marketing w/ Gary Vaynerchuk
On haters.
He says he respects them because they’re expressing how they honestly feel. If you’re getting hate, you’re probably not communicating as well as you should be. Of course, there’s always a small percentage who just will never get you.
He then goes on to say that there are 2 ways to build the biggest building in the city. One way is to build the biggest building. Duh. But the second way is to tear down all the other buildings in the city. A huge amount of people do #2. He does #1 and takes a lot of pride in it.
This is so true. There are a lot of really shitty authors whose books just don’t sell because they’re not worth buying. Crap covers, crap prose, crap plot, crap grammar, crap marketing, etc. A lot of them spend all day writing 1-star reviews on Amazon in order to tear down other authors.
If you’re one of them, stop right now or I will literally come to your house dressed as an alligator and force the ghost of Hugo Chavez to cut off your fingers one by one. Hugo doesn’t wanna do it. Don’t make me make him.
There are tremendous downsides in being a negative shithead. Spiritually you begin to rot. You become unhappy and physically tense. Your books get worse. In turn — and I honestly don’t give a fuck how woo-woo this sounds — the more positivity you bring to other people, the more will come back to you. What goes around comes around.
