Gary Vaynerchuk sensed there was a huge business opportunity in wine, learned everything he could about it, shared that knowledge and passion about wine with the world in a home-made video-blog (Wine Library TV), which became a huge viral hit, which turned him into something of a social media celebrity (over 850,000 twitter followers), which led to speaking engagements (I saw him at Affiliate Summit last year), which led to his lucrative book deal (7 figures for 10 books), which led to Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion. It’s a short book, easy to read, and his voice really comes through the pages In fact, he reveals it is actually him talking, not writing; he dictated the whole thing.
In Crush It!, Gary explains why everyone needs to cultivate their own personal brand online. Create a following around your passion, he says, and you’ll never work another day in your life. There’s a fair share of the standard motivational “life’s too short to work a job you don’t love” stuff, but the book actually does contain some pretty practical advice on how to do what he did.
Which leads to my question: is that what I want to do? There is no doubt Gary is an extremely hard worker, having basically built his entire empire with his own sweat equity. (For full disclosure, his family’s liquor and wine store was already a successful business, but he definitely catapulted it to the next level.) He’ll still reply to literally every twitter message he gets, even though he’ll soon have over a million followers. He’s crazy, but he loves it, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Crush It! is the anti-4-Hour-Workweek.
Take my shoe site for example. Although I’m really excited about the business itself, I’ll never be known as the in-your-face passionate shoe guy. And I’m OK with that. I’m not after fame and fortune and speaking engagements and book deals. All that sounds like a lot of extra stress, when I think I can be happy and comfortable and successful without it.
But if you want to be the next twitter-lebrity, there’s probably no better guidebook. Spoiler alert: Want to know Gary’s “best marketing strategy ever?”
Care. It was a brilliant one-word chapter.
FTC Disclosure: If you buy Crush It! through the above link, Amazon will pay me 4% of the purchase price.
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