Review of Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, is a smart guy. He is a proven, incredibly successful entrepreneur and has a shizen load insight, drive and passion; just watch a video of him and you'll see what I mean. And I would hazard a guess that he is as passionate and enthusiastic (bonkers) in real life as he is in his videos 24x7. Heck, his dream is to own the New York Jets, and I wouldn't put it past him. Check that - he'll have done it inside the next 15 years.

I published a post a couple of days ago about why only having a résumé isn't good enough anymore, inspired by the first 40 or so pages of his book, Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion. It is fair to say I was pretty impressed at this early stage of the book, and I was looking forward to being wowed for the remainder.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I was also surprised; surprised that, according to Wikipedia ‘in the first weeks of its release Crush It climbed to #1 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Web Marketing books. It also opened at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list and #7 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller List.’

To me, this just goes to show that sometimes content isn't always king, and that hype can get you to the top, even if only briefly.

Crush It! is kind of like a ‘How I became successful’ story flipped on its head and spat out as a ‘How you can be successful’ guide. And it is very specific. I felt like I was being spoon fed the content of a social media for dummies book. Vaynerchuk is so specific that in one section of the book he actually lays out 13 point plan, as if you were laying out a five year old's clothes for the day. In order to become successful the way that Vaynerchuk has, you should - nay, must - follow his guidelines. He even begins the list with:

“Let's say you start on a Monday. So on Monday, the first day of the rest of your life, you do the following:”

And then he proceeds to itemise your route to success, which includes things like:

1. Go to GoDaddy.com and try to buy your name, as in firstnamelastname.com...
2. Next, start a Wordpress or Tumblr account. This is the blog sit that is going to host the domain you just bought.
3. ...
4. ...
5. Create a Facebook fan page.
6. Open a Twitter account with your domain name.

My guess is that if you lack the creativity to come up with a domain name for your business, you may just struggle with what comes after this step in an entrepreneurial venture, i.e. everything. (I wonder if anyone has ever taken up his offer to email him at gary@vaynermedia.com if they really ‘can't come up with anything appropriate or all your top ideas are unavailable... and we'll brainstorm together”).

I was even more surprised to see the enthusiastic reviews that were mashed together into a video compilation; it seems to me these people are all trying to mimic what Gary V does and is, and unfortunately most of them come across as nothing but fake. Is it just me or does it seem like they're all just hopping on the merry-go-round of creating comments on each other's pages and selling to themselves? It would be very interesting to find out who these people are how successful they've become following Gary's recipe for success. If any of you read this, please let me know.

Anyway, credit where credit is due, the book does have some pretty valid advice (enough to inspire me to write a whole blog post about why résumés stink). Here are a few quotes I underlined whilst I was reading:

“Everyone - EVERYONE - needs to start thinking of themselves as a brand. It is no longer an option; it is a necessity.”

“The messages in this book are timeless: Do what makes you happy. Keep it simple. Do the research. Work hard. Look ahead.”

“Love your family. Work superhard. Live your passion.”

“Too many people don't want to swallow the pill of working every day, every chance they get. If you're making money through social media, you don't get to work for three hours and then play Nintendo for the rest of the evening. That's lip service to hard work. No one makes a million dollars with minimal effort unless they win the lottery.”

“Anything insane has a price. If you're serious about building your personal brand, there will be no time for Wii. There will be no time for Scrabble or book club or poker or hockey. There will be time for meals, and catching up with your significant other, and playing with the kids, and otherwise you will be in front of your computer until 3:00 A.M. every night. If you're unemployed or retired and have all day to work, maybe you knock off at midnight instead. Expect this to be all consuming.”

“But patience is the secret sauce. Once you put up your site, you don't want to start and stop, back-track and second-guess. It'll make you look insecure and foolish.”

“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.”

“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.” 

“Find a way to incorporate some personal stories and details into your posts. Use anecdotes from your own life to illustrate concepts. Let your personality shine so that eventually people who have no need for accounting information are coming to hear you just because it's you.”

But for me, this book was just a little too simplistic, and too good to be true. For example, in a few places Vaynerchuk suggests that we're all a chance at getting on the TV and speaking circuit. I had to laugh when I read passages like these:

As your audience grows and your blog starts to get real attention in the form of media coverage, ad revenue, and requests for speaking at functions...

... it's entirely possible that someone from The Today Show is going to ask you to talk about board games or your blog on their program.

Sure, it may happen. It happened to him. But just because it happened to you Gary, doesn't mean everyone can do it.

It is true that the cream always rises to the top, but in a cup full of cream, some of it is at rock bottom, and 99% of it doesn't even get a glimpse of the top.

Pity the Fool who Has Only a Résumé

I've just started reading the Crush It!: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk. This was one of the 25 shortlisted books I had on my Christmas list last year, and one of the 10 or so that made it under the tree. It's taken a while for me to get around to reading it, but just 47 pages in I'm glad I finally picked it up.

I had no idea who Gary Vaynerchuk was before starting Crush It! I'd never heard of Wine Library or Wine Library TV. To be honest, it was probably a good thing I hadn't as I might have been a little turned off reading the book after watching one of his videos. Passionate but slightly annoying.

I digress...

The reason I felt inspired to write this post was because Vaynerchuck, and the writer who transcribed his dictated words, flat out convinced me to. I had an immediate urge to start thrashing out what he calls a “personal brand” (I was lucky my Macbook wasn't in the vicinity as I was in the bath and I've read somewhere that water and Macbooks don't play nicely, especially when attached to a human). A personal brand, digitally speaking, is your online persona; the content that's returned when someone Google's your name. Your blog. Your Tweets. Your social media footprint. I didn't have (a good enough) one, and 47 pages into Crush It!, I had to have one. Right. Now.

“Hold it, you might want to reassure me, my résumé is awesome. Tell me this: Is it a pdf of a tidy list where you've worked and for how long, with a couple of strategic bullet points highlighting what you did in each job? Yeah? You're toast. Keep your pdf so that the HR department has something for their files, but otherwise traditional résumés are going to be irrelevant, and soon. Even if they're not yet, that résumé you're so proud of looks exactly like the ones being waved around by the other three hundred analysts in your city currently hunting for jobs.”

Cop. That.

And the man is right. If I owned my own business and was looking to hire a smart, driven person to help the company grow, I'd be more likely to hire the smart, driven person whom I already feel I know through reading years worth of insightful blog posts, over the smart, driven person who handed me two A4 sheets of paper. I've heard it said before, that the blog is the new résumé, but I never read too much into the theory. I couldn't see it clearly enough wearing the other shoes, the employer's shoes. The shoes that count.

I've started a blog numerous times before - personal ones, professional ones, then another personal one - but I could never keep them going for long. They never lasted for more than 5 or 6 posts. I think trying to separate my thoughts, my life, into sections was 95% of the problem. You shouldn't have to divide yourself up and write differently for each different aspect of your persona, especially when it is a personal brand you're trying to build. But the more I read, and the more I grow - personally and professionally - the more I understand the need to sell myself, to prove what I'm really about and what I'm capable of. And you can't keep doing that by trying to shrink the font to 11, then 10.5, because you can't get it all in the standard 2 pages.

So here we go, the beginning a new, improved résumé personal brand.

Review of Linchpin by Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a machine. He has written twelve bestsellers and (probably) thousands of blog posts dating back to January 2002. I must have subscribed to and unsubscribed from his blog at least five times solely because I simply can't keep up with the sheer quantity and depth of his blog posts. The man will sometimes post six times in a day. He is a machine. The man ships.

In his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Godin explains what it means to ship:

“The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to to the sales team, answering your the phone... Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world. 

Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear - this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable.” 

This is one of the key messages in the book. We all have the ability to become indispensable; we are all geniuses, we all can create amazing work, we are all artists. But the system has beaten the genius and the creativity out of us. We have been brainwashed into submission and we have become what they want us to be: cogs in a machine. When we surrender to the resistance, our lizard brain, we become easily replaced with another cheap lemming:

“You weren't born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog.” 

I really got a lot out of this book. Its messages were clear, almost exhaustively explained, and most importantly incredibly relevant to me. At times it was a little repetitive and felt as though I was reading something that I was sure I read not 5 pages ago - but this is probably a good thing as it really drums home the point. And the messages really struck a chord with me, with where I'm at and with what I'm trying to achieve and get out of myself and life.

So what were the messages?

Well, for me this story was pretty poignant:

“One day, Binny Thomas stood up. She stood up, spoke up, and started doing a new job. She didn’t leave her organization, didn’t even get a new title or new responsibilities. Instead, she started doing her old job in a new way. Binny stopped going to meetings with the goal of finding deniability or problems to avoid. Instead, she started leaning in and seeking out projects where she could make a difference. Suddenly, Binny was inspired. She was looking for opportunities instead of hiding from blame. She was putting herself on the line, pushing through the dip, and making things happen. The fascinating (and universal) truth is that the opportunities came after she was inspired—she wasn’t inspired by the opportunities. Binny’s old job was just fine. She did it extremely well. She followed the map, followed instructions, did what she was told and got paid what she was worth. Binny wasn’t in danger of losing her job, but she had already given up her soul. She had plateaued, this was the end. Then she changed her mind. Six weeks later, she got a huge promotion and another, even better new job than the new job she had given herself. Binny is now running a worldwide program of motivated scholars. All it took was a choice. Binny didn’t ask for permission to do her job better; she merely decided to.”

I've been in the wrong frame of mind about my work for a long time now. Note that I said wrong frame of mind. Not wrong job. Not doing something I hate or shouldn't be doing. I let myself become a cog in a wheel, a factory worker. And as long as I continued to treat what I do in this way, as though I was a puppet to my boss, my job and my situation, I was never going to release the artist within and become passionate. Indispensable. Now and for the past few weeks I've viewed my job in a similar light as what Binny does - as an opportunity. It is an opportunity create, to be passionate, to connect with my colleagues, to solve problems and to lead.

“If you can be human at work (not a machine), you’ll discover a passion for work you didn’t know you had. When work becomes personal, your customers and coworkers are more connected and happier. And that creates even more value.”

In the last week or two I've discovered that this is fact. Fact. Stop blaming the people around you, your colleagues, your boss. Stop blaming your circumstances and your habits. Become human, connect with what you are now pointing the finger at as the cause of your suffering, and you'll see you a transformation you could never have imagined.

Linchpin is about overcoming the resistance, the lizard-brain we all have that convinces us we're not good enough. It's about being an artist and giving gifts; not an artist in the conventional sense - painting and building large brass sculptures (although this could be how you create your art) - but an artist in whatever work we do. Being creative, solving problems, connecting with colleagues and customers, with passion and honesty. Give gifts, give time, give a smile, give extra effort, go the extra mile, ship, provide value, be remarkable - not just good.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? is well worth a read, whether you're in a rut or not. It will definitely be one that I pull from the shelf in the future to read again and get inspired. Here are a few of my favourite quotes from the book (easily exported with the help of my new Kindle, which rocks!):

“Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in résumés.”

“The only way to prove (as opposed to assert) that you are an indispensable linchpin—someone worth recruiting, moving to the top of the pile, and hiring—is to show, not tell. Projects are the new résumés.”

“If your Google search isn’t what you want (need) it to be, then change it. Change it through your actions and connections and generosity. Change it by so over-delivering that people post about you. Change it by creating a blog that is so insightful about your area of expertise that others refer to it. And change it by helping other people online.”

“Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.”

“One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that some good ones slip through.”

“Once you’ve given a name to the resistance and you know what its voice sounds like, it’s a lot easier to embrace the fact that you actually are a genius. The part of you that wants to deny this is the resistance. The rest of you understands that you’re as capable as the next guy of an insight, invention, or connection that makes a difference.”

“You must become indispensable to thrive in the new economy. The best ways to do that are to be remarkable, insightful, an artist, someone bearing gifts. To lead. The worst way is to conform and become a cog in a giant system.”

“You can either fit in or stand out. Not both.”

“Don’t let your circumstances or habits rule your choices today. Become a master of yourself and use your willpower to choose.”

Now it's time to ship by publishing this post. Shipped.