Crush it! by Gary Vaynerchuk

Crush it by Gary Vaynerchuk

I love it when a plan comes together

If you’re like me then you hate the thing that brings in money but isn’t what you want to do on a daily basis. It’s a constant struggle for me to get up with the birds just to go to someone else’s business and work hard to make him rich. Go ahead and argue with me that you’re working for your children and not for your boss, then ask the boss to get leave to go watch your kid play cricket for the day. The simple truth is that most of us are slaves to another’s desires.

But I can’t just quit and go do what I’d like, can’t I?

Work sucks, I know. But you’re right. Unless you have a nest egg the size of a golden calf or a rich sugar daddy (why are you in the dead end job then anyway?), you can’t quit right now. You’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed, ain’t nothing in this world for free. But that does not mean that you can’t escape the rat race.

Failure is a lack of knowledge compounded by a lack of focus

I’ve failed at doing my own thing before, small entrepreneurship sailed only to oblivion. But I’m on to something now and Gary Vaynerchuk showed me the way. I’ve done internet marketing before, and it didn’t go too well (spent most of my time writing fiction so it went nowhere before my nest egg ran out). Soon I was back at a day job. I felt wretched. The fiction I did write faded and the debt I incurred caused me to lose my own place and my car, so I had to move back in with the folks with my fiance. Talk about awkward. Soon the fiance left as well. (She came back, and not only because I got a job)

Deconstructing failure

There was something missing. I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to go from day job Dave to full time author Andy. I was struggling to write after an exhausting day at work, so my fiction was going nowhere, and the latest failed endeavour had me in doubt that there was any money left on the internet. The gist of it all was, I wanted to be a fiction writer, but felt like I was not able to be one. I failed at internet marketing because I was building websites about things I didn’t care at all about (heck, I built an affiliate marketing site on backyard farming for pike sake, while I spent every waking hour happily behind a screen). The problem was I was not following Gary’s rule number one.

Follow your passion

Each of us has an answer burning in our hearts. It’s the fly-fishing that makes the dead eyed accountant eyes light up, it’s the puppies that fills the dog tired nursery school teachers dreams. Therein, according to Vaynerchuk lay the difference. Previously I did not care for the subject matter of my site, I only cared about the money. Now Vaynerchuk has shown me that I can cash in on my passion and that now is the time to do so.

Primer on the thank you economy

Veynerchuc provides a personalised account of how he went from immigrant to wine library.tv (his passion is wine, his way) and gives some tips on how to get your thinking started in this regard. Things have gotten more intricate and available since he wrote the book, but Crush It! is still the primer to creating an authority site with the passion inherent in the natural expert.

If you haven’t read this book yet, get it here. Let me know in the comments what you think of it.