Gary Vaynerchuk Needs To Be One Of Your Heroes

Posted in Videos on Nov 1st, 2010 | 6 comments

Anyone looking to be an entrepreneur needs to make some space on their hero shelf for Gary V. The guy puts in 18 hour days every day and is probably one of the hardest working up and coming high profile people in the world. I’m not going to go into his bio because you can search for that on your own, but I definitely recommend digging through his personal site of garyvaynerchuk.com because there a lot of great, short videos on there about different things he focuses on.

I stumbled across this video over the weekend and was immediately obsessed with it and have watched it 4 more times since I found it. It’s short, just 15 minutes long, but it covers some awesome stuff that Gary holds true to his heart that I think are essential if you want to really build a business and brand online. It also fits well with what I have been harping on lately regarding building assets and leveraging your skills and brand name.

Here’s the video:

Some of my favorite highlights

1. There’s no reason to be doing work that you don’t absolutely love – Gary is a huge proponent of doing what you love rather than doing what pays the bills even though you hate your life every day. He believes that as long as you are genuine and bust your ass, the money will come. I 99% agree with him (there are a few edge cases where I think this rule needs to be broken, I’ll go into them another time). Over all though, he’s right on the money. It’s so easy to build a site and write content and get readers, it just requires effort and persistence and most importantly, dedication and long term goals.
2. Don’t worry about monetizing, worry about building up a fan base – I agree with this a lot as well. Monetization is the most important goal to have, but you won’t make money with no fans. You need to build your brand up and then focus on delivering quality content/products/books/guides that those loyal fans will want to buy from you.
3. Don’t give away your brand equity – Gary talks about how he has turned down over 40 television show offers because he doesn’t see the point of making content to give to other people. I fucking love this. Don’t give away your equity, there’s no point in 2010 to do so. Content is so easy to distribute, it’s not centralized anymore, the old media corporations don’t need to control your content for you to make it big. Build your own content on your own properties and promote it yourself and don’t dilute yourself at all.
4. Hustle – No explanation needed. Bust your ass and do what you love.

Bottom line, you need to watch this video a few times. Gary V is the man and has drive above and beyond what most people could ever even hope to have.