W. Davd Phillips

Find your Passion

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, U.S.S.R. (today Belarus) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. He graduated from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA. After taking over his father’s local liquor store, Shopper’s Discount Liquors, and building it from a $4 million business to a $50 million one, he created the wine-tasting blog Wine Library TV and discovered the power of the Internet for driving sales. This book shares his experience and step-by-step advice for using Twitter, Facebook, etc., and suggestions for monetizing an online persona, reiterating that the Internet makes it possible for anyone to make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand.

Crush It! encourages people to determine what truly makes them happy and pursue monetizing around it on the internet. It argues that because of recent social and technological trends the cost of producing content has been driven low enough that passion, knowledge, and effort, which the book calls “sweat equity”, are now all one needs to build a brand and business.

Content
As I began to read the book I thought it was going to be another one of the “You Can Do It!” (a la Tony Little) motivational books. It does that in the beginning, inspiring you to move past the passionless work we often engage in to discover what you truly love to do. However, it goes past this to provide you the internet tools to help you develop your own personal brand and begin to monetize it.

In it, the author seeks to help you learn:

1. Why social media has evened the playing field, destroying the “gate-keepers” who had previously dictated the distribution of content.
2. How to beat unemployment and create wealth-building opportunities by building and maintaining a personal brand.
3. Why storytelling is the most important business concept in the current marketplace.
4. How you can build an online business around your passion without quitting your day job.
5. Why Twitter and Facebook are just tools and not a social media strategy.
6. How to take advantage of the half-billion dollars in advertising that are moving to the internet.
7. Why transparency and being true to yourself are now winning marketing formulas.
8. How to build and maintain an online community around your passion and brand.
9. Strategies for turning attention into money.
10. Why the legacy element of the internet era is so underrated.

Thoughts
First, let me speak to the readability of the book. It was very easy to read. I read 140 pages in the course of 2-3 hours. Part of that short read time was my familiarity with the internet and with social media. Yet, in general, it was a very easy read.

Next, let me speak to the content. The author speaks to three areas that I think are crucial if a person is going to be able to Crush It! First, he talks about self-awareness. Most of us do not really know who we are. We are who we have been socialized to be, but most of us (I believe) don’t really who we are and where our passion lies. We have to uncover those to be crushers. The next thing he notes is the necessity of great content. People will flock to those with great content. This doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of the content, but content that people are interested in and talking about. That is not to say that your content doesn’t need to be good. It means that the quality of your content is secondary to your passion about the content and your ability to convey it as well as it being content that people are interested in. Finally, he speaks to the necessity of hard work. He says over and over that this will be hard work and take time. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This process requires patience, persistence, and hard work.

The author also provides good information on many of the social media tools available. He talks about Twitter, Facebook, and blogging tools. He shows how to use them to build a brand, develop content, and build a community.

This is not so much a “how to” book as it is an idea generation book. Everything is a reflection of his journey toward brand development. But it does not provide a step by step methodology. It really is the story of the American Dream, of someone who worked hard, took advantage of the tools available to us all, and built a brand. The author says anyone can do it, and I believe they can if they want to.

However, I also believe that while anyone can do it, most people won’t. They will not because of two reasons: they don’t want to work hard enough, or they don’t want to take the entrepreneurial risks. I believe God created us all with a creativity and entrepreneurial mindset just like His. However, I don’t think people really want to put in the work to uncover it in their own lives, they don’t want to work to become self-aware and whole, and as a result, they don’t want to take the risks or make the investments to see their dream and passion lived out.

To Crush It! you have to Change It! If you are willing to Change It!, you can Crush It!