Book Excerpt: Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

This is an excerpt from Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vanyerchuk

I’ve said over and over that if you live your passion and work the social networking tools to the max, opportunities to monetize will present themselves. I’ve also said that in order to crush it you have to be sure your content is the best in its category. You can still make plenty of good money if you’re fourth best in a cat¬egory, or ninth best, but if you really want to dominate the com¬petition and make big bucks, you’ve got to be the best. Do that, be that, and no one will be able to touch you.

With one exception. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it. Without it, you should just pack up your toys and go home.

Now, I’m betting that most people who pick up this book con¬sider themselves hard workers. Many are probably just sick of the killer hours and inflexible schedules and demanding bosses often found in the corporate world and think entrepreneurship will somehow be less taxing. I hate to disappoint, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There might be a little more flexibility to your day should you be at liberty to devote yourself full-time to building your personal brand, but otherwise, assuming you’re doing this right, you’ll be bleeding out of your eyeballs at your computer. You might have thought your old boss was bad, but if you want your business to go anywhere, your new boss had better be a slave driver.

Too many people don’t want to swallow the pill of work¬ing 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.

The cool thing about hustle, though, is that it’s one more thing that equalizes the playing field. Fifteen years ago you could have had a rock-solid idea of your DNA and your passion, but there was a billion to one chance of you actually crushing it in business—the platforms and channels were just too narrow and guarded by some pretty tight gatekeepers. Now we can take ad¬vantage of the explosion of tremendous, free digital platforms on the Internet, which are also making the gatekeepers more and more irrelevant. And now it’s no longer a special interest story if you make it big without family connections or money or an edu¬cation, because everyone can do it. The only differentiator in the game is your passion and your hustle. Don’t ever look at some¬one else who has more capital or cred than you and think you shouldn’t bother to compete. You may only have a million-dollar business, and your biggest competitor may have a fifty-million¬dollar business, but if you can outwork him or her, you will win over time.

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.

The thing is, if you’re living your passion, you’re going to want to be consumed by your work. There’s no room for relaxation in the flop-on-the-couch-with-popcorn-and-watch-TV kind of way, but you won’t need it. You’re not going to be stressed or tired. You’re going to be relaxed and invigorated. The passion and love for what you do will enable you to work the hours necessary to succeed. You’ll lose track of the time, go to bed reluctantly, and wake up in the morning excited to do it all over again. You’ll be living and breathing your content, learning everything you can about your subject, about your tools, about your competition, and talking nonstop with other people interested in the same thing you are.

As hard as you’re going to push yourself, don’t plan on seeing results right away.
I’d say that this leads us to the number one issue that trips up a lot of otherwise savvy entrepreneurs trying to build their brand online.