Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too

by Gary Vaynerchuk.

ISBN-10 : 0062674676

ISBN-13 : 978-0062674678 

Bottom line: The sequel to Crush it! is a much better experience and, while I'm not a particular fan of Gary Vee, he makes some good-sounding points; I've actually tried some of his advice and it's been helpful.

3/4

Looking back, I guess I was doing a little Gary Vee double feature with my books. Crush It! was a treaty about making your personal brand and using that as a jumping point for a career/life doing your passion. That sounds fine but the execution of the book was really prescriptive. It really dated the book. 

Now, the sequel is from, what a few years ago? It shows.

A good chunk of Crush It! was Vee's hypothetical scenarios. They were fine thought experiments but, it felt very off the cuff. Such scenarios are still present in Crushing It! but they have, for the most part, been replaced by stories of people who read Crush It! and changed their lives. Most, if not all, of the stories, were still works in progress but they were all supposedly living their passion.

To be honest, that did do it for me. I can see the appeal though. The one that stuck with me was the guy in his forties who became an Ultramarathon runner. He and his impossibly supportive wife made a blog, speaking career, book, competitions. They moved to Hawaii for a while and lived in a tent with their two kids. They've since moved back and can afford a house but, dang. Talk about going all in. I can see why you'd want this sort of story in this book.

It kinda turned me off. Maybe I'm too addicted to my bourgeois lifestyle. I don't know. 

In Crush it! Vee seems to suggest tools but seems to gloss over the why. In Crushing It!, he goes into much more details about that why. Plus points for that!

I have two big take-aways from Crushing It!. First, start by reading, working, and absorbing everything you can in your field of passion. You should get involved in all the communities so then you develop an association between you and that field. The second point is the importance of finding your niche. That will come as you become more well-versed in your field. You'll find gaps that you can fill and then that's where the true success lies.

After reading this, I was inspired. I decided, by golly, I'm going to really jump start my music-making. I love making music and have been shuffling my feet when it comes to Music Theory and the programming language Sonic Pi. Maybe this was the sign that I could get a move on. I joined Twitter, Instagram, and restarted my blog. I starting making posts in the forums and on their Discord (a messaging app) server. I even tried utilizing hashtags and mentions of the communities in my posts. And, immediately, I saw a bump in readership. My normal posts get a couple, maybe, if I post it to my page on Facebook. When I mentioned @SonicPi, and they retweeted the post, I got forty! So when it comes to the message of this book; a thumb up (not quite two but at least one).

In terms of tone, I listened to the audio version, read by Gary Vee himself. Man, he is charismatic. It was fun to listen to him and he has some asides that were amusing. I don't think I like him in real life or at least I don't trust him but, within the scope of this book, I do.

So, where does this fall in the spectrum of Self Help Books? I don't think it was the best but I don't think it was the worst. If you are looking for something quick, check it out. At the very least, check out Crushing It! instead of its predecessor.

I'm probably not going to post this anywhere so I'd be surprised if anyone reads it. If you do, please leave a comment on the bottom to tell me where you've come from! :) Thanks for reading!