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Book Review: Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

This is the first of many book reviews that I’ll do. For each of the 20 books I aim to read this year, I plan to write a corresponding book review to document my learnings as well as how it relates to me.

The first book I decided to read is Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk. For those who don’t know, Gary is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of VaynerMedia. He is well known for his work in social media and digital marketing.

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Love your family. Work super hard. Live your passion.

Gary started out by stating the 3 rules he lives by: “Love your family. Work super hard. Live your passion.”. Although the majority of the book highlights hustling and living your passion, Gary stresses love your family as the top priority. This is something I resonate with strongly as happiness starts with loving and appreciating those dear to you.
What’s your passion? If you are currently living your passion, you would do whatever it is you are doing for free. I graduated with a commerce degree so passion is a word I heard tossed around often. However, I didn’t grasp what it means and even to this day can’t say for sure what my passion is. Back in my university days, we had to choose a specialization from finance, accounting, and management. I went with marketing, a concentration of management because I see it as a field that is less rigid and more creative in terms of problem-solving. With marketing being my clear choice among all the available specializations, I thought and somehow along the way convinced myself that marketing is my passion.
I started taking marketing courses and doing marketing internships. It was great to get experience in the field, but I never looked for ways to get better at marketing in my spare time. It was when I started working on my mobile app that I clearly realized marketing is not my passion. I spent a majority of my time working on my app and would skip hangouts with friends just so I can find more time to improve my programming skills and the app itself.
I’m still figuring out what my passion is, but I know I love to problem solve, learn, and build up and lead teams. In my view, having an industry-centric passion like technology or marketing, for example, is not critical, it’s having interests that you enjoy and want to dedicate the time and effort to get better at. And that I do have.

Develop your personal brand

Gary talks about how developing your personal brand is key to monetizing your passion online. You have to deliver great content, which should revolve around what you are most passionate about. One thing that Gary mentions that most people don’t realize is that your business and your personal brand need to be one and the same. Your messaging across different medium needs to be consistent and authentic.
Even though Gary does not consider himself good at writing, he will not delegate writing blog contents to someone else. This is to allow his messages to be unfiltered and authentic. So if you are not good at writing, find the medium that works for you. Another alternative that Gary mentions is to partner up with someone who complements you. So for this book, he teamed up with someone who knows how to write, but he dictates everything.
As Gary discusses, it’s crucial to develop your personal brand even if you aren’t planning to monetize it. Developing your personal brand is the same thing as living and breathing your resume. And through your content, you’re making sure that people can get to know you personally and professionally. This is my biggest takeaway and the reason I started blogging.

Creating community

Creating community is where the bulk of your hustle is going to go and where the bulk of your success will be determined. It’s about starting and joining conversations about your topic. You need to be deeply entrenched in communities surrounding your topic and better yet be a leading voice in those communities. Remember to always provide a way for people who are interested to get connected with you, which can be a way to contact you or a link back to your blog. Creating community should also be a never-ending task so make sure it’s on a topic you are passionate about.

Summary

I summarized the learnings that are most relevant to me so you might have different takeaways from reading it. It’s concise and provides clear examples and steps on how to monetize your passion that I didn’t detail here. I’ll definitely recommend this book to anyone especially if you have a passion you want to pursue. As Gary sums it up, “Know yourself. Choose the right medium, choose the right topic, create awesome content, and you can make a lot of money being happy.“.
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My 2018 New Year’s Resolution

Yes… I know… you are probably thinking that nobody makes their New Year’s resolutions nearly 3 months into the year. In my defense, most of my resolutions were decided a while ago but it was just recently that I committed to blogging. For 2017, my spare time off of work was spent mostly on developing my flashcard mobile application. And for 2018, I have a few goals that I want to focus on to have an even more productive year.

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Resolution #1: Be conversational in Spanish

My father has always stressed the importance of learning a 3rd language which has always stuck with me. Being able to travel to Spanish speaking countries and to communicate fluently is something I want to accomplish. I have taken a few Spanish courses in university along with reading books and watching Netflix shows in Spanish. This has greatly improved my reading and writing. However, speaking and listening are areas I struggle with, especially when the conversations aren’t slowed down for me. To be conversational in Spanish, I want to push myself to communicate in Spanish 3 days a week.

Resolution #2: Complete and promote my flashcards mobile app project, My Vocab

Whether it’s going to Spanish classes, reading Spanish books, or watching animes in Spanish, it’s common for me to come across words that I don’t understand. Whenever this happens, I jot down the words on my notebook so I can review it later. However as time goes on, this process becomes more and more infeasible. I read Spanish books during my commute to work and watch Netflix shows in Spanish during dinner, so having a notebook wherever I go is not practical. And secondly, as I jot down more vocab, organizing and reviewing the vocab gets more and more difficult. With my interest in programming, I decided to develop a flashcards mobile app, My Vocab, that allows me to record, translate, and review words I want to learn. With the main features developed, I want to promote it to see how far I can take it and get as much feedback as possible.

Resolution #3: Read 20 books

I have always enjoyed reading and have been reading on and off throughout the years. With a stronger emphasis on improving my Spanish, I have spent the past year reading Spanish books during my commute to work. However, that’s where it stopped and I had never thought about dedicating more time to read. That is, until the following conversation I had with my girlfriend, Grace:

The conversation was simple, but it got me thinking. I can be more productive, I can read more, and I can do more. I searched up books I want to read immediately and established my book list within a few hours. The following day, I went on Indigo and purchased all the books on my book list that are available. I have dedicated time slots to read since then and have decided to read at least one chapter every day. I can already feel the impact it has on my thought process and is definitely one of the best decisions I have made this year so far. All it takes is one push or one inspiration and I’m thankful to Grace for that.

Resolution #4: Develop my personal brand

The first English book I decided to read this year is Crush it! by Gary Vaynerchuk. Throughout the book, Gary stresses the importance of developing your own personal brand. A personal brand to me is the way people remember you. Developing my personal brand can help me connect and build trust with a bigger audience and also for my case, document my growth and learnings over time which I find invaluable. To start it off, I’ll write a summary of every book I read and share the learnings that I take away from it.

Resolution #5: Start a new project

With My Vocab mobile app project coming to a close, I want to challenge myself to start a new project that can potentially be a business. I haven’t decided on the idea yet, but I’ll share it with you here once it’s decided.

So here are my 2018 resolutions as well as my first blog post. I’m excited about what this year brings and I’m looking forward to reaching my resolutions! Thank you for spending the time to read what I have to share. Feel free to leave me a comment on your 2018 resolutions as well and we can keep tabs on how each other is progressing throughout the year!