Gary Vaynerchuk at The Capitalism Conference Full Keynote - How to Crush It

Good afternoon. How you guys doing?

Good so far. So I'm really looking forward to the Q and A, to be honest with you. I'm super pumped to stand on stage and pontificate about the how I'm gonna buy the jets or what I think. Or what you need to do more of. Or what I need to do more of. But I really hope that I can inspire in my time up here a real tangible question to the Q and A part that Ryan and I are gonna do, because I think at some level, the details are what I think. How many people here have seen me speak before or kind of seen my spiel just by show of hands? How many people actually, by show of hands, don't know that much about me? Raise your hands. All right, that fucking hurts.

All right, actually, that saves us. That actually is a good thing that that just happened. I'll actually then take five to seven minutes to contextualize where I come from, and then I'll get into my spiel, a little bit of the how I plan on pulling that off. I was born in Belarus, in the former Soviet Union. Nice, Belarus. Let's hug it out after. Well, actually, let's kiss it out.

I came here when I was three. I lived in a studio apartment in Queens, New York, half the size of the stage that I'm on, with eight family members. So I don't know how many of you are immigrants or the children of immigrants, but there's just a different DNA to that. There's a different appreciation. I would tell you that if you ask me what I'm driven by, it's gratitude. It's the fact that I'm a purebred entrepreneur capitalist. And I was born in the polar opposite of that communism, and somewhat got lucky to be born in that country at a time where you could actually get out of it and come to the holy land of entrepreneurship, the United States. So even though it was tough, you know, I've written three New York Times best selling books, and the one that I'm holding onto, that I think will be my greatest book is called I Wish Everybody Was an Entrepreneur. Excuse me, I Wish Everybody Was an Immigrant. Because I think I have a humongous advantage of understanding the struggle. See, I have no idea how you came up, but when you have the luxury that I do, which is walking three miles to Kmart, buying toilet paper, walking back, and then sitting in your living room and splitting toilet paper in half to get efficiencies out of your investment in toilet paper, I promise you, with all due Respect, I'm fucking hungrier than you. Right? And that I think is an interesting proxy because we all have different things. Look, the level of disrespect I have for my two children on this issue is enormous because there are gonna be two rich kids that grew up on the Upper east side of Manhattan. They're gonna be rich and they're gonna be soft. So they're gonna have to play it differently and they're gonna be driven by different things that than I am. But I'm always fascinated by that. So, anyway. Grew up an immigrant. My dad got a job as a stock boy in a liquor store in Clark, New Jersey, where he eventually became the manager of that store. So we moved there when I was four. When I was six years old, I started my first business. I started a six stand lemonade stand franchise. So very quickly I was able to convince my friends in the neighborhood to stand behind lemonade stands all day in the summer. And, and I don't know how many of you are old enough, but do some of you remember the big wheels, the little bikes? I would ride my big wheels at the end of every summer day and pick up my cash in my six locations like I was little Tony Soprano or something.

So that was my first kind of gig, my first taste. When I was 12, how many people here ages 35 to 42 just by show of hands. So some of the guys probably more specifically remember this. When I was 12, 13, 14, baseball cards was a huge phenomenon. And there was baseball card shows in all the malls all over the country. It was a big thing that everybody collected. And that's really where I cut my teeth as an entrepreneur. When I was 12, I was making one to $2,000 a weekend selling baseball cards in the malls of New Jersey. And as you can imagine being an immigrant, not coming from anything, that was a big shift and pretty amazing money.

When you're 13 years old and you have $20,000 in cash under your bed and you're not selling weed, you're doing a good job.

So that was good and that was awesome. And I actually, even though think I will buy a billion dollar franchise, don't know if I'll ever be more rich than I was when I was 12 and 13 with all that cash. And then I turned 14 and my dad ruined my life. At this point. My dad had bought a small liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey called Shoppers Discount Liquors. We sold beer and liquor at cost. It was a pretty interesting business model.

And my dad dragged me in, you know, Oldest son, immigrant family. This is merchant family. This is kind of what you do. So I went from making $1,000 a weekend selling baseball cards to working my dad's store, bagging ice in the basement for 15 hours a day, making two bucks an hour every weekend, every holiday, literally every summer vacation. From eighth grade in my life, I worked at my dad's liquor store. Zero free days. Zero. As a matter of fact, how many people here had this when they were in high school? How many people had a half day on their last day of school when they were in high school? Just curious, raise your hands. This is how gangster my parents were. On the half day of the last day of school, my mom would pick me up and drive me to the store. So it was very hardcore work ethic that I was instilled in early on in my career. For two years. It sucked. I hated it. Two bucks an hour, boring in the basement. Also, my employees hated my dad because he ran it like a Soviet enterprise. So I was a little guy. So I would get beat up by these guys that were like high school dropouts. It was fucking terrible. But then I was finally allowed upstairs and something interesting happened. I realized when I was 16, 17, that people collected wine. And it was the first time that I made a connection to my passion of collecting and selling stuff with that. And that was my connection point. Because at that point, I already, like any good punk kid entrepreneur, felt that I could do it better than my dad. I just didn't want to sell that stuff that became the thing. And basically in the middle of my dad's store As a 16 year old, I decided that I was going to open up 8,000 Toys R Us of wine, which is what I called it back then. And that was gonna be my life, that I was Gonna open up 8,000 wine shops across America. I was gonna sell it, and I was gonna buy the New York Jets. That was the model. I completely punted school. I was a shit student. D's and F's. And with the success I've had and the friends I have, everybody always thinks B's and C's. Just to make sure everybody in this room is grounded. They D's and F's. I completely mailed it in. I read the Wine Spectator in class every day. Like I knew where I was going. I didn't give a fuck about Saturn, you know? And like. And so.

And so I. Very early in my age, I would tell you one of the pillars that I think will bring you value. And I have not figured out in the last 20 years how to help this. But I will tell you, this is the dis. I can tell you right now, there's no secret, there's no model, there's no system, but there is something that completely maps to success through and through. I just don't know how to teach it and I actually don't know if it's teachable. But I'd like to say it right now because I was deploying it as a 15 year old, which is if you were fortunate enough to be sitting in this room right now and you think that you have self awareness, then you are very gifted and you have a real shot of winning. The single biggest reason most people don't win or, or build bigger businesses or are successful or whatever they want is cause they lack self awareness. They hope and dream to be something and they've tricked themselves to what they're actually about. The second that you're willing to accept who you actually are and then put yourself in a position to win around that skill, the second you start seeing upside. And that's what happened with me. I ate shit. Entrepreneurship was not sexy when I was 15, 16, 17. The way to make it was, was through education, so getting D's and F's. My friend's parents thought I was a loser, right? If I was a kid now and acted the way I did then in today's school system they'd be like, oh, there's the next Mark Zuckerberg. It's cool. Back then it wasn't viewed that way. And I had to basically live four to five years of my life where literally outside of probably my mom and dad and me, everybody on the outside didn't think that I would be successful. And it was really interesting. What helped me through that was I just knew who I was. I didn't care. I just knew. I knew at 14, 15, 13 that I was a businessman, that I would be okay, that I'd be successful and that I had to hone my skills. That the more time I put into it selling cards, working at my dad's store, the more likely I would be successful. The things that I watch my 30 and 40 and 50 year old executives just learn for the first time is shit that I really dealt with when I was 15, 19, 17, to get back into the story, I went to College, Shit School, Mount Ida College, fucking Shit School. And I'm playing Madden 95 in my dorm room one day, dominating by the way. And my friend comes in, he goes, you have to come and see this. This is 9-9-94, I come into a room. My friend is sitting in front of a computer. You have to understand, I'm now 18 years old. I've never owned a computer in my life.

Yeah, we're old, you know, it's not like you youngsters, you know, I'm 18. I've never owned a computer in my life. I'm sitting in front of a computer. I know what a computer is. But I failed computer class, so I probably spent about 40 minutes ever on a computer. I brought a word processor to do the papers. I never fucking did. So, like, you know, so I'm standing in front of a computer, there are six dudes hanging around it. I, for the first time hear cuckoo.

Remember that. Want to talk about a real scam? Three bucks a minute to be on the Internet, right? Aol. I say the profound words. Is this the information superhighway? That's what we called it. My friend Joe sits, goes into a chat room, looks at my face and says the words that change my entire life. Gets on the Internet. This is the first minute that I've ever seen the Internet. He looks up at me and he says, we can get chicks on this thing.

I wait three hours till it's my turn to go on the Internet. I watch. I mean, like for the youngsters in this room. I just need you to ground yourself in this shit. This is a real story. Like, I watched other human beings on the Internet. Cause it was so fucking amazing. I finally got my turn. And in four minutes, I landed on a bulletin board where people were selling baseball cards. And within the first 10 minutes of ever being on the Internet, I realized, holy shit, I don't need to open up 8,000 stores. I'm gonna sell wine through this thing. In 1996, 18 months later, I launched the second ever E commerce wine business in America called winelibrary.com In 1998, I took over my dad's operation, renamed it to wine Library, had winelibrary.com and from 1998 to 2005. Excuse me. From 1998 to 2003, in that five year window, I grew my dad's business from a $3 million a year business to a $65 million a year business. On the backbone of the only thing that I really want to talk to you about on a practical kick. And then I'll kick out to some other thematics on how I plan on getting there, what I did, and what I think when I think about this room and I think about what does it take to get to the next level in everybody's careers here, if that's what they strive to do. I was able to do it on my one core strength, which is marketing arbitrage. What I did in 1996, 7, 8, 9100102 was I marketed in the year that we lived in. What I mean by that is I started an email service in 1996 that had 93% open rates on a 200,000 person list because nobody in the world was doing email. That same list now is probably only like 700,000 people all these years later with like a 31% open rate, which is pretty good, you know, in the scheme of things. Google AdWords comes out. I own the word wine for 5 cents a click before Google even went to a 10 cent minimum for 9 months before anybody bid me up. So my career, the reason I give a shit right now about Snapchat or Instagram or anything at virtual reality or anything of that nature is I'm always looking for the white space of what is everybody else doing and what are they valuing versus what's actually happening. My friends, we live in a headline reading word world versus a practitioner world, right? When everybody was crying last year that Facebook doesn't work anymore because Organic Reach dropped Facebook ads was the greatest ad product I had seen since early Google AdWords. So we live in a world where a lot of people in this room you think you know, but unless you're actually doing it, you don't. The ROI of anything is the ability to actually use it. The ROI of a basketball is zero to me. It's worth billions to Lebron, right? And so what I think is super interesting is the process of what happened in my career. I start marketing really well. I built this huge business. We had no money. The business was doing $3 million a year on 10% gross profit before expenses. Luckily, Sasha Vaynerchuk paid nobody anything and he was able to take home maybe a buck fifty a year, right? But I was able to do it with pennies because I was so much better. And I did that and I did that and I did that. Email, banner ads, cookies. When people thought that was some shit you ate, I understood what that meant, you know, like figured it all out. And then my career took a substantial turn. Four months after YouTube came out, I decided it was going to be the biggest thing of all time. Playing with it first time. And I launch a 20 minute wine show on YouTube called Wine Library TV where I sit in front of a camera and I drink four bottles of wine for 20 minutes.

And somehow hundreds of thousands of people started watching that. What started happening was I started feeling the effects of sales from a organic content standpoint, not running ads. And it was happening, was happening. But then my career took a really interesting turn. It sold for $2 billion to Google. And I said, holy shit, this thing didn't exist two minutes ago. It just sold for $1.6 billion to Google. And in the article I read Ron Conway, angel investor, set to make $100 million on his $50,000 investment. And literally my life flashed in front of me. This was only a couple months after my 30th birthday, from 14 to 30, but specifically from 22 to 30, I thought I was the hardest working person ever. I went to the store every single day at 7:30 in the morning. And I left and closed it every day at 10, Monday through Saturday. I punted my entire 20s. I left a lot of hooking up and a lot of parties on the table. I punted the entire 20s of my life. 7:30 in the morning, get to the store, leave at 10 Monday through Saturday, Sunday when the jets played home, watched. But other than that, mixed it in at times 12 to 5, just worked every day. Took two days a year off, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, for eight years, nine years. That was my whole life. There was nothing else. So at 30, I'm driving to the store and I decide that I'm full of shit. That yes, I built this huge business. Yes, I've made it. The business not only went to 60 million revenue, it went to 32% gross profit. We were rich, right? I bought my car at a garage sale. My brother, who's 11 years younger than me, got a new fucking Lexus. I'm not bitter.

And so things had happened, but I looked myself in the mirror and I said, holy shit, I'm completely full of shit. I talk this big game that I'm gonna buy the New York jets, and none of my actions lead to that. I'm working hard, but hard is prerequisite for the hands that went up. You know my spiel on this? It is hustle. 24, 7, 3, 6. I don't care if you're the most talented fucking person of all time. If you don't put in the work, you're gonna lose. That's just guaranteed. That's just documented. There is no other debate. So I always believe in that. But I realized that I wasn't betting on. On my ultimate strength. You know what's really funny? I stand here and you know, it's funny how your brain can do different things. I'm giving the talk, but there's a part of my brain right now that's thinking. And I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck do I really want to help them with, right? And what really I just said to myself, let me just take myself out of my own talk for a second. I'm like desperately hoping that three people won because I'm very realistic about these kind of things, right? You come, you get motivated, and then it's next Thursday and you didn't hit your numbers and you're like, you know, like, I'm very realistic about this. I've been around the block at this point. I'm just hoping that somebody, while they pay attention to my talk and when we get into Q and A, understands the single best thing you can do for yourself is to take a step back, regardless of your success right now, and not lie to yourself and try to deploy self awareness and think about what you're good at. Are you just a really great salesman that allows you to disguise all your other shortcomings and that's why you're successful? Are you just really good at math? Have you just math arbitraged in a technical world? And you're just good at that? If you really, really understand what you're great at or good at. And I have a feeling you have one of those things because you're sitting in this room, I want you to quadruple down on that and literally commoditize everything else around you. Because that's what I did at 30. I realized, shit. I suck shit at plenty of things. But what I'm really good at is I know what you guys are gonna do before you're gonna do it. I know that every fucking person in this room is, is going to play virtual reality games and watch virtual reality movies in seven years. And I will bet on that. And hopefully I'll make money in the same way that when I took that step back in November 2005, started Wine Library TV in February 2006, and then most of all after the YouTube exit, said the next time that I think something is going to be big, I'm going to invest in it. Even though I didn't know what the fuck that meant. And so four months later, ironically, I've never given this talk in this town, in this town, ironically, in this town, ironically, five blocks from here in 2007 or seven, it was south by Southwest. It was the first one that I went to. I Wanted to get into the tech world. I promised myself that the next thing that I saw, like YouTube, like AdWords, like email marketing, that I would invest in. And ironically, and luckily for me, there was an app that was launched here that weekend called Twitter that everybody thought was stupid. Nobody wants to say that anymore, but every person in this town said, who gives a shit if you're eating a pizza, right? Why would you say that? Who's gonna follow that? And what I saw was, holy crap, this is email marketing all over again. Because how many people here did email marketing in 96, 7, and 8? Raise your hands. Anybody? So what we remember was the great thing about email marketing in 96, 97, 98, is you sense something that people liked. They forwarded it to their entire address book, and that died by 2002 and 03, that viral loop. So what I saw on Twitter was, wait a minute, you can reply and people. Everybody sees it. And then they could say, that looks good. I believed in Twitter. I orchestrated a relationship with the company. Their CTO got kicked out six months later, and I bought his stock. And the first tech investment I ever made was Twitter at a $50 million valuation. I then made a video, because now I've changed my behavior and decided what I was great at was seeing things. And I made a video that said, facebook should pay attention to this Twitter thing. It's interesting. The next day, it goes viral. Inside of Facebook, I get an email from Dave Morin, head of platform. When I come and speak to Facebook, I fly to Palo Alto. I speak in front of the entire company, all 400 of them. I rip shit up. Zucks comes up to me, we have dinner, we hit it off. Six months later, every time he's in New York, we jam. He. He gives me a phone call and he goes, gary, my parents want to buy a house. Would you like to buy some of their stock? I sure do, Mark. I sure fucking do.

And three months later, and three months later, I start seeing all. So, by the way, if you ever hear that I've been arrested, it is not because I'm a perv. It's because I just pay attention to what every 13 year old does with their phone, right? So this is what I do for a living. And this is how I got to. And this was back when it was laptops, not phones. Now it's really easy, especially at airports. I love it. I'm just like, look it over. But then sometimes the dad's like, fuck you. And I'm like, I'm sorry.

But.

I Just started noticing that every junior high kid was on something called Tumblr that I was aware of, and I was watching it and talk about different times. I then approached David Karp, became friendly with him, and I invested in Tumblr's B round at a $14 million valuation. And as some of you that follow tech know, a couple years ago, it sold to Yahoo for a billion dollars. So the first three investments I made after I recognized I had something and needed to triple down on it was Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. For the last seven years, I've become progressively stupider, but I'm thrilled to have very early Uber first check into Birchbox, huge exits in buddy media and things of that nature. And I've made more money in my investing career than I did as a great operator in my own business. And then I took a very interesting decision that I think will really bring value to this room. Five years ago, six years ago, my brother was graduating college. I predicted, wrongly, that we were in a tech bubble in 2009 because valuations were getting high, so I hadn't been through a cycle yet. So I got caught on that wrong. And my brother was graduating college, and I didn't want him to be one of these kids that just raises money and learns how to run a business on financial arbitrage, not on actually running a fucking business. So I said, let's start a business. At that point, I was one of the 20 most followed people on Twitter. And brands were coming to me and saying, pepsi, Unilever. Big brands were saying, how do I get what you have? So I started a company called VaynerMedia. Now, I really want you guys to hear this, because I think this might be important to one or two of you in the room. I'm 35 years old. I'm very wealthy at this point for me, making a lot of money. And I decide to take a step back. I'm now friends with Zucks and EV and the whole ecosystem, Travis. Like, I'm in it. I decide to take a step back and scale the thing that I'm best at. So when I thought about myself, I said, I'm great at seeing the future. But then I was also good at executing. So I decided to build an agency that scaled my marketing behavior. Could I help the biggest businesses in the world? Toyota, Unilever, Budweiser, My clients right now? Could I help the biggest brands in the world sell shit in places they didn't believe they could? Because when I was doing Google, AdWords and I was doing email Marketing and I was doing CRM and I was. They weren't. And so they were slow to where I saw the world going, which was this social media thing. And just let me ground this for everybody in the room. There is no social media. Social media is the slang term for the current state of the fucking Internet. And if you understand that this, and I think we would all agree this is the game. I don't give a shit what you do in this room. There's one thing that we're all connected by, that before you can sell somebody on something, you need their attention. Attention is the number one asset that everybody in this room needs to be chasing. Attention. That's why, you know, Amazon as a platform has attention. That's why so many of you are on it and arb off of it. And why they're able to make so much money. You can make some nickels. They're making dollars because they have the attention. So attention is the asset.

When you understand that this machine right here is the beginning of the process of us becoming robots. It is by show of hands. And by the way, I've been asking some show of hands so far, I gotta be honest with you, you kinda fucking suck at it. There's been a whole lot of this and there's been this show of hands fully high. How many people in every 24 hour window are always within arm's reach of their phone? Raise your hand. Raise it. And keep it up. And everybody in the front, look around everybody. How many people here are willing by show of hands to do the following? If I told you that you could have surgery and implant your phone in your forearm, how many people here, without bullshit to try to act cool in front of you on some. No shit. How many people here would be willing to do that? Raise your hand, Stand up. The people that are willing to do it. Real quick, please stand. You raise your hand, bro.

Let's clap it up for these pioneers.

I hope you don't get cancer.

So we're living in a world where all the attention is here. 24 7, 3 6. Guys, do you know how important this device is? I literally, I live in New York City. I. I'd literally rather somebody come up to me, stab me in the stomach and steal my wallet than lose my phone.

So when you understand that 53% of all time on this device is spent on social networks, you start taking social media a lot more seriously. I, for the first time in my life, have shifted all the marketing budgets of wine library just to Facebook ads. And I've never not done a marketing mix in my entire career. That's how effective the product is in selling stuff. It's not about getting fucking likes, it's about selling shit. And so we're living in very interesting times. I decide to scale a machine. And so to answer your question, Ry, it's really simple. The way I'm buying the New york Jets is 5 years ago I decided to eat a lot of shit and swallow a lot of humility and, and take a step back in my career at the height of my powers at 35 years old, in my prime and build a client service business. Go into meetings where people with a third of the knowledge that I have say, well I think it should be red and all that other horseshit. Run a company that I've grown from 30 to 600 employees over the last four years where I'm the head of HR, which means my days consist of the. Gary, Sally's trying to ruin me. Katherine, she's not okay. A ton of that shit.

Okay, I just want you to follow here.

Because what I'm trying to build is a human scaled version of me, a big company. I'm gonna teach marketers that I think are on second and third base in their natural skills by practitionership. I get to stand in front of my company as a 40 year old man now, which hurts, just turned 40 in front of them and say I'm the best at social media in this company, not you 23 year olds. Because I'm a practitioner. The reason I maintain my personal brand and do the AskGaryVee show is for me to be in it. I want to be an architect and a Mason and 99% of this room can't wait to just be an architect and maybe a consultant to the architect. You gotta be in it. And so what I decided was I wanted to be in it, I wanted to scale it. And I will deploy this machine, this Vaynermedia machine that I will build over the next 20 or 30 years. I will deploy it against all my behavior in the future. I will invest in companies and give some of my people to that company. I will write checks into companies, I will buy brands and I will take it insular. Right now it's $100 million a year. So I've taken this business from 3 to 100 million in four years, right. Which is ultra growth. And the reason I told you the Sally and Katherine part, it is on the back. If you just like here's the dirty secret that no fucker that's gonna Talk to you over next weekend is gonna tell you you wanna go from a million to 100 million. It's about people.

There's no algorithm, there's no platform, there's no fucking math arbitrage. To build something From a million dollar to 100 million, you will have to tap into your EQ skills, not your IQ skills. And you'll have to realize if you're even capable of it. Cause if you're not, you're gonna have to bring in a partner or somebody you trust for life to build out that. Because you have to scale humans. And to scale humans, you have to know how to deal with humans. And that's the truth and that's the way it is. And listen, you can decide. You know, I love this. You could be sitting in this room and you might be a little bit less practical and selly and one by one and you might be thinking on an invention kit that you're gonna start a company or create an app. The problem with that is, for me is it's just not practical. For every Instagram and Snapchat, there's literally 50 million Instashits and Snap. Shit.

Those are like numbers. There's been like eight of them.

And then there's everything else. So I think we're living through one of the most interesting times ever for entrepreneurship. Because first and foremost, it's trendy now. And all of a sudden, every 22 year old that's good in school has decided that they're an entrepreneur, that your idea is good enough. And the other thing is, there's a ton of people that are throwing around 25 and $50,000. Because every night, in every fucking rich city, city and neighborhood in this country, two people go out to dinner. Lawyer Rick and Dentist Dan. And Lawyer Rick goes, hey, Dentist Dan, my son at college, his roommate's starting a new app. It's gonna be the next Uber. And Lawyer Rick goes, sure, I'll give you $50,000 for it. And the amount of money that is gonna be lost over the next five years is so fucking staggering, I can't wait for the carnage.

And the reason I can't wait is because I love meritocracy and capitalism. And it's what's supposed to happen. It's just the way it is. And so I ask you and I implore you, and one of the reasons I wanted to do this talk is because there are a lot of practitioners and practical businesses in this room. The thing that I want to kind of pound home is one man's point of view, I'm sure plenty of people are going to have their different opinions. But to really, really scale, I think people think, and I don't want to. I'm not razzing you, Ryan. I think people want to think it could be done on a whiteboard. I think people think it could be done in a process, in a system. I just don't think that people have taken enough steps back. Like, here's something really good to do. Why don't you go and actually look at 50 to 100, 100 million dollar a year businesses. Why don't you just actually look at them and look how they got there. Like, there's very few people that are sitting wizard of Oz style with three computers and fucking pulling levers and getting a hundo.

There's not. I know there's a lot of cool pictures on Instagram where people fucking rent boats and then get all their friends fucking money together for one day. And they all take it out of a bank and they throw it on the fucking bed and try to sell you on this fucking. You can smoke weed in fucking Aruba and the passive income just fucking comes. It's not fucking real.

Cause if it was, I would have done that shit a long time ago.

And so we're living in a very interesting time where we have a lot of fake entrepreneurs. And what hurts my heart is a lot of these kids and grownups are number twos and number threes and number fours and they would dominate. They just don't have the stomach for the adversity of being a number one. Because when you're number one, it's all your fault. My wife always, you know, I do so many things angel investing, and I run a 25 now $150 million fund. I run this agency. I'm still kind of involved in the wine business. I'm writing books, I'm speaking, I'm doing all this stuff. So when we meet a new couple in school and they're like, well, what do you do? My wife always laughs because she knows it's like an hour fucking conversation. But I've started saying in the joke, but not really I'm a firefighter, because literally my entire life, literally the three hours that I've been in the hotel here while you guys were doing things, literally was seven Skype meetings where I was just putting out fires. Headache after headache after headache after headache. That's what you do in those kind of organizations. So I think the thing that I want to get across is what's your process? Who Are you, Do you have the self awareness to understand what you do? And more importantly, can you then deploy your self awareness around your strengths or weaknesses against the white space in the market? What is the white space? And I will tell you right now, we are living through the greatest opportunity of white space because people are pouring really good money into places where people are not paying attention anymore. There's $90 billion. This really probably doesn't affect this room, but there's $90 billion being spent on television ads. 90 billion on the production and distribution of television ads by show of hands. How many people in 2015 have watched TV shows on their time, not when it's actually aired? And have fast forwarded every single commercial every single time? Or have watched Netflix or have watched your favorite show on your time, not when it aired, raise your hands. Interesting. Everybody by show of hands when given the chance. How many of you have fast forwarded every single commercial? You know what's interesting about what just happened here? DVR fast forwarding has declined in the last six months. For the first time in six years, less people are fast forwarding. You know why? Because they're not even giving the fucking time to grab the remote to fast forward. They're just grabbing their phone, paying attention here, waiting for that shit to just go through.

And so Google AdWords, how many people here do Google AdWords for their business click throughs declined on Google AdWords 22% in the last six months because we're getting conditioned. We don't want to click them. They're ads, just like my open rates used to be, 93%. And the shit that I believe in in Facebook and Instagram advertising that so many of you can change your business on will suck shit in three, four years too, because more people will understand. And it just becomes supply and demand. And so the combination, the way the blueprint for me is, has to start with what are you good at? And are you being realistic with yourself? There's probably 85% of the jobs in my company that I could not do. And I'm not joking. For example, I could not be a copywriter, an entry level creative for my own agency, because my grammar is so staggeringly bad that my English teachers are like rioting that I'm a New York Times bestselling author.

But I can be the CEO. And so I think that's the thing that a lot of people are missing. They're plugging away and they're letting their one strength carry all their weaknesses instead of taking it out and then deploying the other commoditized stuff and either outsourcing it or actually just not even doing it. So I would adore and I would hope, and I hope that I can break through to one person on that audit tonight in the mirror in the hotel room, because that's what matters. The other thing is the behavior of time. I was in LA this morning. I took a 6am flight to be here. While I was in the flight on Wi Fi, something happened to my business that now I've canceled my plans for here, had a nice dinner with somebody. I was excited about going to fly home tomorrow morning. I'm now leaving here after the meet and greet and I'm flying back to LA and then I'm taking a 6am flight from LA to New York. I have now for the last four years. How many people happen to by the earlier show of hands, I know not that many. But out of curiosity, how many of you saw the DailyVee episode two that I just put up?

Thank you by the way. And for the far majority of you, I've been doing this podcast, really YouTube show, Facebook show really called AskGaryVee. I've done about 150 episodes of it or so, a little bit more where I answer questions from Twitter and Instagram, business questions. And I talk a lot about hard work because the truth is I have no clue who any of you are and I actually have no read on how much talent you actually have. But we all have in whatever our best skill is, some level of talent. And I know the only way you're gonna maximize whatever that's gonna bring to you, whether that's $100,000 a year, a million dollars a year, happiness and your work life balance, whatever the KPI is for you, whatever that talent's gonna bring to you, the only way to maximize it is to deploy hard work against it.

So I've been talking about this literally my whole life, it feels like now, but I did this. I'm doing a daily vlog now where my main camera guy's following me around. I was flabbergasted by the comments on everybody to how busy and hardcore my day was for two reasons. Number one, I was like, well what the fuck did you think I was talking about? Number two, it was a weird day where I had a gala that I'm on the board of and it actually ended early at 8:30 because I got to go to the gala and I'm like, wait till they see the next one where the 98% of my days end. At 11:30 and 12, because I'm in meetings from 7, 7:30, 7:40, or the five minute meetings that I had throughout the day. Literally, if you watched it, and I'd hope some of you go and watch it, but I think the ones that watched it, literally every minute is in play. I have not watched a TV show in fucking seven years, literally. Besides my family and four hours of the New York jets, every single minute is allocated to the audacity of my ambition. Right? You want to buy the Cleveland Indians? You need to work your fucking face off for the rest of your life. And what's even more interesting is you have an amazing, beautiful girl back there that's six months old. And you need to figure out how to calibrate what you want to do with that, with what your ambitions to buy the Cleveland Indians is. And that's the struggle that so many of us deal with, right? Whether it's work, life balance for your loved ones, for your family, it just is what it is. And so much like managing 600 people, it's all built on communication. You need to first and foremost talk with yourself. And you need to start by not lying to yourself. You might not be that great, or maybe you're better than you think. Maybe you had parents that never cheered you up and always said you were a loser. And actually you're way better than you think. And you need to go the other way because I've got plenty of those in my fucking cup. Like I'm a fucking cheerleader 90% of my time. I see these kids. You know, the greatest gift my mom gave me is I think I'm the greatest fucking human being on earth. I'm being dead fucking serious. Like I don't even have. I had this weird moment at like 24 where I looked back at my 17 year old self like, fuck, I wasn't the hottest guy in high school. Shit. That's how brainwashed my mom had me. I see it the other way, but what I've done through that brainwashing is over time, and it really kicked in at 30, is I just started kind of getting really, really real with myself on my first date with my wife when I realized I wanted to marry her. I basically started break on our first date. I started breaking down the narrative of I'm way more ambitious than you think. We're gonna fall in love and start a family. You're gonna think I'm gonna start spending more time with you and the family. The problem is I'm older and think I'm Running out of time to buy the jet. So I'm gonna work more, not less. Like literally was communicating from the get. And so take a step back and figure out who you are and don't apologize for who you are and don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks, especially your parents or your friends or other people that have influence. You can get there. You've now started the only process that allows you to go to the next level. When you do that, if you can then really significantly put yourself in a position to focus on the thing that you're best at and work on that and then surround yourself with the profits. See, it's a funny chicken and egg game. It's how I did it with wine, library and vaynermedia. If you just do what you're best at, you're gonna make more money. You're then able to take that money to hire people to do the shit that you're not as good at. What most people do is they try to cover it all and they're inefficient and they're leaving upside on table. It's very basic offense versus defense. The problem is so few people do it mainly because it starts with step one of true self awareness and empathy and really getting real with yourself. And so, for example, I would never in my life ever, ever go to something like this because that's not how I learn. I don't learn by listening to other people. I've always learned by doing shit. And then I feel what I feel and then I move on. But I also recognize how valuable this can be. But I hope you didn't come because your homies learned that way. You just have to really know yourself. That's the game and it's really hard. And again, please know that I'm putting a huge asterisk on this. I don't know if that's a skill. I don't know if self awareness is teachable. I really don't. But I tried to tackle this a couple months ago and it's worked well. I'm getting about 100 emails a month on this. If you don't think you're self aware, I don't even know what the fuck that means. But if you maybe just should go through this process. If you can go to the seven or eight people that you spend the most time in in your life and make them feel safe to tell you the truth of what they think you're good and bad at, and you just spend hours on this, like you gotta really convince your mom you're not joking. You can't hurt my feelings. This is for my benefit. I will not hold this against you. Like, this is the one time. Yeah, Ricky, you actually suck shit. You're lazy, whatever it is, you need to put those people in a position because it's been very interesting. I've had a lot of people email me that they spent and I pounded spend a half an hour a week, a month getting that person to feel comfortable to take, tell you the truth, because they love you and they know you. But if you can get that feedback, you could win. And so I think we're living through the biggest opportunity for entrepreneurship ever, while colliding with the most fake entrepreneurs ever. And that to me is exciting times. And I think that's all you could ever ask for. We have great at bats. Everybody in this room should be very grateful. We have way more opportunity to build something for ourselves than our parents did. Because it wasn't practical. There wasn't this scaled machine called the Internet. The Internet is the greatest culture shift to human beings ever. And we're living in its prime or its beginning of its prime. It's pretty rad and you should not take it for granted. You get one fucking at bat. One. Like literally one.

So another thing that I would tell you that you may want to do is I spend a lot of time with 70 and 80 and 90 year old people that are not my grandparents.

You will really quickly see the most painful trait in a human being, which is regret. I promise you, if you actually allow yourself to get up close and personal with regret from a third party that's not your own family, you will quickly realize why I'm so passionate to stand up here and say, please work your fucking face off. If you have the audacity to try to build something for yourself that allows you to do why is it good to build a business or get rich so you can do things that you want to do on your terms. That freedom, if you have the audacity to do that, you've got to put in the work ethic and it has to be around your skill. And that's been the whole theme of this talk. That's why it's that. And one of the great ways to have a cold shower about it is to go talk to all those 80 and 90 year olds at a nursing home. Or I do it when I travel a lot, switch seats, sit with the old guy and boom, regret starts pouring out fast. That is what we'll all do. We will all sit and ponder what we didn't do much more than what we did do. And so I just don't want you to leave anything on the field. I thought I was working so hard, 20 to 30, I realized I wasn't. I realized I had more in me. And it's brought me a dramatic amount of happiness and not in just the financial arb. Right. Like the work life. Balance is great because I over communicated with my partner. I knew that I was a workaholic. And I love this. I find the time for my family and I keep adjusting. They're getting older and I'm spending more time during the day. That was sacrilege for me to go somewhere in the middle of a workday. But I do it now and I hack. But I never ever was not home on the weekends for the last three years. But I'm not gonna be home until 4 o' clock Saturday because I'm punting over here. And so it's not just one rule. It's pulling the levers on an everyday basis and over communicating with your partner in life, with your business partners. But it only stems from self awareness and putting players in the best position to succeed. And over indexing and understanding that because of the Internet, hard skills like math are being commoditized. IQ is being commoditized in our faces right now. It is eq, it is people skills, it is the gray, it's the intangibles that are growing in value because the other stuff is mapped with scale and science.

So I wish you luck. Thank you.

Thank you, garrett.