Gary Vaynerchuk says self-awareness is what separates winners from people who chase the wrong goals. He knew at thirteen he was a businessman, selling cards in his dad's store while others doubted him. Understanding your actual strengths lets you position yourself to win.
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. I 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 build bigger businesses or are successful or whatever they want is because 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 through education. So getting D's and F's. My friend's parents thought I was a loser. Right? You know, 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, right? 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 and 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 in my dad's store, the more likely I would be successful.
