Gary Vaynerchuk's "clouds and dirt" philosophy separates big-picture vision from hands-on execution. Most people get stuck in the middle, doing neither well, which kills momentum. You need both: architect thinking for the future and mason skills to build it now.
Chapters
Clouds and dirt. I spend all my time in the clouds and the dirt. The clouds are the high-end philosophy and beliefs that are the heart of everything I am and everything I do. If you religiously follow just a few core business philosophies that mean the most to you and spend all your time there, everything else will naturally fall into place. The dirt is about being a practitioner and executing towards those clouds. It's the hard work. The vast majority of people tend to play to the middle. Which is why they usually only succeed up to a certain level and then plateau. Ideas are worthless without the execution. Execution is pointless without the ideas. There are too many people who are average at what they do and then confused by their average results. Everyone has their own definition of clouds and dirt, but if there's any advice I can offer you that will change the entire trajectory of your career, it's to start pushing on both edges. Raise the bar on your business philosophy. Dig deeper into your craft. You want You've got to be an equally good architect as you are a mason. You've got to be able to simultaneously think at a high level and get your hands dirty. There are too many prima donnas out there who think that they are the brains of the business and they don't have to get their hands dirty. Don't get caught up in the glam. Even as you start to taste success, you have to have the humility to get on the middle aisle seat to the Philippines and sell a few bottles of wine to some random restaurant. On any given day, I sit through 4 or more pitches. And the pitch I usually end up liking? The one where the players are actually doing the work. They're in the trenches. They're not just doing the big holistic thinking or the higher-level branding. They're just at a raw level executing. They're engaging like mad and experimenting and trying things that risk getting them ridiculed. There really aren't that many people who are hard practitioners like that. There also aren't that many people who are looking far into the future. I'm talking 2025 and 2030. Everyone is hanging in the middle space trying to get the most in the short term instead of trying to build something that lasts. To be in the middle is to be like everyone else. It's safe. The middle keeps everything going the way it always has. The clouds and the dirt breaks things up. You're surrounded by the middle for 99.9% of your life. Most things are unremarkable. I want you to lose yourself in the clouds and the dirt and figure out what you can make that changes the game. Bigness sucks. Lack of drive sucks. Half-assing things sucks. And so Told us the middle. Clouds and dirt.
