Evan Carmichael breaks down Gary Vaynerchuk's advice on building a personal brand. Gary stayed silent for his first ten years, ages 22 to 32, doing work before building confidence to go public. Evan pushes back on this long-silence strategy and offers faster alternatives.
Questions this video answers
I would do exactly what I did: for the first 10 years of my professional career I didn't say a damn thing. From 22 to 32 I did nothing in building the Gary Vaynerchuk brand. I focused on the work that gave me the audacity to build the brand later.
So I'm a huge Gary Vaynerchuk fan. He's one of the only YouTube channels that I watch pretty much every single video that comes out on his channel. He does a series called AskGaryVee and he answers questions from people, and on one of his recent responses, he kind of gave a douchebag answer, and so I wanted to make this video.
My name is Rafael. I run a personal development YouTube channel. My question to you is What would you do if you were starting over and building your personal brand all over again? Basically, getting the name GaryVee out there all over again in this day and age, what would you do to go out there and really spread the word and to get yourself known?
I love this question, and boy, I'm gonna set it up, do I have a really good answer for this because you, and thanks for the question, and every other youngster needs to hear this really, really loud and clear. But I would do exactly what I did, which is for the first 10 years of my professional career, I didn't say a damn thing. From 22 to 32, my friend, I did nothing in building the Gary Vaynerchuk brand. You know what I did? I did the work that allowed me to have the audacity to build the Gary Vaynerchuk brand. This notion that you can just come out the gate and build your brand by growth hacking and putting yourself out there and getting on some podcasts and leveraging other people's brands to get on and build yourself as an expert in what?
And it's a douchebag answer because there's a lot of other ways to build a personal brand, and I wanna give Rafael some real advice, okay? Gary's point is you gotta add value. You wanna build a personal brand, you need to add value. The stuff that you're creating has to add value. And what he's saying is, if you don't have a lot of experience, how can you add that value? But the personal experience is not the only way to add value. Let me give you two examples, okay? One is model success. So when I first sold my company, I was 22 years old, I sold it for 7 figures. It wasn't, you know, it's not a billion-dollar sale, but it's still 7 figures. And when I was asked to go and speak around the world to help other entrepreneurs in developing and building their businesses, What I talked about was modeling success. So I had a little bit of success with my company, but what I shared mostly was modeling the success of other people. So I looked at Steve Jobs and Richard Branson and Donald Trump and how they built their businesses and shared those lessons. Because you can do the research and give advice. So if somebody is, for example, trying to figure out how do I name my company, right? That's their question. You can say, well, here's how Steve Jobs did it, here's how Richard Branson did it, here's how Donald Trump did it. And you're not necessarily saying here's how I think you should do it, but you're giving advice from other famous entrepreneurs. You've done the research and you're just sharing that knowledge. Okay, so you're adding a lot of value even though you don't have the 10 years of track record, history, and experience. The other way you can do it is to interview people who know what they're talking about, who have that experience. You can go interview the guys like Gary Vaynerchuk. Okay, one of my favorite guys who did this, and he fell off the map because of personal illnesses, but Michael Dunlop became a rising star in the internet marketing world, and he was I don't know, 19 years old, 20 years old, and he knew that he knew nothing about internet marketing. And what he started doing was going out and interviewing all of the top guys in internet marketing and asking the dumb questions, asking the startup questions, asking questions that everybody has, asking the questions that he had as well as the questions that his audience would have. And he had amazing podcasts that he created. I don't know if you can still find it. It was on Income Diary. Go check it out if you can find the early stuff that Michael Dunlop put together. And it was great because he got He had all of these experts on that were previously inaccessible. Nobody had interviewed all these people at once together, and every time you went to his website, you learned something new, something valuable from a big expert. And Michael Dunlop became known as the guy who would go out and interview these guys, and then he learned all these lessons that he was able to share. So if you don't have the knowledge base, you don't have the 10 years of experience, you still want to build a personal brand, don't just sit on your ass and just work for 10 years. Go and start sharing value. Share what you have learned, share from modeling success, and share by interviewing people who have done it. That's how you build a real personal brand. Believe. Gary, still love your stuff, but I think it was a douchebag answer. If you want the real goods, I share my best advice for entrepreneurs every week in my newsletter. Click the link below to check it out. It's free.
