GaryVee: This is the #1 Reason You’re Unhappy! Do This to Overcome Anxiety & Unlock Emotional Peace!

The quality of me as a human matters to me, not as me as a businessman. I'm aware that I love it. I love being an entrepreneur, but it is not how I think about myself. Right. It's my favorite game. It is my passion. It's not who I am. Entrepreneur, investor, a New York Times bestselling author, co-founder of VaynerMedia, digital media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk. Please welcome Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk. I remember when I was first popping off in that 2007 Twitter world, a lot of people were like, the wine guy's gonna be around just for a year. This is too much. It's all sizzle, no steak. Money and fame and success doesn't change you, it exposes you. I just have a very simple question for people. Explain to me any justification to sh*t on another human being. If you're not happy, if you're anxious, if you're feeling a lot of pressure, the answer is ironically, you have to start doing the opposite of everything you naturally wanna do. That's the other thing that I don't understand what these people are doing. As if anyone on earth- Is perfect. Is perfect. You wanna have a real moment in this podcast? Everybody, I'm looking at all the cameras right now. I'm sorry about that. It's all right. But I was going for a fact.

You said you want to live to 105. Yeah. You get to do one final livestream.

Yeah.

And all you get to leave behind is three truths. I promise you this is the most.

Truth I've learned in 105 years.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Gary Vaynerchuk in the house. My man. So good to see you. It's been 15 years since we met each other.

Yes.

You have continued to be a leader in the creator economy, entrepreneurship, emotional intelligence and so many other things. So I want to acknowledge you first, Gary, for your continued evolution, innovation and leadership as a human being and also your friendship. You have thousands of connections that you probably text with on a monthly basis and you have a lot of people in your inner circle, but then outer circle, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And I would say I'm someone like in the inner outer circle, you know, we don't see each other a lot, but when we connect, we connect and we have a lot of memories together. And I always appreciate that when there's something happens in my life, you reach out. So I want to acknowledge you for just being on top of things, reaching out when things really matter, even when I'm not.

Like I love for you.

Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. And one of the things I want to talk about first and today is you've got a lot that's always happening, but one of the things is this, book called Day Trading Attention.

Yes.

It seemed, and we were just talking about this right before we started, you were asking me, you know, what's new for you? And I said, feeling emotionally peaceful and abundant and loved is new for me. Because in a world of online marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, business, competition, I was driven to grow, grow, grow. And I was always accomplishing and getting results. But in the last, you know, year, there's been changes, ups, downs for the the first time I feel peaceful about me and love myself, even if I'm not growing at the rate that I always have.

Even if you're ranked 113 instead of seven. Exactly.

Exactly. My question for you to start is, it seems like people are more stressed and overwhelmed and trapped than ever, trying to keep up with the algorithms, likes, views, changes in platforms, one platform being hot, then potentially TikTok going away in a few months, who knows? And people are on this hamster wheel of needing to grow, and create, create, create in order to be relevant.

Yes.

Is that sustainable? And how can people stay healthy and love themselves when they're hot and when they're not? And how do they not chase the hamster wheel of success with social and stay more sustainable?

Great question. Is it sustainable? Yes, if you're in the place that I think you're emerging into. where you enjoy it and it doesn't define you. And you can love yourself and you're good, whether you're making a million dollars a year or 40,000 a year, whether you've got a million followers or 40,000, or the thing that you're going through that I go through and many others, when you have momentum and you're hot, hot, and then you're not as hot and you go up and down. So I think it's remarkably sustainable. I also believe that 99%, 97%, 90%, I don't know what the number is, are not in that place yet. They're not in a place where they don't live for outside validation. They're not in a place where they've hit that maximum place of self-love. You know, I talk a lot about my mom. It's very clear to me that whatever she gave me in DNA and how she parented me and then the circumstances of the environment I grew up in Edison, New Jersey in the '80s, created a perfect storm where my relationship with me was so good, even in high school. I think about it now a lot. I didn't realize it when I was first coming up and getting notoriety. I didn't realize, like, how insane in hindsight. And Dustin, who's filming me right now, like, he also grew up in Jersey, and he, like, really understands what I'm about to say. Even though I'm older, he really knows what I'm saying. Like, 90s, late 90s, early 2000s, like, you know, high school in Jersey and in 1990 to '94 when I was there, that was real kind of hardcore, meaning it now blows me away in hindsight that I did not, not only did I not succumb to peer pressure, that it didn't even begin to gain momentum with me.

Really?

And I had a lot of- you-.

Weren'T like the only one in high school that this didn't happen to?

No, I think there's others, and this is why I'm trying to tap into it. What you're entering, I believe, is what I got lucky and I'm using, I hate to, you know, I hate luck because people love to weaponize it against people they envy. And it's a real lazy trait, but there's a million variables that are luck or serendipity or whatever you wanna call it. But your parents instilled that in you.

And gave you that skill.

You know, my dad instilled other things in me and honestly, I was with my mom predominantly from 14 and then ironically at the time I'm talking about now is when I started to really get to know my dad 'cause I had to work in a liquor store a lot of hours. I just liked myself and didn't think, you're a perfect example. You were like, I was four foot eleven the day I walked into high school.

Yeah, I was 6'3. Now I'm 6'4.

So like, I'm using you 'cause you're a perfect comp. Even if the most handsome, like big dude who was in my grade made fun of me, and I remember within the first couple of weeks, big shout out, if anybody can find Paige Parlow, Paige Parlow is two years older than us, or maybe one, all my high school friends are about to laugh. She was such a pretty girl. I think she was a junior, we were freshmen, right? And she had like cliche, this is literally September 1990. Her boyfriend is like a smoker dude, like literally like a John Travolta type. Leather jacket, literally out of central casting. I somehow, Get lost. This is literally week one or two, get lost of which class I'm going to. So I'm like, two, three minutes after the bell rang, and I'm walking the hall trying to fake, literally like a f ing movie. And they're outside. I already know who those two people are, and we're only a week or two in.

They're like the Legends of High School. Already.

And literally they're outside either her or his locker making out as I'm walking by, and everything in my life is, just walk by and have nothing happen, right? Sure enough, I get by, I'm like, and it's literally a movie. It's literally a coming of age movie. He goes, Hey, I turn back. He goes, the nursery school's right over there. Oh, no, he didn't know. You have to understand why this is extra funny. Our high school was a vocational high school. And I don't know if you know what this is, but vocational high schools, because we were in rural New Jersey, I moved from Edison to Hunterdon County. We had a auto body shop, we had a salon, and we had a daycare in our high school. And some of the juniors and seniors were taking classes to become teachers. So I was literally ironically, I didn't know where it was at the time. I'm telling you this, the first two, three weeks of high school, he goes, Hey kid, and they laugh and I'm like, uhh, literally, but here's what's so funny about it. This is the most meta moment. I literally said to myself in that moment, not I'm a piece of shit, or I'll never be cool or I suck or I can't wait to grow or whatever. I said to myself what's happening right this second? I'm like, that's going to be a really funny story one day.

Wow.

I literally actually at 14 years old said that and here I am 34 years later delivering on the promise I made to myself about that moment. So the answer is, is it sustainable? Of course it is. But the only thing that is sustainable is when your relationship with yourself is so good, you can deal with the death of a parent, a partner, even the worst extreme, a child. You can deal with getting laid off. You can deal with breakups. Breakups. Yeah. How about athlete life that you grew up with? Who are the kids that are bound to be professional athletes? Jay Williams was supposed to be the best basketball player. Got into a motorcycle accident. Obviously, he has a great career. He's a great entrepreneur. He's on TV. He's a good dude. But that's maybe not what he thought his whole life was gonna be for the first 20 years of his life. Or the ones that don't make it, or the ones that come from a wealthy family and then the mother or father die of a heart attack, it spins out the whole family, or they get raided by the FBI. People have things. My mom lost her mom at five, my dad lost his dad at 15. Those are game changing moments. How does one deal that they were in a good place? Last night I had dinner. One of the people at dinner was talking about their sibling, their younger sister passing away. This woman was in her 60s. She was talking about her 58 year old sister and she was talking about the children. And she's talking about the children in their 30s just on full tilt entitlement. Like she literally said, quote unquote, one of them is waiting for the father to pass so they can inherit the money.

Oh man.

And I think about those things and I'm like, what does that? And that's the extreme in the other direction. So there's the, I love myself. Listen, you know this about me. You brought it up in the intro. I love being nice. But I mean, of course I'm nice because I'm good with me. Of course, most people that aren't nice aren't nice because they're not good with themselves. So for me, this is why entrepreneurship has been so easy. I'm not scared to lose. And it is the direct correlation, your capacity with losing, has an incredible correlation to what you're going to achieve as an entrepreneur sustainably. Because when you're deeply insecure and it's not good, you equally might create massive success because you're using it as the makeup. If I put up the points on the board, everyone will think I'm good, even though I secretly don't think I'm good.

And what happens when you succeed, but you're not good with yourself?

Exactly what you know what happens. You better, you and I now have way more than you, but you're starting to get that. I saw the last time I saw you in New York for a second, I'm like, so glad to see you. Yeah, we're maturing. And you know this, many of our contemporaries or guys and gals we looked up to, we've watched get to high levels and collapse. Yeah, crash. Crash. Some of it the public knows, because it's very famous. Others we know where like someone was in our circle speaking or writing books, like made a lot of money, but like, gone through really bad stuff and drug problems and worse and like, like we know, and that's what happens. You know, money and fame and success and followers doesn't change you. It exposes you. Right? And so, you know, I think, you know, for me, it was the serendipity of being in that good place. And it's probably why I, if you look at my journey, it's funny, day trading attention is a funny book for me. It's a little bit back to 2009, Gary, it's very tactical. Social's changed a lot. And I just wanted to give people like, here it is, like go run for the next 24 months. But my last book, 12 and a half, and you know this again, 'cause we've been together through this journey, somewhere along the line, six, seven years into giving tactical black and white marketing and business advice that will work, I got to a place where I'm like, wait a minute, oh, people aren't doing this not because they don't know what to do, It's because they're not in a good place from a perspective, from a mentality, from an internal place. And that's when my content started to evolve into security kind of stuff.

And that's when I started to get.

Into more tactical stuff. I mean, I didn't even know what the term tactical was. Yeah, because I thought when I came out in 9, 2009, 10, 11, 12, that I just built from '96 to 2000, that was the other thing was a little bit different about me in that era. I was also someone who had already really done a lot.

Yes.

And so I was talking about I did, not that might happen. And I think that's what made me explode pretty quickly besides ability to communicate in that kind of level of communication charisma. It was, there was meat there. I remember you may remember this, this is actually an interesting question to you. I remember when I was first popping off in that 2007-8 Twitter world, I'm so animated, I'm so over the top. What I always used to laugh about, similar to getting made fun of that day in high school was a lot of people We're like, oh, this guy's gonna-- the wine guy's gonna be around.

Just for a year.

This is too much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all sizzle, no steak. And I would read those tweets 'cause I'd go and give a talk at the Affiliate Summit. And I would read the comments and someone's like, this guy won't even be around in a year. And it was very similar to getting made fun of in freshman year high school. I'm like, I can't wait to recall this because I know who I am. I'm incredibly patient. Operator. And I build slow and quietly. VaynerMedia, VaynerX, has 2,000 employees. That's incredible, man. I thought it was only a thousand.

It's 2,000 employees.

You were there when you had four? Correct.

I remember there, like, you guys were in, I can't remember Soho or something.

Sunshine Suites down on Dubrosa Street. I remember.

You had a ping pong table and like four people around the table. That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

Like three, four clients trying to figure it out.

And now that's a $350 million a year business. It's a real business.

Amazing.

And that was built from me and AJ in Mike Lazo's Buddy Media Conference Center office six months before you saw us down in Dubros. And that rent for the first year was free because I traded cut marketing services for the space.

Wow.

Because the story that most people don't understand about me, and I know you know this, is I didn't have any money. I built my dad's business. And he didn't pay me much. And I'm not even mad at dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like 60 and 70,000 a year.

Not much in New York City.

Real, real now. I was in Jersey living in a shitty apartment in Springfield, New Jersey, but it didn't matter. And I was able to save money because I worked 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. I didn't even have time to spend money. And the internet didn't work the way it did back then, so it wasn't like I could gamble or buy. Like, it was just like a very, I had a, I'm starting to realize in my late 40s, I'm like, Man, my life was weird, weird. Like, it was weird. I was like in a very weird emotional place, which is amazing. Like off the charts lucky, just like being an athlete or any, or, you know, Beyonce is born with her voice. She put in the work.

She developed it, but she had to.

Put in the work. LeBron was born with what he is. Put in the work, and that's how I feel about myself. I was given a lot of talent emotionally and a lot of entrepreneurial talent, and I've put in an obnoxious amount of work, and here comes the outcomes. But also, just like anybody else, I've gone through my journey along the way. My last book, 12 and a half.

I talk a lot about candor being my weakness.

My kryptonite. Candor, what do you mean by that? Well, Gary V's Candor. Next hour here, and shoot, I'll be like, you, you know, and I do that well as Gary V. But as Gary Vaynerchuk, when I have an employee that stinks, I, for my whole career, to this day, it's a problem. To this day, I'm a five out of 10, maybe a 4.7.

I'm being honest or being- Being- See.

That even like, honestly, that like made me crumble. I hate that candor is- I mean, no, no, no, no, you're right. No, no, you're right. Candor is a synonym or whatever the fuck it's called of honesty. My ability to be honest with an employee that has been around my company for a period of time, and now I like them, who's underperforming, has been the disproportionate Kryptonite of my career, which surprises people. Because Gary V on stage or on podcast, that's my strength. But I'm talking to the world.

So when it's one on one and you care about someone and that- and.

I know- everything about them. I know that their dad this and their mom this and I know they're having struggles at home or I know they came in and had $50,000 in college debt and I'm like, oh, like, and so I've realized one of my great weaknesses of my career is that I bleed too much charity into my work.

Oh, man.

And one of our biggest connection point in our friendship is, you know, Pencils of Promise, right? And I've done a good job in doing charity work, but I haven't been able to take off. Like, I really envy the people who like don't bleed in charity. Charity has been an element of my investing. I've invested in companies that if my life depended on it, I would never have invested in. I 100% knew it wouldn't work, but I wanted to write a $20,000 to $50,000 check 'cause I liked the person. I have kept many employees within my companies for a long time. And here's the worst part. I've taken the brunt of that because it's lost profit, right? It's it's reputational damage. People are like, why is Gary keeping around Sally? And then what ends up happening is eventually there is a moment where that person goes, but it's always been sloppy because of the lack of a year.

Or two after they should have.

And then I'm the bad guy. And it's all because and so candor has been something I've developed a lot more, a lot more.

It's still so challenging.

Back to we were joking about I just read the audiobook. Like, there are a couple things on earth that come incredibly hard to me. One is candor to nice people when I have to let them go in a business. And two is reading my audiobook.

I know, man.

Which is a grind.

Although you mentioned you're in your late 40s now, is that right? I just turned 41.

And I'm 40.

A couple weeks ago, 48. If you could go back to 40, okay. And think about all the things that you struggled with. in the last, I guess, eight years. You've had, you know, people see your wins and successes nonstop. Like all the exits and investments and the growth of VaynerMedia and the books and the New York Times, NFT, all these different things that people see that. But for you, what do you think are the two or three things that have been beyond candor, your biggest struggles or the hardest things you've had to overcome?

One is very real right now. Which is, I am atrocious at smelling the roses because the whole game for me is smelling the roses. However, I'm sensing like, but would I have enjoyed the memories of the more extreme version of smelling the roses? Let me explain.

Good example.

Yeah. So when I have wins, I don't celebrate them. Like there's no, like in my world, we just landed a $20 million client. Wow. It's a lot. It's a big client. And a bunch of the people at Vayner, they've worked at other places. They're like, so when's the, so when are we doing like the celebration dinner? And I'm like, what do you, I don't, like my brain's like, I don't understand what you're saying. Right? And not that like I'm like some tyrant. It's almost like just my energy goes to like problems. I'm a, you know, As I continue to go through my own journey, it'll be very clear that I was blessed with many things as a child, but I was also burdened with some. Like, I was the oldest from the old country. I mean, when I tell you since the time I was five years old, I remember being greened. Like, responsibility, responsibility. Take care of your sister.

Take care of your sister.

Take care of your mom. And I admire that from my mom. Do I also understand, like, anything, if anything's too extreme one way or the other? Between that, and then don't forget, 14, I come into my dad's business. By the time I'm like 15 and a half, when you still used to even use a half, it became clear like I was a talent. Back to the great Kobe Bryant that you got to do a podcast.

We're up 20-30% this year, 'cause you're in there freaking razzle dazzle.

So guess what happens? Now I'm 17 and 18 and 19, and I'm feeling the financial burden. And now that was so, I want to be very careful here. It's not like my father came to me and said, Absolutely not. I did that to myself, but it was hardwired in early and my environment's like my responsibility. I think a lot of first generation oldest immigrants that were born in the old country and their siblings were born here, actually that's really cool. Anybody who's watching, email me at gary@vaynerx.com if you're this exact person. You're an immigrant yourself, you immigrated to America or any first world country, London, anywhere else. and you're the only sibling that was born in the old country, but you have siblings that were born in the new world. I think there's something there.

Of course.

There's something there. I felt half parent my whole life. Wow. AJ, who you know well, I mean, minimally, I feel 50% dad, 50% mom.

Wow, really?

Of course he's 11 years younger than me. That's true. You know, so you're 18 and he's seven, and forget about the 11 years, like I just told you earlier, I felt that way towards my sister who's only three and a half years younger. There was just something like you're the, and again, I think back, this is where, I'll say something very important right now, I believe. I think we judge our parents too much.

Yeah, of course.

Like I don't sit here and say, Mom, like, you know, I think people really dwell too much. I understand. My mom lost her mom at five and then her dad, went to jail for 10 years in the Soviet Union 'cause every entrepreneur did. But it's not like that. And so her and her brother were the world. So she made, I mean, Bratnaya Sistra, Shayna Galava, was like propaganda into my head of like my relationship with my sister.

But it's hard when you're eight to think that way, to not think, your parents should be trying to protect you and educate you and, you know, elevate you.

But there is no should. I get it. You wanna have a real moment in this podcast? Everybody, I'm looking at all the cameras right now. There is no should. That's the biggest thing, right? Because then we could say, your parents should do this. And then I'll tell you the biggest pandemic in the world right now, which is 22 to 30 year olds who are really struggling with standing on their own two feet because their parents went too far to what you just said.

They took care of them too much.

Too much. So this purple, by the way, look at these two books. This is purple for a specific reason. I'm not a Lakers fan.

Yeah, yeah.

And meet me in the middle. What I can tell you has become very clear to me. Is I believe that the world desperately needs to figure out how to fall in love with purple, not red or blue. Because they both have major valid points and they both have major flaws. And the middle, especially parenting. One of the reasons I started B Friends is I knew what was happening with Gary V. You know this, we run in enough similar circles. I've been very blessed that because of where I was, I was then able to be what my mom and my circumstance in a lot of ways did for me. I've been able to do for a lot of people. Right? It feels nice.

Yes.

You get it, too. It feels nice for people to say, hey, you've really helped me. For me, children, you get in that early. It's one thing if I meet you in 2009 in St. Louis and can be a positive deposit. You've been built, though. There's a lot of there. You had to do a lot of your work. I had, I couldn't do, I can't do that as an outside motivation or inspiration or perspective.

Right.

But when you get in early, so for example, in V Friends, there's a character called Accountable Aunt. I'm obsessed with this character. I believe that if I can make that character cool, like Pikachu, Or Spider-Man, right? That if you're a kid that falls in love with the cartoons I'm gonna put out, or the kids books, or the video games, and you're like, I.

With accountable ant, that's my gut, right? I am accountable for everything in my life.

Think about what happens. If you love Spider-Man, or you love Wolverine, or you love Pikachu, like you're subconsciously getting in virtues of that. Or you envy it 'cause you don't have it. If all of a sudden an accountable ant is your guy, you're wearing hoodies with it. It kind of gets hard if you're like, I with accountable and you're not accountable. To not be accountable, or at least strive to it, or at least even know the existence. There's many people watching, listening that don't even realize that they live in a full dwelling, complaining, blaming framework. I've had many friends, relatives, and relationships, acquaintances, and business partners because my parents too far went with no complaining, which meant keep things in, right? But as you can imagine, if you're visceral to complaining, you smell it from a mile away. Yes, yes. And then if you're really visceral to it and you smell it from a mile away, well, you're aware that someone's constantly dwelling and blaming. And so to me, like what was most fascinating in my 30s and 40s as I've gone through this journey is they don't see it, which led me to the great breakthrough of candor. Louis, I didn't know when we met.

That that was my kryptonite. I thought it was my strength.

How about that?

'Cause you're being honest online and you're.

Being honest on stage, you mean? Nope. Because I didn't even realize the dichotomy of that. I just thought I was being nice. I was like, look what I'm doing for Sally. Two more years of payroll when she sucks? Look what I'm doing for Ricky. This guy blows. He'll never be okay out there. There was probably a mix of little ego, like, jump on my shoulders, I'll be Superman, which is why I'm using the Kryptonite example. But there was also, I thought it was being good. Life's hard lessons. I had to wake up in my mid-40s and go, why has anyone that's ever worked for me not like me? Because, you know, you'd read a tweet, be like, Gary, I'd be like, Fuck, how's that possible? I was so nice to John. I had to really do that work.

-Why do you think that people maybe don't like you?

-Well, people in the outside world who don't know me don't like me. The reason they wouldn't like it is because Either my communication style is in their jam, which I understand. Like when you're aggressive and confident and competitive and Jersey and like my shtick in their mind, like it doesn't work for them. I understand that. Some people are more chill. Like, you know, the reason people don't like, I love to live in New York City. Some people come to get me the out of here. I'm that, right? It's too much. That I respect. Number two.

But the people that know you or.

Work for me, it's too much. That I respect. Number two?

The people that know you or work.

For you or... Yeah, let me finish this. I think 'cause I think this will help people. 'Cause what I'm really trying to do in this is not say it about me. I'm hoping that people can start having a better relationship with people not liking them that don't know them.