Nick Hutchison breaks down five lessons from Gary Vaynerchuk's Crushing It: turn passion into income through social media, work nights and weekends, choose fulfilling work over sleep, balance long-term patience with daily speed, and use voice tech like Alexa to reach people during transition moments.
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Hello and welcome to episode number 14 of the brand new video series 5 Lessons Learned, brought to you by Book Thinkers, where each and every week the team and I will discuss the top 5 lessons learned from a book that we've read and loved. This week we're going to discuss Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk. It's his brand new book. Gary is a legend with regard to social media, motivational speeches, public speaking in general, and He has a lot to teach us throughout this book. So without further ado, let's jump into lesson number 1. Lesson number 1 is that in 2018, we have an infinite opportunity to be happy in the workplace. What I mean by that is that oftentimes people say we have to have a choice. Either A, you settle into a job that you tolerate in order to make money, Or B, you follow your passion with the expectation that you're going to be poor. But in today's digital environment, in today's digital economy, that's absolute bull. Toss it out the window. You can do what you're passionate about and make money off of it. All you need to do is just hustle a little bit. And throughout this book, Gary teaches us the principles that allow us to access our passions and use them in order to make money through social media and through the internet and through our digital economy. So definitely check out this book if you enjoy that lesson. Lesson number 2 is that when you're first starting out in the entrepreneurial space, there is absolutely no time for leisure. If you're working 9 to 5 for somebody before you can take the complete dive into entrepreneurship, great. That means you have 7 PM till 2 in the morning every single night, Monday through Friday, and the entire weekend to dedicate towards your passion. Or your entrepreneurial activity. There's no excuse. There's absolutely no excuse anymore. You can work because of this digital environment at any time. Really, you seriously can. And especially if you're aligning your entrepreneurial work up with your passion, something that's going to make you happy and energize you all the time, then you don't even consider it work. You would consider it relaxation and fun. So that's lesson number 2. There's no time for leisure anymore. You need to get up, you need to hustle, and you need to work. Lesson number three is about joy versus sleep, and it's a pretty funny one. I mean, Gary gets a lot of people amped up in criticizing him about the fact that he recommends an unhealthy lifestyle when you're an entrepreneur because he recommends sometimes you work 14, 15, 16, 17 hours a day to make your dreams come true. And they say, "Well, that's not spending time with your friends and your family. You're not getting enough sleep." Well, Gary says. Okay, I'm talking to the group of people who are aware of the fact that they wake up every day miserable doing something that doesn't fuel their fire. Would you rather get 8 hours of good solid sleep and then spend 16 hours in a miserable life, or would you grind for 20 hours of pure joy but be a little tired at the end of the day? 20 hours of joy over 16 hours of misery any day of the week. I know I'd do it. So that's Gary's message. It's joy that he's preaching. It's not an unhealthy lifestyle, and you have absolutely no excuse not to go out there and do what you love anymore, as we explained in lesson number 2. Lesson number 4 has to do with patience and speed. This is very similar to what Gary talked about before with the clouds and the dirt. Patience is for the long term. You need to know what you're doing where you want to end up, have a goal in mind, and be patient on the macro level. But then speed is for the short term. You need to be efficient each and every day. I mean, speed is one of Gary's 2 or 3 obsessions. He says it himself. Anything that allows him to get his work done more efficiently and be faster each and every day, that's something worth learning more about. And when those 2 pressures build against each other, that's where the diamond forms. That's where success comes from. You need patience on the macro, and you need speed on the micro. You need to hustle, like he said, 14 to 17 hours a day. So that's lesson number four. Lesson number five is that voice-first technology is going to take over what we call transition times. Transition times are pieces of time where you wouldn't be doing anything else, like right after you woke up in the morning. Or maybe when you're brushing your teeth, maybe when you're in the shower, or right before you leave for work and you're grabbing your keys, you can ask a piece of technology just like this anything you want. So for example, Alexa, what's the weather today? Currently in Jacksonville, it's 58 degrees with cloudy skies. I don't know why I moved to Florida if it's 58 degrees right now. Alexa, off. So pieces of technology like this, typically people have about one of them or 2 of them in their entire house. Pretty soon they're going to be everywhere you go, they're going to be in every room of your house, they're already starting in your cars, I mean seriously it's overwhelming. He says invest in this, this is where it's going to be, you can create applications, you can create ways to utilize this technology for your brand, building either your professional or personal brand, it's incredible. So that's lesson number 5 is take advantage of voice-first technology before it's too late and you've missed the ball. If you've made it this far, thank you so much, and we hope you've enjoyed our top 5 lessons today on Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk. We really recommend you go out and view his additional content if you're not already a diehard fan. I mean, Gary will motivate you unlike anybody else, and he has 4 other books. They're all up here. They're all great reads. We really do recommend them. If you have a book that you'd like to recommend to us, please let us know. Either drop a comment or DM us like a few of you have. And then last but not least, please go out there and check out bookthinkers.com. It's currently an online platform that allows you to create a virtual bookshelf, log book notes, and set systematic reminders so that technology will pretty much remind you of this information over time. It'll flex that neural pathway. You'll be able to remember more of what you love. You can also go out there and find your next reads, set personal challenges, partake in group challenges. A lot more is out there. So thank you very much again. Go out there, read, retain, share, and grow, and we hope to see you soon. Bye.
