Gary Vaynerchuk (Garyvee): Do This and Succeed

Please welcome Gary Vaynerchuk. Good evening, inbound. How are you? I'm super excited to be here. So excited. Can we hear it one more time for that? That was fucking remarkable. Good shit. I'm really excited about tonight. It's a very special day in our amazing country. And for me, it's especially special because I wasn't born in the US I was born in the Soviet Union. I came here as a little boy. Both my grandfathers spent substantial time in jail just because they were Jewish. And I know that there's a lot of tension and different beliefs about what should happen tonight, but the fact that we're even able to vote and to be in this amazing country is something that we have lost perspective for. And I'm very thankful to be here tonight. And to me, it's super interesting because I want to talk about the journey of an entrepreneur. And by hands, how many people here are entrepreneurs? Raise your hands. Very nice. And how many people here work within organizations that are entrepreneurial within them? Raise your hands. Very nice. If we can keep these lights on, that would be huge for me, if you don't mind. So for me, I think the opening statement is going to be this. If you are sitting in this room tonight and you believe that whether Donald or Hillary wins impacts you, you're a motherfucking loser. And I want to explain this. We are so lucky to be here in this playing ground where the impact of the President only has so much impact on you. Because the reality is we are dramatically, and I mean dramatically, more in control of our. Then the media pounds down our throats. And so I hope if anything, if anything, whether you're 16 or 97 and you leave here tonight, you understand how unbelievable our opportunity is to play in this ecosystem. What I want to talk about tonight is a couple of things. One, we are living through the greatest era of communication change that we've lived through since the printing press. And regardless of what you do in here, it is gonna impact you tremendously over the next decade because it's already impacted so much over the last decade. And so for me, that is a very important thing. But before I go into the tactics that I wanna bring to everybody, so you bring home something tangible. I wanna start with something that I've been spending a lot of time with and haven't really expanded outside of the content that I've put on the Internet. So on stage tonight, I thought a really interesting thing to talk about would be self awareness. If I could spend two to three minutes with all of you and make you understand that self awareness is probably the single most important thing that you can spend time on for your outcome for your future life. It would be so exciting to me if hundreds or thousands of people left here today and started really realizing who they actually were. We're living in an era and we have forever where people have sold us on the optics of what we should be, where we should go. Let me tell you a story about myself. It's really funny. I got an email earlier today or yesterday from a friend of mine, Jay, that I went to college with, who works with Carolyn, who I went to high school with. Are you guys here? Can you guys stand up? Can I find you? Get up. There they are. Can we clap it up for my homies? What's funny is both of them know how bad of a student I really was. And what's really interesting to me on that is both of them also know that for some reason at a very young age I was extremely self aware. I knew exactly who I was and I was able to bet on my strengths. I think that when I think back to my life and the story of my life and what I really want to impose on others to be able to navigate through is I was lucky enough to have a mother who instilled so much self esteem into my body. I was able to navigate through the universe of not worrying about what everybody else thought about me and what I've really, to be very frank with you, I've come to realize over the last year or so that I feel so much guilt, just general guilt that I had it so good that a. I came from nothing, which is a massive advantage. Can the immigrants raise their hands in this room? Let's clap it up for these people that have a major advantage. We're lucky. One thing immigrants realize is how good it really is. So I had that. I had nothing. And then I had a mom that did all the right things for me and, and made me feel so phenomenal. And so basically I've come to realize I've been asking myself over the last year like why am I producing so much content? Like what the fuck am I really doing here? I've got this hundred million dollar a year business to run. Why do I have fucking drock following me around everywhere? What am I really doing here? And I've come to realize that I have so much guilt inside of me for having it so good that I want to use my content that if I can play the role of that my mom played for me, for anybody in this room, then I've accomplished anything that I could ever dream for. Because, look, there's a lot of people that are going to make money. But to me, the most important thing is how you make your money, not how much you make. And what I realize. Thanks, Mom. And what I realize. What I realize is that we live in an era now where we can all document and create content around these narratives and communicate in a different world. The thing that I'm completely taken aback by is, is the fact that this is now the television, and the television is now the radio, and it's the late 40s and early 50s and the people in this room that understand that and understand that Snapchat and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram are ABC, NBC, ESPN, and MTV. You like that? It's a good one, right? But I'm not done yet. You fucked me up, all right? And that the businesses and individuals in this room that realize how to make MASH or Seinfeld or the best shows on those platforms will win. We are living through a major shift where every person in this room has a binary decision. Either you go on the defense because of all of this, or you go on the offense. Either you realize this is the greatest opportunity we've ever had as humans and entrepreneurs, or you're scared of all these changes and you judge them and you fear them. And so, for me, in this huge shift of technology and communication, comes the greatest opportunity ever. Again. Because the theme of the night, for me, the fact that mainstream media has been able to cast such a cloud over this ecosystem is fascinating to me. I'll be very honest with you. I'm not sad. I'm not sad. I'm pumped. I am thrilled that so many people think it's bad because that's more opportunity for me. And so what I implore you to do is spend a hell of a lot less time worried about other things that will impact you and spend a lot more time to figure out who you actually are. What are you actually good at? Are you actually in a position to be successful? What do you like doing? Because the opportunities are endless. The problem is we are scared to do different things, because the fundamental core reality is we worry about what other people think. We worry about getting judged if we fail. One thing that I've been very blessed with is I've traveled the world quite a bit for business and speaking. And one thing that a lot of people may not understand is that entrepreneurship does not work in a lot of other countries, because failure is a scarlet letter here in the US we're so lucky that entrepreneurship is met with. When you fail, you pick yourself back up and you go. And to me, that is unbelievable. And we are blessed to be in that ecosystem and we need to take full advantage of it. So look, I like the back. Yes, back step up. This is real fucking shit. We are fucking like. Can I ask you a question? Do you understand that you're only gonna live one time? Everybody has a lack of perspective and reality of what's going on here. We have so much opportunity. You're in a fucking convention center in Boston listening to fucking Hamilton, wake the fuck up. Shit. Seriously, you have it so bad. Perspective is so ridiculous. The only thing I fear, besides the health and well being of my family is, is regret. The thing I'm so scared of and one of the tactics, if I could inspire 20 people to do this, that would be big. Fuck, I'll take one. If one person in here can start spending more time in a retirement home, go and donate your time, your most valuable thing, and go spend time with 70, 80, 90 year olds. Do that for one day, two days, a week or two, and you will understand very quickly that, that the only thing that is scary is the things that you didn't do. Right? It's those things. And I sit here tonight and people are in their tactics, they're in their business, their startup, they work in their companies. And the thing that I fear and the thing that I'm passionate about deploying tonight is really pushing a little bit more what I would call practical risk. Practical risk is something that I've been thinking a lot about. A lot of people tell me they can't take the chance I of going and doing what they want to do, whether it's a different job, whether that's. By the way, I've gotten 100 emails in the last six months of people that needed the courage to shut down their startup and get a job because they were worried about the ramifications of being made fun of for not executing on their business. Whatever it is, as you sit here tonight, I want to deploy and I want to start talking about practical risk. And what practical risk means to me is the thing that I did not understand until I started getting thousands of emails a year from individuals is we're fucking fancy. We're fucking fancy. It's not that you can't. It's that you're not willing to give up dumb shit for a better life. You're not willing to go backwards. You're not willing to make yourself dramatically happier, to move out of your home and downsize and go into a different neighborhood, you're not willing to to go backwards. That to me is fascinating. The fact that things, whether home, car, watch, clothes, going out is holding people back from a substantially happier life is fascinating to me and something that we need to debate because at the end of the day, that one at bat is all we've got. And so if I can absolutely push you, one tangible item. I see some people have pads and pens and I'm fascinated by that. Go. Ready? Go to a fucking F U C K I N G retirement home, spend time, collect data, realize regret is the worst and do something about it. Got it. Awesome. Let's clap it up for her. I really want to talk about the phone and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat because it's a place I come from and I want to get a little bit away from the heady shit right now and get a little bit back into practicality. If you are not producing content on the 5 to 6 major social network platforms today, you are creating an enormous vulnerability for whatever you would like to happen in life. The person you want elected, getting money for your kids, charity selling shit. Communication has shifted forever and these platforms really, really matter. The problem is, even at a conference like this where there is so much marketing skill, I am flabbergasted by the lack of practitionership in the actual creative ability and paid media amplification of creative to make a business action. I, for a lot of you that don't know, built my family's liquor business really on the back of Google Adwords. Google Adwords came out, I bought the word wine for 5 cents a clip. And even though I was doing direct mail and doing local television and billboards, I get a lot of accolades in this ecosystem from building my dad's liquor store from a 3 to a 60 million dollar business. But the truth is I stand here tonight and admit to you, not excitingly, that it should have been $150 million. Because if I actually understood how I.