Gary Vaynerchuk tells Vishen Lakhiani that unstable times are when entrepreneurs win. His advice: practice GAP—gratitude, accountability, perspective. Focus on what you control, reframe hard moments against history like World War II or the Black Plague, and choose gratitude over helplessness.
Chapters
I remind my friends, some who've been struggling, that if Covid started six weeks earlier, Kobe Bryant would be alive.
With everything happening in the world right now, what would be your advice to entrepreneurs?
This is what you signed up for. Like, to really go there. What I tell fellow entrepreneurs is like, this is our time. Like, when things are challenging, when they're difficult, when they're not stable, is exactly when entrepreneurs do well. A pure, a real entrepreneur. I don't like using the word real, but like an entrepreneur. Not someone over the last decade, when it got cooler, decided they wanted to be one, but an entrepreneur. It's like being a fish. And now here's the water. You've signed up for a world where you have to react to realities on a daily basis, and it's all on your accountable shoulders. And then when they're incapable of going there, I deploy perspective and gratitude. I remind my friends, some who've been struggling, that if Covid started six weeks earlier, Kobe Bryant would be alive. You can decide to look at all the bad. It's half glass full, half glass empty. You start getting into really interesting, thoughtful places. And so for me, it's perspective. I think about World War II. I think about the Black Plague. I think about so many genocides. I think about the people and the millions of people around the world that don't have clean water every day. Not when there's not Covid. I'm not capable of dwelling because of gap, you know, gratitude, accountability, perspective. Accountability is tricky because people confuse accountability with lack of compassion. And I don't see it that way. You know, I view accountability as what can I control? And so, you know, when things like this happen, people blame, you know, people want to blame China. People want to blame their own government. People want to blame their boss, their spouse, the system. And oftentimes there's validity in those things. The question becomes, what are you going to do about it? You know, you can go political and talk about voting. You can talk about people that are really suppressed places, about leaving if they can. You know, some places you can't even leave, but leaving if you can. You know, for me, it's accountability. What can I do? You know, And I don't think it's fun or healthy to feel helpless. That doesn't mean that I don't have compassion for people that are in precarious positions. It's just that I think it's very empowering for people to try to hack, to think, what are they gonna do now?
The final one was perspective.
The p. I use perspective and gratitude a lot. My perspective leads to gratitude. You know, it could be worse, right? My perspective is it could be worse.
I love that gap concept.
This crew will probably see a video tonight. Serendipitously, I decided to answer your you with, you know, with gratitude, accountability, and perspective. I ordered it differently, but as you and I were talking, I reordered it into spelling the word gap. And so I'm actually going to make that piece of content like I literally have just decided right here. Serendipitous. Never put those words together. So what do I do when things are tough? I walk into the gap.
