ask gary vee book summary and pdf

#ASKGARYVEE by Gary Vaynerchuck [Book Summary & PDF]

In #ASKGARYVEE, Gary Vaynerchuck responds to some of his most asked and most interesting questions from his popular show. He covers a range of topics from starting out in the business world, technology, education, and running a business with family to influencer marketing and emerging social media platforms. Whether your a new employee, a manager or starting up a side-hustle, this is a great guide with some humorous insights and useful real-world examples. In this post, I share some of my favourite messages, concepts, and quotes from #ASKGARYVEE

CLOUDS AND DIRT

“The clouds don’t just represent the big picture; they represent the huge picture, the everything. They are not goals. Goals can be achieved and set aside or moved. The dirt is about being a practitioner and executing toward those clouds. It’s the hard work.”

Execution and prioritisation

 

“Ideas are worthless without the execution; execution is pointless without the ideas. You have to learn to prioritize properly and quickly identify what’s going to move you further ahead and what’s going to make you stall.”

 

 

Cash is oxygen

“There is one thing that always transcends everything else: Cash. It is the oxygen of your business.

You can make the greatest cup of coffee, the greatest sneaker, the greatest TV show, or the greatest work of art ever, but if you can’t sell your product you are out of business. So your first priority is sales because it generates cash, and cash is what allows you to do everything else. Without it you’re a fish out of water, gasping for breath.”

Focus on your strengths

“Focus on your strengths. What else are you really good at? Design? Growth hacking? Nail these skills down, and then drill deep with them. If cash is your company’s oxygen, your strongest skills are its DNA. Develop and cultivate them because they will be the hallmark of your company.”

“Bet on your strengths. It’s an underrated business strategy in a world where so many people are obsessed with fixing their weaknesses they give short shrift to the skills they were born with.”

STARTING OUT

Finding a job that's the right fit

“If you can’t find a quality company to pay you to work for them, apply for an internship so you can prove your chops.

Unless you are literally sending out résumés and interviewing eighteen hours straight per day, you’ve got time to volunteer your professional talent somewhere. Find a place where you think you can make doors open, and put your skills into action. We have become too entitled. Go out and earn that job.”

Choosing a name

“There is no science to choosing a business name. People will agonize for hours, weeks, months, trying to figure out the name for their start-up, hunting for that perfect, zingy, creative name that allows them to “stand out” and “disrupt the category.”

You want to know how you stand out and disrupt the category? It has nothing to do with your name. Just stand out and disrupt the category.

Full-time job to entrepreneur?

“If you are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, and you are miserable whenever you work for anyone but yourself, and you feel restless, and you believe in your bones that you’ve got what it takes to run your own show, go do it. Go do it before you take on the responsibilities of a mortgage or a family, before your parents start to need you or you adopt a dog. Do it now while the only person you have to worry about is you.”

Start something

“The best way to become something is to do the work required to become something. Sell, sell, sell. Figure out what it takes to provide value. Learn how to communicate your value proposition. Engage with your customers. Find mentors. Go work for free and under people who can show you the ropes and serve as that point of contact when you need it. Learn the hustle and taste the game. Put yourself in the position to win.

Stop waiting for the perfect moment to jump, because it will never come. Start doing whatever it takes. Even if that means selling the very t-shirt off your back.”

Be a hobbyist

“There are a lot of people who are able to enjoy being hobby entrepreneurs because their joy is in the process, not in the outcome. So they make maybe $10–40K on the side doing something they love, and they’re satisfied with that because they don’t need to make a billion dollars to be happy. If you’ve gotten to a point in your life where you can’t ditch everything to follow your dreams, being a hobbyist can often give you the best of both worlds.”

Fear

“There’s no doubt that taking that first step can be terrifying. But, would you be so afraid if you knew no one was watching? See, what really scares people is not fear of failure, but fear of failing in front of someone who matters. Like your mom or dad. Your best friend. None of us wants to disappoint someone we admire.

But if you want to be an entrepreneur—if that’s what you really, really want—you cannot give a shit about what other people think of you. Not even your parents.”

Taking a product to market

“Apply your time and energy to where there is fertile ground. It might take a lot of work to find your customer base, but it sure beats wasting your breath on people who are never going to help you out.”

The right partnerships

“Everyone has something to offer. But instead of asking them to do something for you, ask what you could do for them.”

Getting the first customers

“To get those first ten customers, you have to grind. You can’t be shy, my friends. Just roll up to every single person in the world who might possibly buy your stuff (meaning who already buys into at least the concept of your idea or product; see two questions up) and ask them to buy your stuff.”

The competition

“Every industry has its market leaders—companies who have done good work in the past and have become the default solution for their client base. Your goal is to become one of those leaders who are automatic go-tos.”

 

Going at it alone

  1. Be practical. How much money do you have to stay alive, and for how long? Do you have enough money to cover rent, expenses (anticipated and unexpected), and overhead for a year? You should.
  2. Be prepared to sacrifice. The minute you decide to launch a new business, you also make the decision to do nothing else but that for the next year, and maybe even two years, but build your business. Every minute of every eighteen-hour day should be dedicated to this endeavor. Your business success will come at the expense of family time, friend time, vacations, and any other hobbies or activities you once enjoyed. This business has to be your entire life, or it will die.

Plan B

“Have a hard-core Plan A alongside a deeply practical Plan B. You’d be crazy not to at least consider what you would do should your entrepreneurial venture fall apart.”

 

HUSTLE

  • It’s maximizing the energy you put into what you are passionate about.
  • Squeezing every last bit of juice out of your day.
  • It’s putting all your effort into achieving the goal at hand.
  • Making every minute count. Every. Single. Minute.
'Making every minute count. Every. Single. Minute.'Click To Tweet

Small business owner with limited budget?

“Work more. Whatever it is you’re doing, add a few more hours of hustle. It’s the greatest way to shore up the gap between you and a bigger competitor. I promise you Goliath will never work as hard as you.”

Personal brand

“Don’t ever think you can hack expertise and branding by relying on social media and modern tech. There is no substitute for honest hard work. You have to execute and accomplish something before earning the privilege of being a personal brand.”

 

Harder, faster

“You need to work harder and faster. Working harder is easy. Drop the hour you’re watching Scandal and voila, you’ve got more time to hustle. Working faster, however, is a little trickier. It takes practice. Train yourself to do a little bit more in each hour than you normally would. Maybe you save checking your emails until lunch. Maybe you turn off your phone. Maybe you work odd hours.”

CONTENT AND CONTEXT

“Even as the platforms and distribution channels change, the rules of good storytelling have remained the same for businesses since the beginning of commerce: The quality of a brand’s storytelling is directly proportional to the quality of its content. If it’s not good, no one will pay attention.

Which is why it’s so vitally important that everyone from big organizations to solopreneurs to small companies start thinking and acting like media companies.”

Creating good content.

Anyone can create good content.

  1. First, respect the platforms. A forty-year-old woman is looking for something different on Facebook than on Pinterest. On the former she’s keeping up with her friends and family, and on the latter she’s probably shopping and searching for inspiration. So you have to strategize around that and adapt your storytelling accordingly.
  2. Second, respect your audience. That means putting out content the forty-year-old woman would like, not the content you would like.

Gaining a following

“Put out quality content every day and engage around it.It really is that simple and that difficult. No one becomes a sensation by accident. The talent to put out content is only one piece of the equation. One percent of the magic. One percent of people who make it big in social media might do it on content creation talent alone, but the rest of us have to work our butts off to bring our community in to see what we’re creating.”

 

Content and Facebook

“Facebook is content awareness gold. Post a link to an article or video and if your post earns enough likes, shares, and comments, you can just step back and allow the awareness to grow organically. But if you want things to move a little faster, or you want to hedge your bets, you can actively drive a crapload of views with Facebook ads. It’s absolutely worth the investment.”

JABS AND RIGHT HOOKS

“Jab: the content you put out that entertains, distracts, attracts, informs, or otherwise engages and builds a relationship between you and your audience. It builds your brand, raises people’s awareness of who you are and what you represent, and opens people up to receiving a right hook when the time is right.”

“Right hook: the content you put out that brings in the sale. The one that offers the 10 percent off, or announces the new line, or merely says, Buy my stuff.”

 

THE PLATFORMS

There are two keys to the success of a social network.

  1. Win over the youth market. The network that makes Snapchat feel like it’s for old people will be the next social superstar.
  2. Be extraordinarily useful. Instagram was just a place to post pretty pictures until people realized it actually made them better photographers. The visual intimacy of the pictures made people feel close to other users, and eventually the social network developed to support that closeness.

If you’re trying to develop the next big platform, create something the youth of the world didn’t know it couldn’t live without.

Unproven platforms

“Experimenting with unproven platforms is definitely worth your time.”

INFLUENCER MARKETING

“Influencers have more power than ever because now they’re in a position not only to create content, but also to create meaningful distribution.”

“The best influencers are so creative, they can make the product feel totally seamless, like it’s a natural part of the event. It’s why GoPro has done so well. Their product is, by its very nature, a seamless part of the scenarios with which they want it to be associated.”

 

 

LEADERSHIP

“Everything in business stems from the top, whether you’re the boss of two people in a three-person team or the head of a Fortune 500 company. And everything that happens in a company is 100 percent the CEO’s fault. After all, the CEO is the person who puts people into a position to make good or bad decisions. It’s no accident that when some companies change their CEO they go from winners to losers or vice versa. It may be the most important variable for success in running a business.”

Failure

“Failure doesn’t kill you, and that the earlier you do it, the easier it is to recover. It’s not the failure that’s so important as how well you ride after you get knocked on your butt.”

“Don’t fail too often, but don’t be afraid of it, either. Yes, failure is really important. Failure makes you better.”

'Don’t fail too often, but don’t be afraid of it, either.'Click To Tweet

 

This summary is not intended as a replacement for the original book and all quotes are credited to the above mentioned author and publisher.