Relentless effort brought him success. Will he ever slow down?
Back in August, Gary Vaynerchuk — entrepreneur, CEO, social media Yoda, and a massive fan of the New York Jets football team — took his grind to Australia.
That’s a favorite Vaynerchuk word: grind. You’ll also find him using language like hustle, side-hustle, and a curse word that iPhones autocorrect to ducking.
A Belarus-born, New Jersey-raised multimillionaire in his early forties, Vaynerchuk hit Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne before heading southeast to Auckland, New Zealand. He spoke before thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, digital dreamers, and business professionals looking for tips on better leveraging social media and the internet.
The crowds were hoping to hear GaryVee, as he’s popularly known, deliver inspirational, no-nonsense talk about laser-sighting your focus, maximizing your schedule, and giving the middle finger to personal insecurity and naysayers.
And that’s what people got.
The gym-trained, snug-T-shirt-wearing Vaynerchuk has the energy of the Tasmanian Devil in the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. He charges through a succession of 16-hour workdays, his wild, scanning eyes suggesting someone who’s just downed a dozen Red Bulls. But unlike the grunting, cyclonic “Taz,” Vaynerchuk, who got his start working in his father’s New Jersey liquor store, is hyper-verbal, disciplined, strategic, and socially skilled. With his cropped, unfussy hair, panther-like stride, and online acumen, Vaynerchuk projects a vibe that’s half tech nerd, half Navy SEAL.
An early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Uber, Vaynerchuk today is CEO of VaynerMedia, a digital advertising agency with 800 employees, offices in New York and London, and clients like Budweiser and Toyota. He’s also chairman of VaynerX, a media and communications company with multiple brands under its umbrella, and a cofounder, with his younger brother A.J., of VaynerSports, an athlete representation firm.
His online reach is large, with two million Twitter followers and a 6.6M Instagram count. He has a YouTube channel, The #AskGaryVee Show, with 2.2M subscribers. He’s the host of a top-100 global podcast, “The GaryVee Audio Experience,” and appears in a crisply produced online documentary series, DailyVee, which gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at his head-spinning schedule — a medley of meetings, interviews, talks, content creation, and location-hopping, one thing after another, at the clip of a Gatling gun.
On his YouTube show, Vaynerchuk responds spontaneously to viewer questions selected by staff but which he hasn’t seen. Its name gave him the title for his 2016 book, AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media & Self-Awareness. A best seller, that effort followed Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World, published in 2013. Last year, Vaynerchuk released another hit book, one whose title nodded to his first e-commerce venture, selling wine: Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Built Their Business and Influence — And How You Can, Too.
It was in the mid-90s, with Vaynerchuk still a college student in Boston, when he realized the nascent internet could be a retail gamechanger. He’d been taking the train down to New Jersey on weekends to work in his dad’s store, Shoppers Discount Liquors. Following his branding instincts, he persuaded his dad to change the store’s name to the more upscale Wine Library. Then he launched WineLibrary.com, giving the family business a digital dimension.
Vaynerchuk’s timing was perfect. People were just beginning to buy online. Annual store revenue rocketed from $3M in 1997 to $45M by 2003.
In 2006, Vaynerchuk debuted Wine Library TV, a web-video series, shot in a makeshift studio above the liquor store, where the vintner’s casual style proved appealing. Seated at a table before a single stationary camera, Vaynerchuk would taste-test wines before spitting the liquid into a metal bucket plastered with Jets decals. At its height, the show grabbed 100K views per episode, and grew legit enough to feature Wayne Gretzky and CNBC’s Jim Cramer as guests.
During his Australia trip in August, Vaynerchuk sat down with a Sydney podcast host. DailyVee episode 574 documented parts of the interview. Unshaven, wearing a black beanie and sneakers, Vaynerchuk was asked if he ever worried about burnout.
In response, he sounded a central theme: the importance of confidence in career-building and entrepreneurship. He said it wasn’t necessarily hard work that produced burnout, but rather the psychic drain of insecurity and lack of self-esteem.
If you dreamed big and believed in yourself, as Vaynerchuk did as a young man — and still does in 2019, his plans for the future extensive — that was energizing, from hour one to hour 16. It was fuel, because you were convinced the hard work would pay off.
After making this point, Vaynerchuk grew animated, gesticulating, and moved on to another GaryVee theme: the importance of living within your means.
“It’s not how much you make,” he told the podcaster, “it’s how much you spend.”
He conjured a 25-year-old urban professional, a type familiar to him from New York City, complaining that he doesn’t earn enough to support his lifestyle.
“Of course if you take fucking Uber everywhere, and eat out every night, and need the freshest, fucking flyest, flexiest clothes, you’re gonna need a fuckload of money,” Vaynerchuk observed. “Why not take the train? Why not cook every night?”
Given Vaynerchuk’s focus on hustling your ass off — on grinding — it was almost shocking to hear him tell the Sydney podcaster that he’d like to make happiness his primary message during the next ten years, and focus more on balance in life.
He’ll counsel people to define success for themselves, he said. If they can be happier making less money while doing something rewarding, he’s all for that.
“Work a lot,” the digital entrepreneur and marketing guru continued, only if you enjoy this approach to life, or your financial obligations require it.
As for Vaynerchuk’s own big dreams, he’d like to own the Jets some day. For now, he’ll settle for a decent season.
