Book Review: Crush It By Gary Vaynerchuck

Post written by Marlon Ribunal.
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Convert your passion into a money-making machine. ‘Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion‘ is about that – Know when to use your passion to your advantage. I really think that the author intended this book to be a street-smart business book. But if you are looking for a main stream, step by step business book, this is not for you. This book is a great testimony of the power of passion in propelling the spirit of entrepreneurship into heights anyone could only imagine. This is not a ‘how to earn quick money’ book though.

Vaynerchuk (vay-ner-chuk) shares his story on how he built a mega-million enterprise on top of his family wine business. Hoisting his family business in great successes can be attributed not only to his natural entrepreneur skills but also to his passionate interaction with the outside world through the many channels of social networking. That’s right, some great amount of passion can really send money to your bank. The author is not really saying that you can make money by being passionate about social networking.

You can take advantage of the social networking sites by building your reputation and personal brand. The brand itself makes the business. You can be passionate about simply everything but that alone could not give you anything in return. The social networks can only serve as a convenient platform that you can build out your brand of.

Some rants against ‘Crush It!‘ have the wrong idea. They are misreading what Vaynerchuk actually meant. You can just go to the book’s page on Amazon and see for yourself what I mean. Here is an example from one review:

“Here’s the straight to the point short answer for this book: Use facebook, and other social media sites to promote yourself! There, I just gave you all this book is going to give you. I simply gave it to you in one sentence for FREE instead of the $10 I paid for it on Amazon, and 2-hours of your time wasted reading it. It’s really nothing more than a salesman’s pitch book. And the pitch here is to buy his book, and read about him telling you THAT he used social media to grow his business, NOT HOW HE USED SOCIAL MEDIA TO GROW HIS BUSINESS.”*

I think the core of the book is about building a great reputation around your brand and taking advantage of the convenience of online presence to grow that brand. What this book has successfully done is that it proves that the demarcation between the Fortune 500 companies’ and ordinary businessman Joe’s advertising money is now greatly reduced into a matter of “who’s doing it often” rather than “who has more money”.

Capitalize On Your Passion!

The erstwhile exclusive privilege of rich companies on advertising on primitive media platform does not stand unchallenged now with the ubiquity of online platform made possible by various social network sites. The big and rich entities still have more money and resources but the playing field is now being neutralized by different aspects of modern interaction over the web. The average businessman Joe still has lesser money but he can now leverage the power of his personal brand.

As Vaynerchuk would put it, the gate keepers, that is the media, has now fallen down. The success of building a brand is no longer dependent on how much money you are willing to spend on it. Although money is still a factor, it is no longer the sole determinant of your success in building your brand. The gate keepers are down, and so are the intermediaries that usually comes in between. You now have the direct access to your target audience. Interaction can happen in real-time. Feedback can be instant now because it does not have to go to and fro the medium from which the message is delivered. Why? You are the message.

You can read more about Gary Vaynerchuk in his blog here. I highly recommend ‘Crush It!‘ to anyone who is willing to embrace the concept of personal brand built on passion.

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