Matt W. Kane

Crushing It

Gary Vaynerchuk

Introduction

I’ve been able to grow my personal career as an artist from selling a painting for $200 to having painting auction for $1300 at N.Y.C.’s coffee festival this past September.

Parents are trying to get their children off Pokémon go when augmented reality gaming is going to be huge for generations. They think their daughter should make less climbing to more algebra.  slime may be a fad; slime could also become the conduit through which a girl learns the dynamic of supply and demand list of them involves $1 million personal brand and company.  The crazy thing is that she would not be the first.  Karina Garcia did it. She used to be a waitress; now she’s a successful YouTube star famous for making, you guessed it, slime.  How successful? With six-figure earnings every month, she was able to retire her parents. In August 2017 she took a seven-week, fourteen-city tour to meet her fans.  People paid $40-$99.99 for VIP passes.  Stories like that are no longer uncommon, and they illustrate why we need to give our children as much freedom as possible to grab take toward what they doing.

Get pumped

The most exciting thing about the business world we live in is that still. There’re so much room to succeed here. Unbelievably, a lot of you still seem to balk at experimenting with new up-and-coming platforms.  You don’t want to waste your time if it turns out to be just another fascinating trend, but then you wonder why influencers like the wind about to meet our succeeding so much better than you are.

 The graphic was a list of ways in which people can emulate the black female powerhouses of our era: WRITE LIKE SHONDA, SPEAK LIKE VIOLA. WALK LIKE KERRY. BE FIERCE LIKE TARAJI. BE STRONG LIKE REGINA. LEAD LIKE AVA. That detail, the logo placement, is important to what happened next… the T-shirts looked fantastic, but Alex realized that maybe putting the logo back instead of the front hadn’t been such a good idea. “We had wanted the shirts to be about the graphic, not about us, and wanted to make sure that our customers knew that we always have their backs. Real smart, genius.”

Speed is one of my two or three obsessions in business. I will always gravitate towards the things that allows me to live my life more efficiently and do my work faster.  It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about voice control assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo.  Entrepreneurs–heck, humans–care about time and convenience, and it’s just faster to spit toothpaste out and say, “Okay Google remind me to buy more toothpaste” than it is to grab the phone and type tooth paste into your shopping list. If you’re just starting out, you’re going to be slogging alone for a long time before you can hire an assistant to help you manage your time. In the meantime, put whatever tools you can find to good use to keep you moving through the day and using your time wisely and efficiently

 You need to constantly be in do mode.

 Hear me now: you are better off being wrong 10 times and being right three then you are if you only try three times and always get it right.

Crushing it follows the laws of thermodynamics: whatever energy you put into something manifests itself in equal amounts when it comes out.  Sometimes the resulting energy gets harnessed to move muscles are machines; sometimes it dissipates, unused, into the ether.  A successful entrepreneur is one who puts in enough energy to move the gears and execute well enough so the work isn’t wasted.

Knowing how to spot underpriced or underappreciated attention as a key influencer skill.

 People have always dismissed or under estimated the new thing, from radio to TV, from the Internet to the social networks. They’re the same people who believe that Hollywood, not YouTube an instant gram, still incubates the biggest stars. As anyone under the age of 25 will tell you, they’re wrong.

VaynerTalent

Document, Don’t Create

Documenting has liberated me from the pressure of having to create all the time.

 Documenting to build a personal brand is an especially good tactic if you’re already working a job or you want to leave someday. Build your brand and gain traction in your niche before you ever need to make any money, so that when you’re ready to step out of your current job, your brand is there to hold you up and carry you to your next opportunity

 Put your stuff out in public so you have to live up to it.

 Remember, there was a time when Kobe and Beyoncé still had to use their last names.

Ritch Roll added that the experience validated one of the important messages he frequently shares with his followers:  the main thing is realizing that even if you feel terrible for a while, that is not how you are going to feel the whole time… Things change if you just keep moving.”

Align all 8 of the essentials– intent, authenticity, passion, patience, speed, work ethic, and ability to track consumer attention and master social platforms, and content– and you have the closest thing to a formula for crushing it that I can offer.

www.garyvaynerchuk.com/permission

Create your pillar

 Even if musical.ly turns out to be a fad, let us remember that every season, Brands pay millions of dollars to run ads against pilots for new series, most of which just statistically will not exist after nine months.  As of 2012, 65% of new shows are canceled after one season. It literally does not matter how long the platform lasts.  What matters is that it exists.

 Imagine this

 Let’s Say that after working for years as a professional singer and actor, you decided that you were done pursuing stardom and made the choice instead to take over your family’s summer camp, located in the woods just outside the limits of your hometown. This is an exciting move.  Imagine, we are finally going to stay at home long enough to invest in some real furniture and get a dog. And you aren’t leaving the industry entirely; you plan to add more acting in musical theater classes to the camp so you can continue to share your passion and expertise. You smile as you imagine the all camp variety show at the end of each summer session.

             Unfortunately, you didn’t take over a thriving business. While once yours was one of the only camps of this kind in town, over the last decade or so, several more have been established here and then surrounding areas, in business has gone down. In particular, summer camp registrations are nowhere near where you think they should be. Once you had to drop the session because too few children enrolled. You’ve tried everything you can think of to grow the business, but compared to the newer, fancier options to choose from, your camp seems a little nerdy and old-fashioned.

             While you’re hanging out with your 11-year-old niece one day, she showed you a video of herself lip-synching.”  It’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen–a 15 second close-up clip in which your niece bops around, sometimes backward, making duck faces and shooting hand signals to Kesha’s “Praying”.  It’s like an excerpt from a music video.  You ask if her mom knew she’s playing around on the site where anyone can see her. “Sure,” your niece replies. “All my friends are on it. It’s just a place to sing and dance.”

            A social media platform embraced by 11-year-old to look to sing and dance. What’s this thing called again?

             You set up a Musical.ly account and start filming yourself performing your favorite songs you asked your campers to help you pick the song, and you let them direct you. They’re impressed– for an old person, you don’t look or sound half bad singing their music.  Not even lip-synching, you’re the real deal, straight up.  You create micro music videos that not only showcase your talent, but also the camp. You film from a different location every day.

             One of the girls asks if she can film herself with your phone.  You send home a permission slip asking parents’ consent to let the kids make Musical.ly videos on the camp account. They know their children are already there, and most agree.  From then on, every day, a new camper gets to produce four pieces of content for the camp Musical.ly account.  Kids are fighting for their chance to be a Muser of the Day; it becomes the biggest reward they can get, and all the kids start working extra hard to be helpful to earn your time.  There’s an added benefit to letting the kids’ controller platform: it’s a great learning strategy. Instead of figuring out for yourself what kids want to see on Musical.ly, you let the 9 to 11-year-old show you.  You now get to watch them, take note of their behaviors, and get a sense of how they think about hashtags and trending topics.  Again with the parents’ permission, you let the kids document their camp Olympics, scavenger hunt, final campfire, and all the camp traditions that Marked the Summers for three generations.

             Every child who makes a Musical.ly video immediately text his or her friends so they can see it. The kids also show to their parents and their parents friends. They show it off at school when classes start again in the fall.  Over the course of the year, awareness of your Musical.ly page and the camp slowly begins to rise. By spring, when parents start thinking about which camps to register their children for, the name of your campus freshener minds. You seal the deal when the kids informed her parents of people decide they want to attend camp together during the same session.

             You become the most popular, fun, hip camp director ever, and your popularity soars, along with awareness of the camp you run.  Registrations double, and you’re performing arts classes are so popular you start to offer them during the rest of the year. You initiate a music video class, which includes teaching the kids the steps the famous music video routines. Within 5 to 8 years, the camp is just one of the summer options available through your new city-based school for performing arts.  You’re a smaller star than you’d once hoped to be, but you’ve never been happier.

Snapchat

 It eliminated the great barrier to many social networks, which is the anxiety of wondering what you’re going to post next, whether it would be well received, and whether it would come back to haunt you one day.  With the freedom to post anything, people could experiment and get comfortable building their personal brands without fear of repercussions…Snapchat let them to create a new art medium…

 You bother because it’s a mistake to give up one of the tools in your toolbelt for no reason.

Twitter

            If you’re a lawyer who wants to be the next influential sportscaster, it’s likely you are going to put out amazing sports related commentary on YouTube and create a sports podcast.  Getting anyone to give you even a passing glance on those platforms, however, that depends almost exclusively on the quality of your content, even then a huge number of people just won’t see you.  But on twitter, Verizon sports caster can make it her mission to find all the people– every single one– talking about Kolten Wong, Adam Wainwright, the Cardinals, the Cubs, Chicago, or Wrigley field, and reply in some unthreatening, interesting way that creates a connection between her and each sports fan.  The next day, she could do the very same thing for people talking about the Jets and all Jets-related topics. If she doesn’t well and frequently enough, eventually she can virtually grab these people by the shoulders and straight to her website, YouTube channel, or podcast.

             The thing is, it will take a shit load of discipline and patience. Let me defined discipline, it’s backing up your ambitions with your actions. This rookie will need to spend for five even six hours a day on this kind of engagement, often in the predawn hours, if she wants to become the next Linda Cohn. If she just wants a little name recognition from her towns bar regulars when they talk about their local team, then 20 or 40 minutes per day will be perfectly adequate. Maybe.

             Now, keeping people’s attention and nabbing a subscription or a loyal fan will still rely entirely on the quality of what those consumers find on our rookie sports caster’s website, but the point is that Twitter gives you a chance to both lure and Lasso– or jab and right hook– people into your orbit in a way that no other platform does.  It’s a slow, slow, slow process and an immense amount of work, but if you’re willing to do it and your content is special, you should see a payoff.

 Now think about this: who do you think has a better chance of getting an internship with ESPN: (a) the unknown kid who sends her resume in along with 4000 other people applying for the same job and has nothing but a prayer that the director of the internship program will bother to look at her portfolio, or (b) the kid who becomes a regular, active presence in the twitter feeds of all the ESPN personalities and staff to actually rely on intern help?

If you’re looking for a job or hoping to make your mark in an industry, consider your activity there as the longest interview of your life.

You Tube

 Now, interesting is subjective. You know what I find super interesting to watch? Videos about hitting up garage sales. And I’m not the only one.  As I write, a quick search on YouTube shows videos devoted to the topic of garage sailing receiving as many as 50,000, 99,000, and 137,000 views.  Don’t ever decide for yourself that videos about you or the things you like to do won’t be compelling to anyone else. Let the market decide. Trust me, it will be honest with you.

It’s the platform where the person no one thought would amount to anything can make it.  I’s a tool for finding your best angle, and I don’t mean camera angle. If you have a lot of interests, if not you’re sure where your greatest skills lie, if you wonder whether you have the kind of charisma or appeal that draws audiences to YouTube personalities, or if you simply can’t decide whether you’d rather be the number one American authority on pajamas for the go to guru for kombucha, pick up your phone and start documenting your day.  Put the results up daily as a YouTube vlog and see which posts get the most attention and double down on whatever it is that’s making those posts stick.

“6 Minutes for the next 60 years of your life” – google it

Podcasts

 The thing that keeps coming back to me is the landgrab. That’s what I think so many people missed. All the time people say, “John you’re so lucky that you started podcasting when it was nothing and now it’s the Golden age of podcasting. You had the landgrab.”  And they’re completely right. My timing was perfect. It was super amounts of luck in great timing, but what they miss is that there’s always the next thing.

Voice-First

But a few of you at the time of this writing are probably sitting around thinking, what’s my Alexa Skill going to be?  And yet you should, because we’re about to talk about a tech innovation that I’m absolutely sure will transform how the world consumes content. It’s called Voice-First, and anyone currently building a personal brand needs to worry about fast and early.  It’s platforms or the equivalent of yet to be discovered Malibu Beach fair property, much like Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and snapchat in 2012.

            I daytrade attention, and lately I am particularly interested by what people pay attention to during the transitions of their day, especially the three that occur in the home: what they do during the first 15 minutes of the morning, the first 15 minutes after they come home from work, and the last 15 minutes before they go to sleep at night. Those are transition periods.

GaryVee365

The Skimm’s airs its breakdown of the day’s top news stories; eHow’s presents daily life hacks. Add these and others to your list of flash briefings, and when you ask for them, either by saying, ”Alexa, give me my flash briefings,” or even, ”Alexa, what’s in the news?” You’ll hear from your favorite sources one after another.

 Your flash briefing will be a one-minute version of your one-hour podcast, a one-minute audio version of your eight minute videos or livestreams, or one-minute selection of your pretty pictures on Instagram.

 Your one-minute audio tip of the day could be the thing that compels a person to put on your podcast or in the morning commute instead of their usual NPR classic rock