The follow-up to his 2009 best-seller, “Crush It,” entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too” updates his tried-and-true business advice with inspiring examples and tactical recommendations.
If you’re not familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, his story is the embodiment of the American dream and of the entrepreneurial opportunities the internet has made possible in only the last two decades.
Vaynerchuk immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet country of Belarus in 1978, when he was 3 years old. In his many keynote speeches and YouTube videos, he has described living in a tiny apartment in Queens, New York, with eight other family members; being “a terrible student”; and never seeing his very hardworking father, who was busy building a life for his family as a liquor store employee.
The Vaynerchuks eventually moved to New Jersey, where his father bought a liquor store and “GaryVee” began to develop his entrepreneurial chops: running lemonade stands, selling baseball cards, and eventually working for his father.
As a young man, Vaynerchuk utilized the opportunity he saw in the early days of email marketing and YouTube to grow his family’s liquor store from a $3 million business to a $60 million business. He then moved on to become a successful investor and founded a digital marketing agency and giant personal brand, both of which seem to be growing at breakneck speed.
In other words, he’s now “crushing it.” In his own words, “If you’re earning what you need to live the life you want and loving every day of it, you’re crushing it.”
“Crushing It,” like “Crush It,” sums up the business principles Vaynerchuk employs to make the most of the opportunities he sees in the most popular internet platforms.
In this update, Vaynerchuk divides his book into two parts. In the first, he offers motivational encouragement and introduces other entrepreneurs—“People just like me who have used the internet to build personal brands, thriving businesses, and a life on their own terms”—using the principles outlined in his original “Crush It.” He highlights stories of people making a modest living and people enjoying amazing success whom you may recognize, like Lewis Howes, Chase Jarvis, Pat Flynn, and Amy Schmittauer.
In the second part, he dissects the current most popular online platforms and explains how to utilize them for business success. Here, he goes into tactical details about specific tools like Musical.ly, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Podcasts, and voice-first platforms like Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Those who follow Vaynerchuk’s daily social media content won’t find a ton of new information in “Crushing It,” but interestingly, Vaynerchuk’s fans who bought the book expressed in Amazon reviews that they simply wanted to pay Gary back for all of the free content they’ve consumed from him over the years. For those unfamiliar with Vaynerchuk’s advice, or internet marketing in general, and for those with entrepreneurial dreams, “Crushing It” is worth a read.
Vaynerchuk explains on the back cover: “If there’s anything this book should teach you, it’s that the only thing stopping you from achieving lasting career and life happiness is you.”
‘Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too’
Gary Vaynerchuk
HarperCollins Publishers
288 pages; hardcover, $29.99
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