The Stories of Crushing It! not by Gary Vaynerchuk

The really cool thing that I loved so much about Crushing It! by Gary Vaynerchuk was that this is the second book in a “series”. His prequel book, Crush It!, was written back in 2009. It was Uncle G’s major prediction book that he wrote to explain the future of social media basically. When that book was written, I could see it being really hard to know just how big the impact of that book made on so many lives. With this second book, he wanted to add the stories of how his readers took action and decided to Crush It! and he put their stories in Crushing It! He got hundreds of thousands of submissions of examples that what he preached in Crush It! worked for others, too. When you put in the time, work, and dedication, you can live a life you love.

 

These are just some of the stories I found super compelling; the things I learned from these individuals needed a post of their own to be honest. Below I have them listed out by the individuals themselves and the quotes I’ve highlighted from them.

 

Shaun “Honduras” McBride

An entrepreneur is someone who finds a way.

Building a business around [your] passion could be a great way to ensure that [you] rarely get to indulge in it… I think it’s often best to chase things that are in line with your passions but aren’t exactly your passion.

Once you’ve crushed something, you’ve got to keep moving on. Who knows how long [it’s] going to be around? Let’s crush it again.

 

Lewis Howes, School of Greatness

When we show up and we add value and we care, then we can learn how to make money around it later. But show up with value first. That is how I built the last decade of my life.

It’s not about how much you know, it’s about how much you care.

 

Lauryn Evarts, The Skinny Confidential

This chick is a mega boss! She had a full schedule, like Gary’s kind of hustle from 7am to 2am kind of hustle.  All of her time between work and breaks was spent taking photos, writing blogs, teaching pilates, going to school, staying up till 2am working, weekends spent on social media posting, commenting, DM, emails…. you name it, she had ZERO excuses even with a FULL schedule.

It’s so much more then passion. Execute.

Find that niche that you’re good at and ride it, and ride it, and ride it until you can slowly expand out.

Storytelling is so underrated.

Constantly hitting it day after day, never giving up, keeping my blinders on, focusing on my own shit, and really, really doing me. Doing me to the best of my ability. Crush It!, and his other books too, allowed me to just be who I am and not be sorry about it.

 

Andrew Nguyen – @Brandwithdrew

You can brand yourself all you want, but if you don’t have credibility or have not done anything, it’s almost worthless. You can only sell something that’s actually good.

 

Rich Roll – Rich Roll Enterprises LLC

You have to have the long view.

Even if you feel terrible for a while, that’s not how you’re going to feel the whole time…. Things change if you just keep moving.

 

Rodrigo Tasca, Tasca Studios

I was willing to start back at zero and put in the work.

 

Sean O’Shea, The Good Dog

What would cause me to come back to a Facebook page or Youtube channel?… [answer:] if it helped improve my life, if it had value in that sense.

 

Jared Polin, FroKnowsPhoto

There’s no secret to being successful on the internet. You need to be good at what you do; you need to be passionate about it and go crush it.

at any hour… if I was sitting there, I would take the call. Then I would get the caller’s permission to record the call, because there’s nothing like free content… if they’re asking it, then other people probably have the same one.

Im very upfront. Someone might pay me, but they can’t tell me what to say… It’s all about building credibility.

You’re not going to be successful unless you put the work in. If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re full of shit… It’s one thing to read the book, it’s another to take action.

 

John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneurs on Fire

Well if I do a daily show, I’ll get better quicker.

I started an entrepreneurial journey with one strength, and that was discipline, and I can tie that directly back to the army…. the two biggest areas I had to develop to go along with discipline were productivity and focus.

What I found very clearly was, if you are willing to commit to delivering free, valuable, and consistent content, you are going to build an audience from that. Then, if you are willing to engage that audience one-on-one and ask them “What are you struggling with?” and then just listen, they will tell you what their pain points are, their obstacles, their challenges, their struggles. And then you, the person that they know, like, and trust, who’s been delivering that free, valuable, and consistent content for a significant amount of time, can provide the solution in the form of a product, or a service, or a community.

My timing was perfect. It was super amounts of luck and great timing, but what they miss is that there’s always that next thing…. Always keep you eyes on that horizon.

Andy Frisella, The MFCEO Project

A little background on Andy and his company. He has a motivational podcast about business and success. He regularly buys books all the time, without any idea what the book is about, if it’s good or not. He just figures that if he can get even one or two useful pointers or thought-provoking ideas from each, his time has been well spent. I just thought that was super cool. Knowledge is power! Would you take the time to read every book you picked up, just to get one little nugget potentially? Anyway…

You’re going to go through a time where you’re not going to make any money… it’s going to be years… if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out… follow your passion… if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re going to be that much more likely to quit when shit’s hard.

Everybody knows when they’re being sold. No matter how slick and cool and skinny a salesman is, customers recognize a fucking salesman.

I’m passionate about creating people’s success stories.

If people aren’t telling good stories, all advertising is going to do is speed your death.

With social media, I think it’s more about being authentic to yourself and finding what’s going to be the thing that suits you best.

You just have to use the tools the right way to accelerate the word of mouth.

The kids now that are starting out are lucky… but they’re handicapped, too. They rely too much on the social…. if you can bridge these two things together [the social media smarts with the skills to engage face-to-face with empathy and care], you’ve really got something special.

 

Alex “Nemo” Hanse – FOOLIES

This guy is super cool. He’d send customers who bought a shirt from him a custom Youtube video of himself singing a song with their name in it, or a personal message. He shipped the shirts inside mini paint cans, the idea being when you opened it up, you’d be releasing your dreams. And he’d send a hand written letter to every customer, along with a dream journal, “because that’s the biggest thing that people don’t do: they don’t write down their goals down, so they can never manifest and come to life.” The detail, the logo placement, every little thing he did was important to his success.

 

Hope you check all these cool cats out! Or at least take something from their stories and start crushing it in your own life!

 

XO, Taylor