#AskGaryVee Episode 34: How to Build a Personal Brand from Nothing

– [Voiceover] Veronique asks, “You say to put out quality content daily. “Can I add curated
content to my own content? “If yes, what’s the right mix?” – V, thanks so much for
a great first question. I’m real excited, by the way, I’ve been really missing the show. Between the weekend and traveling to LA and St. Louis on Monday and Tuesday. Big shout out to everybody
who’s listening on the podcast. Oh, I said watching. I didn’t say watching and
listening on the intro. Well, that’s just how it is sometimes. Anyway, the answer to your
question is absolutely. As a matter of fact, I
think what I call DJing, the ability to take
content that’s going on all around the world right now and bring it into your voice
and putting it out there is an enormous skill set. I think it’s mapping what’s happening in the actual music world, right? You look at what’s happening in EDM and other places of that nature, DJs, people that are able to take a lot of different things and put ’em together, it’s sort of like being
a great chef, isn’t it? So, actually I think one of my biggest weaknesses is my lack of curation. Because I take so much pride
in that the content is mine. I haven’t gone out and taken
articles from other people and then like kinda jumped on top of that. I remember loving Tumblr. One of the reasons I invested in Tumblr way back when was the
notion of reblogging, like tumbling something. You hit somebody else’s blog post and then you wrote your
two cents on top of it. The retweet functionality, with a quote, and then you’d put your
own two cents on Twitter, I think still has a lot more potential. They like limit you to room. I love the ability to retweet, and then have 140 characters, and let the whole thing be 250 characters. Twitter, you should steal that because I think that would
make Twitter much better. I think the adding of
two sets has always been something that I think has been valuable. And you look at somebody
like Guy Kawasaki. I mean people look at his
Twitter feed, it’s all curation. He treats himself like a media company. It’s almost not him. It’s like the Guy Kawasaki network, and he’s just putting out
hundreds of tweets a day it feels like of just different articles, things of that nature, kind
of like a human Nuzzel, or kind of like a human RSS feed. So I think curation of
other people’s stuff or passing on other headlines
is the biggest weakness in my social media content game. And I highly recommend
all of you working on it, and if it feels comfortable. For a lot of people,
you know I would say my, here comes a humblebrag, (bells rings) but I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. If you can see the latest
video. (clicks tongue) I like that dynamic pause, don’t edit it. So for me I think the reason
I don’t do as much curation is I have the ability to do
original content at scale. That’s a struggle for a lot of people, so for a lot of people that
don’t know what to say, the curation of other content
and being the news source for somebody and the rest of the world, under their context, within their genre, if you’re a yoga person
or a health person, or a pumpkin picker, your
two cents on Apple Pay, or George Clooney’s wedding
or things of that nature, under the context of being
a pumpkin picker matters.

– [Voiceover] Darren asks, “How much sleep “should you get on average? “Do you work seven days a week? “Do you have set days off
to spend time with family?” – Darren, you know this
is a great question, I get it asked a lot. I talk so much about hustle
and people don’t think I sleep. You know, I try to get six
or seven hours of sleep. I think sleep is massively
important for the body. Right now I’m working out a
lot, as you guys can tell. And that’s affecting my sleeping patterns. Not that I sleep better, by
the way, everybody thought. I was so exhausted before that I was just sleeping like a rock, I’m
lucky with the sleeping, but I sleep quite a bit. Weekends are for the family. No this on the weekend, anymore
for the last couple years. Lot more vacation time. Going from maybe a week or two, even as early as four or
five years ago to now, then three or four, now even like five. So sleep’s important, rest is important, recharging’s important. It’s not about 365 days
of complete insanity. It’s about 265 days of complete insanity, and a hundred days of really resting and giving you the energy
to have that insanity. I think hustle is about when you’re in it, versus every day doing it, right. So for me, it’s this
Tuesday, uh Wednesday, see? This Wednesday is all in, right? Like I’m gonna go all in
the whole way, every minute. A lot of the people that
are around my life now, even you guys probably,
get very caught off guard of how I have zero minutes in
play for 15 hours in a day. Like there is no, Zak needs
like two minutes to like, hey look at this new
design for Wine Library, and DeMayo, my assistant’s
like, yeah next Thursday. And he’s like, two minutes, right? So I go all in on the days I’m in, but boy, do I rest when I rest. And boy, do I check out when I check out. I don’t even like travel. I don’t want the pyramids
of the Eiffel Tower, I don’t care about the coral reefs. When I vacation, I need
to sleep on a beach. And don’t talk to me. That’s how much recharging. When I sleep, if you walked into my home, punched me directly in the face, and stabbed me with a knife in my left arm while I was sleeping, and
robbed everything in my home, I’d still not wake up. That’s how all in I am when I’m resting. So I’m just an all in character, regardless of what I’m doing.

– [Voiceover] Cory asks, “What
have you found is the best “way to introduce
non-wine drinkers to wine “without it seeming overwhelming?” – Cory, I took this question because not only for the wine people listening, but for the business
people that are trying to educate about social media or apps or tech culture, it’s the same game. Why did I over-index in the wine world? And why do I think I over-index
in the business marketing, operations, social media marketing world? I said marketing twice
’cause it’s so nice, it’s because I talk to
people, not down to them. How do you get people into your thing? How do you do that? You talk to them, to them, not down to them. That’s the struggle for everybody who gets any level of expertise. They get this expertise and
they want to leverage it against their audience to
establish I’m here, you’re here. I fully believe, and I
can guarantee the comments coming right now that one of the reasons people watch and listen to this show and have followed me for
the last seven years, when I was educating about
wine, intimidating subject, or social media, new intimidating
subject to a lot of people is I’m talking level set, right? I’m not imposing my expertise. I’m not making anybody feel bad that they don’t know as
much as me, snickering like, “How could you ask me
this question, Ricky?” I don’t do that, right? I understand that there’s 99% of the world that I know jack crap about. I know my couple little things, and when I’m trying to
learn about other things from other people that know, it’s nice to be talked to at that level, which is respect as a human
being, not being imposed on something you learned
a little bit more about. And so, you want to get people into wine, or anything else for all
of you that are watching, and I see a lot of you
who are watching trying to impose your expertise on food, or pets, or anything of that nature, I highly recommend you start realizing you’re talking to
somebody, not down to them. – [Voiceover] Adam says, “I
understand that marketers

“ruin everything, but is
Twitter’s latest algorithm change “going to damage the user experience “and the essence of Twitter?” – Adam, congrats on getting on this show. Guys, let’s give a huge shout out, a collective shout out in the comments, and go on Twitter and
give him a shout out. Adam has hustled, has
asked a lot of questions. He has persevered, he has taken my advice from some other episode recently, where I just say, keep asking,
keep asking, keep asking. He didn’t give up, a lot
of you have given up. A lot of you have stopped
using the #AskGaryVee hashtag to try to get on the
show with your question because after 20 episodes
you didn’t get on. Loser mentality. Winner mentality is
Adam, who has completely over-indexed on asking over and over and over to get on the show. Big props to you, brother. The answer to your question. Life is very simple. Whether it’s for Twitter showing you ads, or Facebook which has
set this up for Twitter ’cause they’re following
that notion of discovery. Whether it’s dating the most attractive guy or girl you’ve ever dated before, but they actually aren’t
that nice of a person. And you actually don’t
like them that much. This is more of a guy thing from what I can tell from my girlfriends, but like that notion, that same psychology plays out on this answer, which is the world is
predicated on the value it’s providing you versus what
it’s doing to you otherwise. Meaning, was that a dog? – [DRock] I don’t know
what happened there. – If you’re listening, that was not a dog, from what we could tell. My friends, it’s very simple. It’s the value proposition, it’s a seesaw. Does it kill Twitter? It kills Twitter for the
people that don’t value everything else that Twitter does, and find seven to 10 more tweets in their stream not
valuable enough. Right? When you’re a young guy, and you get that hottest
girl that you’ve ever dated, she’s so pretty, you don’t care about that she’s like hurting your feelings, and mean to your friends, and not letting you hang out
with your friends at all, you let that all go ’cause you
value the beauty over that, and as you evolve, eventually
if she’s the worst, you can finally, after
the beauty subsides, and you’ve calibrated the
beauty, you go the other way. And that’s just the way it is about life. You love your family so much that you let them get away with so much. That’s the bottom line. Facebook has enough value in
keeping up with your friends, and has a lot of data
to show you the stuff that you actually want to see, and that’s why we’re tolerating it. And you could tell me the
kids are going off of it, and they’re on Snapchat and
Instagram and so are you, and that’s fine, that makes sense, but Facebook’s data shows
the world, it’s true, that we’re still on it at enough scale. If Twitter’s unable to do that, or any other product in the world, Tumblr was very valuable
to high school kids, it was a different creative place, they didn’t make the shift
to mobile fast enough and good enough and they
lost their value proposition when something else came along. What happens when the pretty girl with an awesome attitude comes along? And so the answer to this question, as you can see I’ve used human, kind of like what we all grew up with, kind of psychology, it’s
very simple which is, it’s all about the value prop, right? The second this show doesn’t
bring you enough value, you stop watching. Period, end of story. And that’s what it’s all about. And so Twitter has a
challenge of making sure its product brings enough value that the little things that
maybe don’t bring you value still don’t offset the value. – (speaking foreign language), Gary!

My name’s Rafael, I run the Personal Development YouTube Channel. My question to you is, what would you do if
you were starting over and building your personal
brand all over again? Basically getting the name GaryVee out there, all over again. In this day and age, what would you do to go out there and really spread the word and to get yourself known? – I love this question and
boy, I’m gonna set it up. Do I have a really good answer for this, because you, and thanks for the question, and every other youngster
needs to hear this really, really loud and clear. And this is not being disrespectful because I was a 22-year-old
genius business person in my mind because of what I did. But I would do exactly what I did. Which is, for the first 10
years of my professional career, I didn’t say a damn thing. From 22 to 32, when it comes to business, at 30 I started Wine Library TV. From 22 to 32, and one would argue that I was really doing business since 14, but I’ll just say 22 ’cause it
was all in, no school, fine. From 22 to 32, my friend, I did nothing in building the Gary Vaynerchuk brand. You know what I did? I did the work that allowed me to have the audacity to build the
Gary Vaynerchuk brand. This notion that you can
just come out the gate and build your brand by growth hacking and putting yourself out there,
and getting on some podcasts and leveraging other people’s brands to get on and build yourself
as in expert, in what? Like when are we gonna start
asking all these people that are experts, what did they do? Here’s what I did and why I think you should listen to me in business. I am now in the midst
of building my second 50 million dollar plus business
within a five year window. That’s good execution at a speed that most people can’t
calibrate, at a high volume. Is it 50 billion? No. But it’s a life, right,
for a lot of people. It’s business. I invested in companies early on and made a lot of money because I saw where the market was going. Hence the video I popped
up earlier before, that’s linked below, of
what I saw with Apple Pay. I did things that allowed
me to start having a shot to be worthy of people buying a $15 book. Or spending 15 minutes and
watching his or her show. So I did things. So my friend, to you, and everybody else, I promise you before you
get your name out there, it’d be really nice that you
can go to the accomplishments, because when I ask you, hey bro awesome, that
your branding or health, or personal coach, or
whatever the hell you are, but what did you do to become good enough to do this, I’d like to know? I love when people argue
with me on this issue. They’re like, well look at
all the football coaches. These coaches a lot of
times are not real players. You don’t have to be a
great football player to be a great football coach. Guys, have you looked
at every football coach? There’s no football coach that comes out of nowhere at 23 years old and is then an NFL coach and wins Super Bowls. They’ve been a ball boy
since they were seven, and worked within the organization
for 20 years, 15 years. Eric Mangini, when he
was the Jets coach at 36, had been a ball boy since he was 18. Like they’re in it forever. They’re kids, they’re sons
and daughters of coaches, they’ve been in it their whole lives. That’s how you get there. And so this quick move of
using good, modern technology to build up your brand,
siphoning and doing JVs with other people to
siphon their brand equity, that you’re passing
on, that I’m an expert, and then coming out the gate and saying, I’m an expert building
a brand. It’s ludicrous. I laugh at it in my soul, in my stomach, and so does everybody who’s got chops. Gonna say it one more time, I laugh at it and so does
everybody that’s got chops. And I need you to pay attention to that. You have to earn your opportunity to be a personal brand. And the only way to do that
is to actually execute. And so when somebody asks me, well what makes you a social media expert? I show them things I’ve sold, in sales, business, put money in the pocket, predicated on marketing
within that channel. That’s a way to do it, that I believe in.