Book Review: Crush It!
With a title like Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion and my previous experience with Gary Vaynerchuk’s insightful but very colorful presentations, I was more than a little nervous when I started reading this book. I had nothing to fear. Unlike Hugh MacLeod‘s (Ignore Everybody), Vaynerchuk is a perfect gentleman in print.
Interestingly, while MacLeod advocates for always retaining a “real” job and treating your passion as a hobby you generate some income from, Vaynerchuk strongly advocates for pursuing your passion with hussle and making an average to great income from doing and talking about what you love.
From Vaynerchuk’s view, you’ll never need a vacation if you’re doing what you love. This is a message I initially believed was in contrast to the lifestyle Tim Ferriss advocates in The 4-Hour Work Week. They aren’t though. Ferriss wants us to find a business model that doesn’t take much of our time so that we can pursue our passions., while Veynerchuk wants us to make our living with our passions. Both achieve the same goal: income and time devoted to doing what we love.
Crush It! is filled with a healthy balance of both inspirational and practical advice. It’s also the type of advice I really appreciate. Veynerchuk doesn’t tell us exactly what to do. Instead he shares an outline of advice with enough examples for each of us to imagine how we could apply his methods to our individual circumstances. This type of advice seems easy to give when you’re reading it, but I know from experience that it takes more thought and effort than any set of specific directions.
Which brings me to the greatest value in Crush It! It’s plain that Veynerchuk not only cares about his audiences and wishes each of us success – he believes each of us is capable of succeeding. That’s a powerful read for anyone.
