Crush It – A Review of @garyvee ’s New Book

I’ll admit upfront, I’m a big GaryVee fan. When he announced his new book, Crush It, I ordered it no questions asked. I knew that it would be that good. Plus, I’ve mooched off of his unbelievable content for the past 2-years, it’s the least I can do for the guy.

I first heard about Gary when he came to San Francisco and my friend JJ invited me to go see him do a live taping of WineLibrary.tv. Of course, I was a dummy and turned down the offer. I had never heard of Gary, I don’t really drink wine so I passed to hang with my family. A few days later, I watched the video and kicked myself for a couple of days more.

If you’ve ever watched Gary, even once, you know the voice. That unmistakable, semi-hoarse, kind of screaming, enthusiastic voice. That voice was in my head the entire time I read this book. I thought that was cool. Here is a book about building a personal brand and I can’t even get this guy’s voice out of my head. Talk about brand.

The book itself, like his videos, is pretty short (total read time was only about 2 hours), easy to digest and extremely motivational. You can’t read this book and say ho-hum, I’ll stick that on a shelf for a rainy day. Hell, it’s even got me blogging again. It’s also got me thinking about how I can help my dad in his pending retirement and my sister with her new pet store and my buddy the artist. You just want to go out and spread the gospel.

If you’re pretty savvy on the social media front, a lot of this will be second nature to you. You’ll know all the tools that he talks about. You’ll probably have them all set up and you’re using them from time to time. If you’ve spent anytime with anyone that has built a good personal brand, you’ll know a lot of the strategy that Gary lays out, but what you won’t know is the hustle that he describes. As he points out in the beginning, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme, this, like all good schemes, it’s a get rich slow with a lot of work one.

But he spells it out for you. In the book, Gary shares with you everything that he did to build his own personal brand. It isn’t rocket science, it’s work. It isn’t get a million twitter followers over night, this is get them over 2 – 3 years of hard work and brand building. But the directions are there, all you’ve got to do is follow them.