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Overview
Title: Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too
Author: Gary Vaynerchuk
Genre: Self-Help
Themes: Marketing, Social Media, Entrepreneurship
Publish Year: 2018
ISBN-10: 0062674676
Utility: 2/5
Readability: 5/5
Storytelling: 2/5
Literary Quality: 1/5
Pace: 2/5
Impact: 2/5
Favorite Excerpt/Quote
"A lot of pseudo-experts will justify subterfuge by saying they're just taking the age-old advice of fake it 'til you make it. But no one needs to do that anymore. The only reason people used to have to fake it was because they had to convince the gatekeepers - the agents, the directors, the publishers, the music producers, the talent scouts - to give them the shot they needed to prove themselves. But the internet plays the middleman role now, and the Internet can't stop you from putting your work out there." (Vaynerchuk, 84)
Review
Marketed as a self-help book on content marketing and entrepreneurship, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crushing It! feels more like a 263-page promotion of his previous book Crush It! than a tool for learning. Vaynerchuk’s 5th novel combines his motivational spirit with his acclaimed strategies for building a social media influence. However, the utility of the book is overshadowed by a keenness for self-promotion and a lack of depth.
Crushing It! starts with the classic Gary V motivational message of hard work, persevering through failure, and self-confidence; themes that are central to Gary’s journey to entrepreneurial success. The book then turns to its primary purpose: identifying strategies for growing a digital presence. The first few chapters discuss broader, more general strategies then transitions to analyzing specific strategies for different social media platforms. The book wraps up with a look forward to voice-first technologies and one last motivational message for the reader.
Crushing It! utilizes a series of anecdotes to illustrate the strategies presented throughout the book. Most anecdotes start by recounting the struggles individuals faced early in their journey, then converge on the individual discovering Crush It!, and end by highlighting the success that came from that utilization. This is best exemplified in the anecdote of Digital Architect Deon Graham. After sharing Deon's struggles, the story converges on Deon's discovery of Crush It! with this line: “It wasn't until he started to dive onto Crush It! principles and focus on building a brand long term that things started to turn around” (Vaynerchuk, 69). The anecdote ends a few paragraphs later with a few shallow mentions of the strategies that Deon utilized and a few praises to Gary. This structure and framing place the focus of the anecdotes on the discovery of Crush It! rather than on the specific strategies these individuals utilized to reach their achievements. As a result, many of the anecdotes feel like self-stroking promotions and lack the depth needed to be effective teaching tools. The reader is left searching for further explanation that never really comes.
Having engaged with some of Gary’s content on other platforms, I know that he has a knowledge and expertise beyond what is presented in the book. I was disappointed to finish the book feeling that I could have easily learned more by engaging with his other content. The book fails to dive into the depth needed to achieve good utility.
A little bit of light shines through when the book turns its focus on the implications of newer voice-first applications, though it comes only in the final 18 pages of the book. Some of the anecdotes presented are interesting, but with a purpose to expand my knowledge of content marketing, serve little purpose. Unfortunately, the ill-focused anecdotes and lack of depth lead Crushing It! to feel like an unengaging self-promotion disguised as a novel. If you’re looking to learn about content marketing, specific social media strategies, or entrepreneurship beyond a broad brushstroke, I suggest searching elsewhere.
Overall Rating
There are better resources available: 2.3/5
Citation
Vaynerchuk, Gary. Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too. HarperBusiness, 2018.