Career Pivots, Entrepreneurship and Overcoming Fear | Tea with GaryVee Ep #85

0:00Podcast nation, before I get you into today's podcast, big announcement. as you probably heard at this point because I had John from Stan on the show. I'm an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan, Stan.Store. I'm sending you right now to garyvee.com, garyvee.com slash Stan. Go check this out. We've done a Gary V. Stan Store challenge which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected, honestly, by my overall content. The tech stack, all these features and the minimal costs per month that Stand Store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that I envisioned when I wrote Crush It, when I wrote Crushing It, and this overall thing I'm thinking a lot about lately, which is the individual empire, right?

0:48This creator entrepreneur slash entrepreneur creator economy that I think is gonna eat up the oxygen, very honestly, the thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet is you've got the strategy for me. you've got the ambition within yourself but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it and I believe you can find that at Stan store Stan dot store but specifically I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you and plus there's a bunch of cool things so if you want to go see those cool things go to GaryVee.com slash Stan S-T-A-N now to the podcast This is the Gary Vee audio experience Good morning everybody Welcome to episode 85 of Tea with Gary Vee.

1:35Excuse me, Jesus. Erin, I'm ready to go. All right. Taya asks, I'm 36 and I'm starting over by going back to school. But in the past, I've struggled to complete what I start and I tend to lose interest easily. Do you have any advice for people like me? This is an interesting question. To be honest, there's only two answers to this. One is really good. I actually think both could be good. Actually, one's very bad. I'll start with that one. What's her name again? Taya. Taya, you just might not deal well with adversity. You might not have resilience. You might not have consistency. You might not enjoy the process of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

2:19And so that might be the issue. Let me repeat this. You might have no resilience. You might not be comfortable with being uncomfortable. You may struggle with consistency. you may overvalue other people's opinions, you may have those issues. On the other hand, what you might have is very good self-awareness and you just know that you thought something was good for you and then you changed your mind, which I actually think is a tremendous strength. You're gonna have to ask that question. Either you're soft and insecure or you're self-aware and confident. I don't know, but I don't beat myself up when I don't finish tasks, when they're creative and on offense.

3:09I do beat myself up when I'm not doing things that are important, right? If I'm not spending enough time with my family, if I'm not going to the gym or eating well, these are very black and white things. You know, I don't view school as a black and white thing. There are too many people that are successful and happy that have not finished school. But that's that. Let's ask another question. Okay, this question is from John. How do you love someone deeply without letting their negativity consume you? By limiting the time you have with them. Loving someone does not require you hanging out with them 24-7.

3:45Right? Like, I've been pretty consistent on this point of view, which is we must learn how to limit very seriously limit negativity when it is in your life, even if it's your mom or spouse or best friend. And we must cut out negativity, complete cutout, if it's someone who literally has, you know, is an acquaintance, a coworker. I think people confuse loving with enabling. And I think this is super important. I think one of the biggest issues people have, and by the way, I'm a culprit of this. I think we enable bad behavior. And I think that that's something we have to be very, very real about.

4:32It's just real life. We also put words like loyalty on a pedestal. Again, being loyal to your toxic mom doesn't mean to sit and enable her toxic behavior. In fact, if you love someone, the actual requirement is to have candor with them and try to help them. I think that's the answer to the question. I think again, we put things like loyalty and love and we disguise what we're actually doing, which is enabling. And we have to address that. And in life, I always say life is fair and people sometimes struggle with that. But of course, if lightning strikes you and you're dead, one could be like, wow, that didn't seem fair.

5:14And I understand that. I also think that what we don't understand is a lot of times we are manipulating and enabling the behavior that we get and we blame others without being accountable to our own actions. There are plenty of people who are in narcissistic marriages who need to be honest with themselves to realize they are the enabler of the narcissistic behavior and if they don't like it, they can force the candor, they can force the therapy, or they can force the divorcing papers. They can do that shit. And that is awfully hard and the hardest and the worst and all that. But again, in life, you either act or you complain and blame.

6:01And I just think living a life that is grounded in blaming and complaining is a very unhappy life. That's it. Let's keep it going. Okay, this question is from Maria. what strategy would you recommend for posting on social while keeping a somewhat low profile on my personal social media accounts while still employed in a corporate role? Yeah, to do exactly what I'm doing. I don't know, like if you're here and you know who I am, then just address it the way I address it. I literally do not post content that can be controversial or negative. I literally post nothing about my personal life. The end.

6:44again this is a game of you being in control in the end you can like literally post anything you want people post things that really expose that they're actually addicted to the insecurities of the algorithm people post their children, people post their personal relationships because they get more likes and they compromise what's in their soul

7:17and they do it for something that is so not real and it's a mistake for most people and ultimately rears its head. And that's that. You know, like, you know, again, the theme of today's morning so far is you're in control. And until you realize that, you lose. All right, let's keep it going. I want to keep going like this. All right, Luke asks I work in finance which I love but I love singing and playing music. I'm 25 I'm nervous to even try it because I'm not sure I'm good enough Pretty much. No one makes it. No one listens to my stuff. Please help. I love your advice man This is a very simple question either you decide to live with regret or you don't right also when you're 25 you have the capacity to do both like when you have that 25 year old energy you have 12 to 18 hours a day to give to both you can work you don't have to quit your job you know you don't have to quit your job um you just have to balance both let's go to reina on video reina how are you good how are you doing good what's your question yes so I run a small b2b sales group right so we literally go business to bits like cold car like cold-cut business to business sales so I do more telecommunications but I do more of the management so I hire I manage things that nature so would you be focusing solely on marketing the sole product itself like the telecommunications are solely focusing on and marketing my business as in recruiting and things of that nature.

9:07Well, you need to do both, right? So I would market both. Okay. Right, at the end of the day, when you're marketing, you're marketing with purpose, you would like something to happen. It sounds like you need both, right? Right. So for my dad's liquor store, he needs to sell wine and liquor and beer and food, and we market all of those things. He also needs local employees, so we may market locally to get employees. I think that people are obsessed with the word or in our society, and the answer is always in the word and, right? So I think for you the answer is and. Now, the reason I have an acronym called PAC at VaynerX, Platforms, Algorithms, Culture, is they rear their heads.

10:00In your world, if you're recruiting for people, LinkedIn might act differently as a P, as a platform for you for what you're trying to do versus the way TikTok would work or Twitter versus YouTube. There's different audiences on different platforms for different reasons. Most people are on many platforms, but that's that, you know? Yes, because I know I was doing a lot of recruitment through LinkedIn, and personally reaching out to people directly when I would see like their background saying, hey, you're good at marketing, I see you're interested in sales, things of that nature. So I would reach out to them personally.

10:32And my team grew like tremendously rather than just traditional like recruitment with my recruiter. So as far as LinkedIn with more of recruitment, should I be posting more of like, like more sales tips or more like, what should I be posting more on LinkedIn in order to engage more instead of wanting people to work for my company? Yes.

11:00Okay. Stick with me. Do you understand what I just did there? Exactly, yeah. Again, you're asking, this is so how everyone thinks. You know what to post. Do you think you should put sales tips? Fuck yes, you should do sales tips. You're insane. Fuck yeah. Like, most people aren't asking me what they should do. most people are asking me, how do I get lots of views for the posts that I do? Right. Right, you know you should be doing it. My question to you is, are you doing the things that you know I talk about? Are you posting eight, 10, 12 times a day or not? The answer is 99 % of people are not.

11:44Cool. Okay, well thank you so much. It was super nice to meet you. I was like, wow, I got on the call. I was like, wow, hello, hi, how are you? So thank you so much. Raina, before I let you go, did you understand? I do, I do understand. It's just that, do you understand? It's like consistency, it's volume. The algorithms are the great opportunity of people and businesses in the history of communication. They are free. Newspaper ads were not free. PR companies to get you written about in articles were not free. Billboards were not free. Radio ads were not free. Television ads were definitely not fucking free.

12:21Direct mail was not free. This is why I was obsessed with email. Email in the 90s and today is free-ish. You obviously have to get people on it. They're fucking free. And now we have phones. It's not like it was in the 90s where you had to like hire a film production company and they came to your liquor store and you made a video and they gave you a fucking VHS and you had to figure out how the fuck to do with what. Every fucking human starting at the age of six can take their fucking iPad or phone, produce a fucking video, and post it on the biggest platforms that have attention in society for free.

12:59Right. And I guess my last question is, how can I get people excited about sales? Right? Because whenever I'm a - People are excited about sales, Raina. People are excited about sales. You can't convince people that are not excited about sales to be excited about sales. You need to just find the, oh, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people that are excited about sales. This is the problem with everyone. You're not gonna convince, Rangie, let me promise you something. You do not want someone on your sales team that you have to convince to get excited about sales. Sales is a fucking DNA game.

13:34You are either a fucking salesman or you are not. You're not convincing someone to be a fucking salesman. Right? Braden on my team, great hair, tremendous rebounder, like fucking workhorse, like country boy strong and morals, like would trust him with my children, right? Like believe in him the most, can't wait to see him dominate life for 60 years, but that motherfucker is not going on the sales team.

14:12Right, right. Got it? Okay, absolutely. What a lot of people like you make the mistake of is you're trying to hit, you're a saleswoman. Yes, absolutely. And what you're misunderstanding as a saleswoman is the most important part of sales. In sales, and this is not a common thing that is said, which is why it's misunderstood, which is why I'm beating this drum to the ground. In sales, you cannot convince people. They are not good customers. If I convinced someone here who smokes weed that wine drinking's better and they're gonna like it, I'm telling you nine out of 10 of them will not be great customers.

14:53Even I'm great at sales, I can get all 10 to try. But I'm telling you nine out of 10 of those people are not gonna be great customers. They're gonna do it because I sold them. You'll get sales people because you sold them on sales. A lot of times, and you know this, those people are fucking losers. Like they're looking for, and of course people are not losers, I'm trying to say they're a losing sales player. They're searching for the next, oh Rainia looked dynamic, and you know this, salespeople that are trying to sell and convince people to be in sales also suck at selling. They're showing watches and fucking trips, and hey you non-sales person, if you become a sales person like me, you can have a fucking Bugatti too.

15:37Do you understand how bad the people that are gonna be excited about that are gonna come to you because I'm a great fucking salesperson and I'm not falling for that dumb shit. Absolutely. Get that word commence out of your fucking vocabulary. Find people that are already fucking salespeople. Got it. Absolutely. That's it. Yeah. Cool. See ya. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Erin, what are you doing here, Sid? Okay. Parker asks, Fucking up my show. Parker asks, what's more important, experience or money? I'm a 24-year-old who asks myself this question quite often. I make great money for my age, but I don't know where to go from here.

16:24Both are good for different situations. Experience is always good. Money is often bad.

16:34Money exposes your truth. The amount of people that have made money and lost money, like made lots, lost lots is a lot because they weren't prepared to know what to do with it. Experience means you know what to do, no matter what it is, hanging a fucking picture on the wall. If you have experience in it, you will be better. Experience is dramatically more universal and more consistent than money. Money is a catalyst. The problem is it could be a catalyst for bad. If you are broken inside and you end up inheriting a million dollars from your grandma and you're like, yeah, my life is good now, you cannot comprehend how bad the next 24 months are going to look.

17:19It is the story as old as time. People consistently misunderstand how to use money. People consistently believe it is the great trick of our society. People are addicted to this concept that it's going to solve their problems. I've literally watched people get way worse, especially if they didn't earn their money. You know who's a real fucking loser playing when it comes to money? So I grew up with real fucking scum buckets and like dirt kids and like a lot of people were flawed. Do you know that between like fucking 11 and 25 in my life, the amount of kids and people around me that literally spent almost all their time trying to figure out how to fake an injury to collect insurance money?

18:11Yo, if you're from the dirt and the gutter like I am, please explain to everybody in the chat how common this conversation was amongst your other loser friends. Watch, watch the chat right now. People will tell you. Look, look at this. You see this? This is real below lower middle class life. If you grew up in this below lower middle class life, again, I'm gonna say it again, people don't believe me because they don't know me like that. Now I had a college, 90 % of the kids that I went to college with were on fucking financial aid and from real fucking ghetto life. 24 hours a day. Oh, what if I stop my car a little short and get hit in the back and then get a neck brace and collect insurance?

19:01Oh look, a puddle. Let me slip, like I'm being dead fucking serious. Money is gonna solve my shit. Every kid that I watched play that game, and I saw it. Look, every day was a hustle. Look, look, like people lived that life. Look, I'm an insurance adjuster, I see it all day. This is real shit, I'm telling you.

19:27And I've seen people collect on it. and that money is gone within six months. Until you fucking get your fundamentals right internally, you have no shot. Go win the lotto. Why do so many lotto winners lose?

19:47So I don't even remember the question, but I know something. Experience is a hell of a lot better than money. Chris Lyons, I can. Hey, can you hear me? yes sir Gary I think you're gonna like this check this out this is a graded b friend I love it I love it there's only two of five two of five and then I have wise wasp graded ten I got a whole I got twelve of them I opened them on live the other day I got some real cruisies are those 3D printed little things back there Optimus Prime all that yeah yeah it's cool shit how are you yes I'm really well thank you so much I listened to your content for years i met you at um the view friends conference the first one in uh minneapolis it was really cool um and you know that conference was incredible it really opened my eyes to just how big the crypto world is because it kind of gets their bad rap but seeing like people do real was like super cool but the reason i actually wanted to hop on here real quick with you is i'm on 34 i paid off my mortgage through salon trading meme coins i run a uh it's a tire shop that does seasonal stuff solid it's okay cash flow but i'm also building a brand called built daily it's all about discipline and compounding daily actions and it's funny i built a chat gbt model that is you like i trained it on all your content and i literally talked to try to get advice so if i ran this question through it and i want to see like how it compares to this content um so i got three three lanes right now crypto my tire shop and then my built daily and my struggle is do i scale the real business because right now it's from home or do i go all in more on like the the passions because i love being an entrepreneur like i cannot be an employee like like it i just i can't like you you get like i cannot be an employee but um the entire business is kind of like it could grow but i'm also like man i love all these side hustles like i feel like confused and like almost lost well why why can't you do them all because i i feel like if you want to build like a real personal brand say in like the crypto world it takes so much time and energy that it pulls away a lot from like like well how much time and energy do you put into work don't bullshit me chris how much time and energy every day do you put into work um in terms of like my passions it's a lot like i'm up like 7 a.m i go to bed like i'm in like i'm doing like ridiculous um hours on like the side stuff.

22:16So it's, which paid off. It sounds like you're doing both. And you also know this, the meme coin thing worked out, but you could have gotten caught. 100%, which is why I'm trying to focus less on the speculative kind of gross side of things and build something. Correct. Again, back to my question, how much time do you spend on the tire business that has nice cashflow? As you call it, almost none. As you called it, as you called it the real business. Yeah. You did hear that, right? Yeah. So let's focus on the subconscious of what your brain even thinks. Let's focus on the thing that you called the real business.

22:56Let's break this down. You have a real business that takes you very little time, that has cash flow and is working. You've played highly speculative crypto behaviors. Thank God it worked out. As you know, for hundreds of millions, it did not work out. Yes? Correct. What do you think? Sounds like I need to focus on the real business. Well, I would say it sounds like you're giving it very little. It's kind of like relationships. Let me break this down for you. Let me paint you a very different picture. Over here on the left, you have this really reliable, wonderful, solid girl. She requires very little, you know, just, you know, even in fact, I'm mad at her because she should be asking for more, but she's happy with what she's getting, and you're getting all the dividends of love.

23:56In fact, in this story, she's cooking dinner and doing right. And then over here, you've got a fucking stripper, right? And you're addicted to the glitter and the fake tits, and it's all very exciting, and it worked out like this one. One time you hooked up, but what do you think's going to happen, brother? Yeah. When you put it that way, it kind of makes it very clear. So here's like the one caveat I would just throw in there. And like, I love the honest brutality because that's... I'm wondering if chat, Gary, GPT gave you the stripper analogy. I'm going to go with AI's not there yet. No, AI's not there yet.

24:37it told me to um don't overthink it and just document and kind of just do my thing which is kind of actually what i've i had like six six different accounts for all my different passions and i moved it all into my personal account which is which has been good um the one caveat i would ask is like i love running my business i really enjoy that but like doing the entire business like the work itself, I don't necessarily am passionate about. But then is that just me being kind of a wimp? Like, you're not going to love everything you do. Like, sometimes you just got to grind. Yeah, I mean, look, again, I want to have a logical conversation with you.

25:17I'm pumped that meme coin trading worked out for you. I'm also just like, the reason I stay Ethereum and Bitcoin in the crypto world is, I haven't done enough homework on the others. And I just feel comfortable that I understand the rails that Ethereum is building with layer two and base and all this stuff. Obviously now that stable coins have been legalized by the Genius Act, it gives a lot of understanding to why Ethereum's got a chance. Bitcoin, money in the history of our time has always been, does the collective believe it's money, right? Whether it's the dollar or coins or, like gold and silver, when cavemen were running around, was gold and silver.

26:07It was in the fucking world, but people didn't value it. Consensus of humanity is important. Bitcoin's dangerously close, if not already, at consensus of humanity. Definitely very different place than when I bought it for the first time in 2015, 16. Big shout out to Aaron Battalion and South by Southwest jam sessions for teaching me these things. I just think that you gambled and it worked out and I'm concerned to say like gambling is a consistent, like gambling works once in a while, why it's gambling, it consistently does not work. Now building a personal brand in crypto is a different thing, meaning I've got a personal brand in crypto, my belief is that 1 % of NFTs on Ethereum will be the great collectibles of the next generation.

26:53And so I'm comfortable building out my VFriends world and taking a real stab at trying to build Marvel, Pokemon, Disney. I believe in CryptoPunks. I think they've been proven to be very resilient. You know, they're a couple hundred thousand dollars for the cheapest one right now. NFTs have sold hundreds of millions of dollars over the last two weeks at a time where 99 % of the world thinks that they were a scam. That is a profound data point, which makes me bullish long term. Bitcoin is being eaten up by all the biggest financial institutions in the world. Literally the CEOs and executives and boards of the biggest financial institutions in the world called it a scam a decade ago and now are running, writing substantial tens and hundreds of millions of dollar checks to get it.

27:41Those are black and white things that are happening. You know, buying vomit coin for.00001 cent, hoping an influencer tweets about it so you can sell it for.0004 cents doesn't feel like a sustainable model. Very true. What are you going to build your personal brand on? That you guessed on the app hype and it worked out? Or, you know, like that, that you got to be thoughtful about how you build this. So the way I'm doing it is you are, you nailed everything you just said about like this Solana stuff. So I thought like when I, if I go in there with a totally different mindset and try to build something different.

28:25So like what it's called, it's built daily. And it's just about like, I'm bringing long-term thinking to a short-term game and showing people that it can stick with someone over a year. I think that's great. How are you going to monetize that? Well, this is a good question. I have a podcast and I'm hoping in time that, you know, get advertisements or what have you. It's a hard game. I mean, I'm for it. if you can build a big enough audience, you can monetize. Here's what I would say. I think the way you're playing it right now is working. I like that you're happy, right? You're happy doing this other thing.

28:58I just want to make sure, A, that you're not gambling. B, if you're trying to build a personal brand and then do sponsorship against it, that's a regular business. By the way, no different than your tire business. To your point, it's a lot more fun for you to play with the crypto stuff than the tire stuff. I'm fine with that. I would just tell you that in a world where you're 7 p.m. to 12 in the morning, you obviously are able to do that because you're enjoying the shit out of community, engaging, Twitter, spaces, whatever you're doing to get into the space. It sounds like you just need to double down on both, meaning not more hours, being more effective.

29:36You know, it's not about working more hours. It's, for example, my team around me, all of them, I think the second they get close to me and really look under the hood, they're like oh fuck this guy works. Right, it's like oh he has 39 meetings every day actually. And like 20 of them are 15 minutes and I take an hour and a half to do the same thing. Maybe I don't need an hour and a half. So if you know the tire business can get three times what you're giving it by you being more efficient. And a lot of people that are playing in crypto or any other genre that plays out online, gaming, personal brands, live social shopping, they end up spending all their time consuming the scroll instead of feeding the scroll.