How to Break Free From Fear | VeeCon 2024 Closing Keynote

0:00Listen, I'm feeling emotional when we set out on this mission. you know obviously the utility, the NFT besides the digital collectible nature at its core besides the access token was VCon and now we're at three of three and I'm wrapping it up. It's been a very emotional weekend for me as well because as a lot of you know the majority of my time has been outside with all of you one-on-one and it's given me an incredible pulse of where thousands of you in this room are at. on your journey.

0:41Hi, Glenn. There's so much I want to cover in this short period of time. As a matter of fact, Zach Nadler, who is the president of VaynerSpeakers. All right, Zach. Got a little love here. You know, works so feverishly and so selflessly on this conference and he's been repping me and speaking for 15 years and I said to him late last night or early today, I'm like, I want some slides and he's like, well, you've never done slides in 15 years. I'm like, shit changes, Zach. And so actually, I'm gonna ask for a chair as well because I'm gonna really lock in here for you because I have a lot to say.

1:24Actually, this is fucking Zach Nadler. Let's hear it out, Bora.

1:32I love you a lot. I love you a lot. I love you, brother.

1:38Zach, Zach stealing the fucking show. I'm gonna go through some things that stood out for me at VCon this year. But before I do, the reason I think I decided to do that was because you assisted me in this keynote. Some of you in line brought up something that, I don't know, weirdly I forgot about, which was we were here, many of us, together a year ago, or a couple more months, actually on that note, whose first VCon is this? Make some noise.

2:12Whose second VCon is this?

2:18And now, please stand up if it is your third fucking VCon. Let's fucking go! Three for fucking three! Three for fucking three! Let's fucking go! That's it, that's it. Something I said last year I forgot about in that rant. Most of us remember that I said go fuck your grandparents and that did its thing. But what I forgot was that I asked people who are miserable at their job to stand up and commit to quitting. And I was so emotionally taken aback by how many of you told me in line, and it was just a half a dozen, but fuck, six people who told me, many more I know did it, that you did that, that you did the hardest thing.

3:19and that, and listen, and we're about to go into this, clapping, like quitting your job is not necessarily the right thing 80 % of the time. I'm being serious and I'm about to go into that but that you quit it and then you told me what happened and the tears and the emotion of how much happy you are which is fundamentally the simplicity of my life. I am desperate for people to be happy, because I'm so happy. And I just know that it's good, and it's worth fighting for at all costs. So, just curious, if you were one of those people, I know you might not even be here, but if you're one of those people that quit last year, and you're happier now, please stand up so I can clap for you, and so people can clap for you.

4:13So now, lights, you're doing a great job. By the way, anybody who's contemplating missing fucking T-Pain, you're out of your fucking mind. So I don't want to hear, I don't want to see on Twitter like, oh, we went to dinner in between your keynote, Gary, and we missed T-Pain. Do not fucking miss T-fucking-Pain. Do you understand? I don't want to hear, I've got a flight to get. Cancel that shit.

4:45I ask, lights on right now before I go into the talk, if I may ask, and it's very hard to be vulnerable in public, but I ask that you do it. How many people here professionally, professionally, are unhappy with what they're doing for a living? Please stand up.

5:07You fucking liars.

5:13I want everybody to clap it up for these people to encourage them

5:21you can sit you can sit because the amount of time that we spend at work is staggering when you take out the hours of sleep, it becomes astonishing how much it takes up our entire lives. The concept of doing something that's killing you inside, especially for it to pay for your lifestyle when you don't have the humility to take a step backwards in your lifestyle to unlock your happiness, is one of the great mistakes of humanity. And I hope that what we talk about may unlock some of that happiness. I won't even go as personal into the next realm of how many of you are unhappy in your personal life with your relationships, because I think it's maybe a question too far to have people stand up, especially if you're sitting with that person in the crowd.

6:20It's freaking get weird at VCon. But I beg, it's the word that comes to mind, I beg for all of you to understand that the number one thing worth fighting for is to be happy. Now, that's all fine and dandy, Gary. What about how? Slide number one. Slide, my slide. I have a slide. Let's see it. Where the fuck is this slide? Show me a slide. My first ever slide. There it is.

7:01one thing that absolutely was obvious to me and has been one of the core strengths of my life is how much adaptability I have it is no question one of the foundational elements of my professional career I love and by the way let's give a big shout out to Sasha Dad, stand up.

7:36I'll get to mom later. You always yell at me that mom gets so much credit, I try to give you a moment, and you're like, what about mom? Impossible to, please. Adaptability. Not to put my father on the spot, because he has so many qualities that I think are dramatically stronger than I, but one of the things that I remember very early in my career was I thought and continue to believe that changing your mind is huge. My dad took a very interesting take on making decisions. He actually, in my mind, blended two things. He's so incredibly honorable and loyal that he sometimes confused that in one man's point of view of meaning that you say something or you do something and then you do it for life.

8:24A kid told me in line that he doesn't want to quit this job that's killing him because he wants to be loyal to his employees, his coworkers. That's unbelievably admirable. But it's also something that he will regret his whole life in his 80s and 90s. adaptability is the single core strength that can lead to happiness because it means that you're not scared all I heard for three days in one size or shape or angle was fear all I heard for three days was fear. Different versions of it in different packages and the reason that most of you are not adaptable is because you're scared of the outcome. This is very important.

9:21It's as important as me telling my friend Glenn to shut up because Victoria's trying to listen and you're bugging the shit out of her. That's me being adaptable in the middle of the keynote. You see what I did? That's adaptability. I'm really focused but I'm worried about Victoria right now. And so I adapted in real time. And so I'm telling you, the adaptability that so many of you lack, the inability to change your mind or change, is completely almost always predicated on your fear of the judgment of people around you on your adjustment. So many of you, because of the way Web3 has navigated over the last three years, made outlandishly humongous statements to your friend network and your relatives three years ago.

10:09For almost all of you, that has not panned out. People were early and people forget. People remember what they want to remember. This is a long process to build anything. Anything meaningful takes tons of time. Adaptability is the drug that can get you through it when you're going through your ups and downs. Adaptability is an incredibly big word. It matters a lot, but it's very hard to be adaptable if you are grounded in fear. My question is, what are you so scared of? One of the reasons I talk so much about swimming and bike riding and having your first kiss is because it's a connective thing that all of us went through.

10:57Some were more scared of it than others. But once you got over the hump, you weren't scared. So many of you asked me how. Whatever it was, you said how. And I said in the great words of Allen Iverson, practice. The way you get shit done is by actually doing it. The amount of time spent in this collective room at this conference of contemplating a decision was staggering. when what you're trying to achieve was met with just the action of just fucking doing it. The problem is you're crippled to do it because you fear the ramifications emotionally. That is something I'm desperately trying to unlock and I hope that many more of you can achieve.

11:54Please fall in love with adaptability. Let's give it up for adaptability. Next slide. Let's hear it for the courageous cock-a-fucking-two.

12:12Anybody here own a courageous cock-a-two? Make some noise. That little group right there knows it's been three long fucking years. We haven't heard a peep about this fucking character. And yet, if you ask me the character that most needs to have shine at the end of VCon 3, it's this. The courage to jump is a really interesting thing for me to think about. It's the cousin to what I was just talking about with fear. I remember going to Jamaica with my friend Joe Minikawa who I'm looking at right now. Much to the chagrin of my mother if she ever knew this I remember us standing on top of a cliff in Jamaica and we needed to jump because that's what the fuck we were doing.

13:05I just remember standing over it and being fascinated by how scary that jump looked. But as I literally jumped off, landed, came back up, da da da, the thing I was most fascinated by was what the fuck went through my head in the moment that triggered me from fuck this, I'm gonna talk myself out of this, like always, to I'm gonna jump, right? and it was based on courage but what you say to yourself when you jump in real life or metaphorically is a very fascinating thing. The thing I say with humility is there's a sheer lack of collective courage at the conference right now. When I look at so many of you it's just so obvious to me how capable so many of you are to deal with the ramifications.

13:58It connects the two characters. So many of you need to jump and you're scared of what will go wrong without realizing what will go wrong will just require adaptability for you to go back. The fear of going backwards after you jumped is something that I am so fascinated by. As if the people in the crowd judging your misstep have anything to actually do with your life. So many of you are crippled to jump into the courage because you're scared that if you lose, you have to go backwards when in reality, you're already backwards. Do you understand? Bro, you're already fucking backwards. You're already stuck.

14:47You want it. And yet, you can't jump and courage should be applauded. Courage needs to be understood. And courage's relationship with adaptability is a very big deal. I promise you, you will never, I promise you, I promise you, you will never regret your acts of courage. Ever. When you go and talk, and so many of you know my spiel here, you know how much I love hanging out with the OGs. When you talk to the people that have actually lived it, their regrets are never their moments of jumping. Their regrets are always the moments they didn't jump. This week I've had the luxury of hanging out with the OGs.

15:34Some of them bang Newports like a fucking gangster. That's you. And I respect it, fuck. But when I tell you what they focus on and what they understand and what they see, there's so much power in youth. But the saying of youth is wasted on the young is very true. experience is incredibly important. Going through the reps and I just implore all of you if you leave with any part of this keynote please take a little courage away from this week and do something, do something next week that you've been scared to do. Cool?

16:20By the way just because this might be my best opportunity need to do it, just a little commercial half-time break from this talk, just a little noise to be made for how VCon 3 was for all of you.

16:39Good. Next slide.

16:47Now we've gotta take it down a notch. this is one of my favorite characters because in all the rah-rah shit that comes out of my mouth you can do it and we're gonna do it and fucking courage and jump off the fucking cliff and da-da-da-da the level of practicality that runs through my body is extraordinary there is no delusional dinosaur in V-Friends but after talking for the last three days I might have to draw that shit

17:21Where there is confusion in the subtleties of this message, this mission, this hopes and dreams that I have for you, is yes, like I said earlier, I'd love for you to quit your toxic job. Yes, I'd love for you to do X, Y, and Z. But some of the shit that I heard in line, that made absolutely no sense. Like, I'm gonna do this. I'm like, well tell me about your stability. they're like, I got like a week's worth of runway. I'm like, you're fucking out of your mind. They're like, I'm gonna build an AR company selling Mars tokens, but I've got a week's worth of runway. I'm like, who the fuck are you?

18:02It's incredibly cool to be courageous. But when I saw my dad's disappointed face looking at my mom when I just told the Cliff story, what he doesn't realize was it was very practical. There was nothing dangerous about it. It was just scary. And that is an incredibly important thing to understand. The things that so many of you fear, the thing that so many of you don't understand, the thing that I see people get it wrong is so many people are scared of things that are not scary and that are completely petrified of things that they should be scared of and instead of being petrified of it, they just jump because they think it's okay.

18:40It's called the hippo shark theory. All of you are scared of sharks. not all of you but you know what I mean meanwhile hippos kill way more fucking people a year than sharks but because we had fucking hungry hungry hippos we think they're fucking cute

18:58hippos are fucking dangerous but jaws came out scared us and now we're scared that's what I see in a lot of you in your career decisions there's things that you're scared of that are not that scary because you can adapt and just go back if it didn't work out. And then there's things that you are looking to do that have no practicality in them. They have no shot. And that is a very important thing for all of you to understand. Do not allow your passions to make you delusional. Practicality is important. There are bills to be paid. I believe that many people who are unhappy can have smaller bills, can lead into other things that can bring it down, but I ask you and I beg you and I implore you to get more practical with some of your decisions.

19:48This is why, and I don't have it up here, but this is why there's two patient characters. Patient pig and patient panda allow you to be practical. If you're willing to eat shit for one more year, then you can actually maybe be practical and go after your dream. Understood? Let's lean into a little bit more practicality. Cool? Next slide.

20:12Now here is the fucking counterpoint. At all expenses, full tilt, all in, please, please, please, please consider to cash in on your passion. Crush it, my first public business thing outside of wine, the subtitle was how to cash in on your passion. I wrote it in 2008, it came out in 2009. I stand here 16 years later, as convicted about passion as I was as that young man. Passion is always the bet. Passion is always the right thing to run through a wall for. If you team it up with practicality, it gets really good. If you don't, you usually have to go call in the adaptable alien and go back to a job.

21:06This is an incredibly important framework. But so many of you love so many different things. So many different interests. And right now we live in a social media world. I don't know if you've heard about social media marketing but I'm into it. It's free. It's free. You post content and it gets distribution and it's free. Of course you can pay someone to make content, I get it. But you can do it for free. and not making content on social media around your passion, your opinions about it, your ideas about it, debating about it, if you're into cooking, cooking, if you're into praying, praying, if you're into cards, cards, like not leaning into putting out content that costs you nothing on this current social media world that will go away.

22:00One day, the cell phone will look like the pager, like the yellow pages, like the radio. And we are not guaranteed that the advertising platforms of the next medium will be free. The regret that many of you have in the next decade or two for not going all in when social media was free will be very high. The time in your life that so many of you in this audience are in right now is such an opportunity. please lean into your passion please try just try because fear is what is holding everyone back just try don't worry about people making fun of you don't worry about people judging you all the best shit that has ever happened in the world that changed the world was laughed at by the people that didn't understand it they always laugh and then they marvel got it?

23:06Next slide.

23:12I think some of you know this. This was the original mascot of VFriends. I believe Andy, are you here? Andy, was it the night before, the morning of? like when did I change the logo before we launched? Night before. This was the original logo of VFriends for a very specific reason. I am the byproduct of somebody who told me always and every day that I was capable.

24:05Tamara Vaynerchuk told me, he said, Sasha, you were not the one who told me that I was capable every day. Okay. My mother told me I was capable every day. She held me accountable for all the dumb shit I did.