It's insane to me to ask anybody to be what they're not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That's always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.
Gary VaynerchukRead
I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who've never made any money in business.
Interpretation
Many popular business books are written by authors who lack practical business success.
This quote by Gary Vaynerchuk highlights the paradox in the business literature landscape, where numerous books, despite being penned by individuals without real business success, achieve significant popularity. It suggests that readers are often drawn to theoretical insights rather than practical experiences, raising questions about the value of knowledge gained through personal success versus academic or observational learning.
In practice
During a business seminar to illustrate the importance of practical experience versus theoretical knowledge.
It's insane to me to ask anybody to be what they're not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That's always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.
Content is king, but marketing is queen, and runs the household.
The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person's e-mail and every single person's Twitter @ reply.
It's important to build a personal brand because it's the only thing you're going to have. Your reputation online, and in the new business world is pretty much the game, so you've got to be a good person. You can't hide anything, and more importantly, you've got to be out there at some level.
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23
I suppose Virgin is an unusual brand in that I suspect we're the only 'way of life' brand in the world. We're one of maybe the top 30 best known brands in the world, yet if you look at the other 29, they all specialize in one area. Whether it's Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc., they all generally specialize in one area.
I think any company should compete on the quality of their products, their prices, the novelty they can produce, their services, because that would be fair competition.
I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!
You know, if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So, we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don't, it will be shame on us.
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