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Hustling, Connecting, and Winning with Gary Vaynerchuk (Ep. 8)

Gary VaynerchukEver since I started blogging and doing things of an entrepreneurial nature, Gary Vaynerchuk has been a source of inspiration for me. His talks and tweets have motivated me to hustle – to work insanely hard to reach my goals – and to constantly build my brand and connect with others.

Gary is the founder of Vaynermedia, a company that does brand consulting for Fortune 500 giants like PepsiCo and Campbell’s.

He is also the author of three books – Crush It: Why NOW is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion (2009), The Thank-You Economy (2011)and the upcoming Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social Worldwhich drops in November of this year.

Gary got his start in college by taking the train home every weekend to work in his parents’ liquor store. From there, he added an e-commerce component by starting WineLibrary.com, which helped catapult the business from $3 million to $45 million in annual income.

During that time, Gary also became an expert in social media. He advocates a spirit of unbridled passion and insane hard work, and he’s shown that this approach works by gaining almost 1 million Twitter followers and speaking at high-profile tech and social media events around the country (this is one of my favorites).

In this interview, Gary gives his insight on how to identify your passion in college, how to go after it and succeed (minus all the typical career-advice bullshit), and why mentors are way more important than money or college credits.

Items mentioned in this episode:

Things you should do right after listening:

  • If you’re still not sure what you want to do, start looking at your free-time activities and figure out if you could leverage any of them into a job.
  • Find a mentor that can help you to achieve your goals.

If you enjoyed this episode, give the CIG podcast a review on iTunes!

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