#AskGaryVee

Ask Gary Vee -- summary

The short white kid the Jets had to take

In 1995, a kid named Wayne Chrebet showed up at the New York Jets training camp as a walk-on. He was short. He was slow by NFL standards. He played college ball at Hofstra, a tiny school nobody scouted. The only reason he got a tryout at all was that his dad mailed VHS tapes of his college games to the coaching staff until somebody, finally, hit play. The Jets were terrible that year, so they figured they had nothing to lose. Eleven seasons later, after dozens of concussions and one of the most beloved careers in franchise history, the team retired his number.

Gary Vaynerchuk tells this story in the middle of a chapter on hustle, and it is the closest thing the book has to a soul. Most career advice you have ever read assumes you are starting with a stacked deck. Vaynerchuk's whole worldview starts somewhere else. He starts with a kid who got told no, who got mailed himself in on tape, and who outworked everyone the moment a door cracked open. That is the protagonist of this book. Not the wine importer's son who built a digital empire. The walk-on.

So what is "Ask Gary Vee" actually about? It is the printed version of a YouTube show called #AskGaryVee, which Vaynerchuk filmed in 157 episodes between 2014 and 2015, answering questions from anyone who sent one in. The book takes the best questions and gives Vaynerchuk room to answer them properly: how to start a business, how to handle your parents, how to use social media without sounding like a fraud, how to lead, how to hire, how to ask for the sale without being weird about it. Messy and direct, it reads like a man with strong opinions sitting across from you, trying to save you a decade of avoidable mistakes. The questions it answers in the pages that follow: what you should do first when you have an idea, how you actually grow when nobody knows you exist, and how you build a career that does not collapse the moment you are tired.