A few days ago I received an email from a reader of this blog ( thanks John D.) suggesting I check out a book called “Crush It!  Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk.  Lately I’ve been receiving all kinds of books from publishers for review and haven’t had a lot of time to do a lot of reading, so looking for yet another book to read was the last thing on my list.

However, something about Gary’s book title and the energy around his Blog really resonated with me.  So I took John’s suggestion and ran out and bought the book yesterday.  After catching up on the latest episode of 24 recorded on my PVR I started reading Gary’s book at around 2am and I didn’t stop until I finished it.

For a scanner that doesn’t finish a lot of books that alone says something about the book.

Here’s my review of the book:

Firstly, I want to say that I just love Gary’s energy.  He’s passionate, loud, authentic and real.  The energy I picked up from reading his book and checking out some of his video’s reminds me of my own energy when I’m “on” my game.

I can totally tell that if Gary and I met and hung out in person we would probably get really excited to meet someone with similar energy, then we wouldn’t stop talking for three hours straight about doing what you love and pursuing your passion instead of spending your life bitching about how much your job sucks, then the similarities in our personalities would start clashing with each trying to talk over the other, then we would get into a huge fight and then we would become best friends.

While reading Gary’s book I was nodding the whole time.  I kept thinking “Exactly!” each time I turned to the next page in the book.  His thinking on a lot of subjects is so similar to mine, yet he is totally different in many ways as well.  He loves wine, I can’t stand it.  His medium of choice is video, mine is written text (for now), etc.  But even though he has totally different passions we share a common passion of business, entrepreneurship and going out there and killing it in the business world doing what you love instead of withering away at some dead end job.

A huge part of Gary’s success is due to his focus on being authentic and being real.  I talked about this briefly in my previous post about why lightworkers fail online.  I’ve been working on this part of myself as well, trying to push myself to be more and more authentic and real on my Blog and each step I take in that direction leads to more and more success.

I must say, however, that Gary’s taken this to a totally different level that really inspired me.  For example, when he does his video’s he only does one take.  If he screws up something while filming the video, it’s all in there.  No retakes.  I just love that.

All of the lessons in this book are awesome, and I agree with Gary on almost everything he talks about in this book except for one thing.

The one thing that I didn’t like about this book is that it kind of pushes the “specialist agenda”.  I’ve watched interviews with Gary where he states that you should pick a really narrow niche and just Crush It.  For example, instead of creating a site and brand around a topic like “Music” he suggests going super specific such as “Music > Rap Artists > P Diddy > P Diddy’s Hair”, and just become the leading expert in everything to do with P. Diddy’s hair.

Of course this is just an example to illustrate his point, not an actual suggestion but the point is that he suggests picking a very narrow niche and specializing in it.  Even though that can work for specialist type personalities, I wouldn’t recommend that advice to Polymath’s.  Instead I would recommend making your “specialty” being a Polymath.  Basically use all the things he talks about in the book to build a personal brand, be authentic etc. but embrace your Scanner / Polymath self and Crush that instead of trying to be something you’re not (a specialist).

That would be the only part of this book that didn’t resonate with me 100%, naturally since I’m a Polymath.  Besides this focus on specializing on just one thing which is totally understandable since most people in the world are not Polymaths, everything else was spot on.

I would definitely recommend checking out this book.