Gary Vee’s Open Secret
Gary Vaynerchuk (aka Gary Vee) knows something special. At the seat of his philosophy is a secret truth that animates his many businesses as a branding expert, social media guru, writer and entrepreneur. Every once in a while he’ll say it out loud, but most of the time it’s not something he announces.
Because he doesn’t have to. It’s baked into everything he does: Business Advice Is Personal Advice.
This is the foundational insight behind Gary Vaynerchuk and his empire of self-actualization, a recognition that business advice and personal advice are one and the same.
In our cultural moment at least, these two things are indistinguishable. The ‘personal brand” is a central component of a faith in a sort of metaphysics of entrepreneurship where the self, the brand, and the business are all one breathlessly aspirational thing.
And Gary Vaynerchuk has used knowledge of this fact to spin out millions of social media posts, thousands of hours of YouTube videos, and almost a dozen books. But the alchemy implicit in the fusion of the Personal and the Professional is tricky.
Writing for The New York Times, Joe Coscarelli hints at this ideological amalgamation: “As an internet personality, the Gary Vee character can be as patently absurd as he is engaging and convincing. His posts, which are often overlayed with aphoristic text like digital bumper stickers — ‘THE ULTIMATE ADVICE FOR EVERY 20 YEAR OLD,’ ‘RECOGNIZE WHAT YOU’RE AFRAID OF,’ ‘how to make money FROM YOUR BED’ — can feel like hokey, get-rich-quick sloganeering.”
Coscarelli is no twenty year old. His take on Vaynerchuk is not colored by the excitement of many of the Gen Z fans of #AskGaryVee. He sees in Gary Vee what many of us newly exposed to Gary Vee’s antic mentorship might see. He sees a scrim of generic motivational speaking techniques presented alongside uniquely expert social media branding advice and compelling, often simple business maxims.
The combination can feel uncomfortable to an outsider. It may feel like a gimmick. But it is a message ideally crafted to an audience of folks who feel emotionally lost in the professional world.
While people who are already successful or who feel perfectly capable of self-determined success may have no need for Gary Vee, there is a wide swath of the American population that has not found a place in the economy or a sense of it that goes beyond toil, ennui, insecurity, or a kind of doom-laden, pervasive doubt.
This helps to explain why Vaynerchuk has a special appeal to younger Millennials and members of Gen Z, two groups famously subject to a bitter sense that they are either unequipped for success in “the real world” or that the real world has been rigged against them.
Gary Vee rejects both of these views even as he offers a series of tips to overcome precisely these obstacles. And whether they’re psychological or material hang-ups, he treats them both the same.
Here is Vaynerchuk’s first irony. He tells his audience that their excuses, however bitter and fully felt, are just excuses.
This means that his message can be understood as a diagnosis at least as much as it is a prescription: “This is why you’re not successful.”
His motivational tone might suggest otherwise, but this is what his audience seems to want — a ticket out of failure and ineffectualism. As logic would have it, these are things you can’t “get out of” if you’re not already there.
The people tuning in and soaking up Gary Vee’s positive advice about how the excuses we make keep us from achieving success are also in need of being levered out of a self-defeating mindset.
Ironically, the generations that so famously blame their elders for failing them seem to crave a model of advice that turns the blame back against the blamer. It turns out that it’s empowering to hear that your failure is your own damn fault.
The Origins of a Strange Phenomenon
Gary Vaynerchuk was born in 1975 in Belarus. He made his way to fame and success by creating a web channel to sell wine for his family’s store in New Jersey, where he grew up. And though he treats himself and his story as a prototypical one — a model to follow — he is not at all a typical cross-generational celebrity.
Gary Vee is not an entertainer.
It’s entirely normal for a generation’s favorite performers to belong to an older generation (think Beyonce here as the entertainment avatar of younger Millennials), but it comes as something of a shock to realize that Vaynerchuk holds a similar cross-generational appeal.
He’s not making music videos. He’s not acting in Marvel movies. He’s giving business advice. And somehow that advice has bridged the gap from Gen X to Gen Z.
Yet, of course, it’s not just advice. It’s a mindset that Vaynerchuk is selling. (Most of the time though he is giving it away for free.) And it’s one that has snowballed — from wine videos to sports agencies to best selling books.
As Eric Adams put it in Entrepreneur, Gary Vee “is the living, breathing version of what digital marketing can do — because once he started mainlining himself into the internet, it helped him be a successful entrepreneur, which made him a celebrity, which helped him become an even more successful entrepreneur, which made him an even bigger celebrity, with each part feeding the other.”
At least that is what things look like on the surface. That’s the quick take on this entrepreneur cum social media guru. In a word, he is the embodiment of the dream of digital entrepreneurship and digital celebrity. And while that seems entirely accurate, it doesn’t yet unearth the most curious aspects of Gary Vee as a cultural figure — the ironies of his message and the role he’s carved out for himself as a different sort of guru.
If you spend some time looking at Gary Vee and his social media empire, you begin to see that his principle insight separates him from self-help experts like Tony Robbins and from nuts-and-bolts financial advice of people like Warren Buffett. We begin to see that Vaynerchuk’s curious function is to embody an ethic of self-realization that borders on the religious.
Expectation, Suggestion, Initiation
Vaynerchuk makes videos and writes books that expressly offer the key to entry into the ever mysterious worlds of success and fulfillment.
Given the initiatory and incantatory methods behind his message, it’s natural to connect Gary Vee to the traditions of the revival preacher and the Harry Houdini types that utilized a similar formula. He’s no magician but he is a sort of preacher. A high energy, no-nonsense, business preacher, professing the gospel of self-actualization.
So, it’s tempting to see Roland Barthes 1957 description of the famous evangelist Billy Graham also as a description of Gary Vee’s approach to motivational speaking and note some interesting parallels to Barthes’ take on Billy Graham, whose performative approach to evangelizing utilized “the three great phases of every religious action: Expectation, Suggestion, and Initiation” (Mythologies 109).
According to Barthes, Graham’s approach followed “the best traditions of such spectacles…by making itself desired in order to exist all the more readily afterward” (109) and we can see the same dynamic at work in the genius of Gary Vee.
In Gary Vee’s use of click-bait titles like “99% of People Need to Start Asking This Question,” an expectation is created. Vaynerchuk understands the power of the insider-outsider dynamic. In a world of rampant conspiracy theories, there’s never been more cache in the notion that a secret interior exists, an in-group, an empowered elite. Video taglines like this one play on that notion, creating an expectation for insider status, a ticket to life behind the curtain. This is the expectation Barthes was talking about.
If “99% of People Need to Start Asking This Question,” only one percent is already asking it. Join Gary Vee and he will bring you into that elite 1%. If you didn’t know that this elite group existed before you saw the tagline, you know it now. If you didn’t know there was a powerful secret question that stands as the key to professional fulfillment and achievement, now you know.
If you didn’t know how to create a desire where a moment before there was none, well, ask Gary Vee. He’s got that all figured out.
By means of implication, signification, and carefully crafted self-presentation, Gary Vee manages to describe success as a very specific form of self-actualization that moves beyond the material and into the realm of the spiritual. This is suggestion.
This becomes obvious fairly quickly if you spend a few minutes watching Gary Vee’s YouTube channel. It’s not about money, per se. But there is a distinct suggestion that self-actualization is not just a key to success and wealth. Self-actualization is fused with success and wealth. They are a single composite. Achieving one means achieving all in a sort of alchemical transcendence.
Gary Vee doesn’t leave the expectation and suggestion as abstract promises. In his shows on YouTube, Gary Vee talks directly to his Millennial and Gen Z acolytes, conferring on them not just a message of self-actualization but also a status as the special elect. He gives individuals one-on-one attention, putting them on the screen with him. This is initiation.
It’s worth noting that the viewer is not explicitly invited to recognize the spiritual element of Gary Vee’s vision. Vaynerchuk uses the language of business. He uses the symbolism of materiality. He often offers concrete advice on specific actions to take. Yet all the while, he is creating a desire for a remarkable level of self-actualization — something that comes close to the epiphanic, the sublime.
Gary Vee is selling a spiritual vision dressed up like the American Dream.
It’s Not Salvation
Self-actualization, for Gary Vee himself, is manifested in a very specific form of self-revelation.
He’s a social media guru. Outside of the term “entrepreneur,” this is the tag most commonly associated with him.
And it’s a term that demands we resist the natural urge to read his persona in the light of the revivalist preacher. He is selling something, but it’s not salvation. Not exactly.
What does he want for his viewers? What bounty is promised in his Barthian suggestion?
Vaynerchuk got his start as a wine seller in New Jersey, using social media to create a brand and a following that eventually opened out into a cottage industry of personality for Gary Vee. He writes and sells advice books now. He makes video after video for his YouTube channel. He gives speeches.
Nowhere does he tell people how to sell wine. And while Gary Vee obviously sells books, he doesn’t charge people for the advice he gives in his videos.
Coscarelli quotes Vaynerchuk as saying, “I don’t want to be anybody’s Tony Robbins […] I’m so much more. I don’t charge any money from anyone — that’s not my business.” This is authentic and true. But, still, he is selling something.
Please forgive the cliché: Gary Vee is selling himself. He is selling the idea of Gary Vee. He is promoting an ethic that happens to be identical to his own image.
That image: a man fully engaged with life, taking on challenges, acquiring wealth, able to joke and say he doesn’t care if he does or doesn’t buy the New York Jets. And able to mean it.
He doesn’t come off as happy-go-lucky. He’s amped and ornery. He doesn’t want to say he has been lucky or stumbled into a charmed life. He’s not selling his own magic. He’s selling his grind.
This is the tricky part. In one sense, Vaynerchuk’s accomplishment is being willing to work hard for a long time and to believe that this work is deeply personal, that work and identity are one and the same.
As Vaynerchuk would put it, that’s crushing it. But to most of us that is “grind.” It’s also magic. It’s a trick of the mind.
It may be the highest truth for many people, but it’s not the coffee-mug-ism it seems at first blush.
Vaynerchuk is the person he says he is. He isn’t putting on a show. He refuses mystery. He rejects mystification along with excuses.
The irony that emerges is a difficult one. His message, in short, is that people can achieve success through self-realization — by becoming and being fully themselves. But his method is limited to showing people who he is.
Achieving the Alchemy
While mantras like this one may seem like a familiar self-help credo, they are only half the Gary Vee story: “There no longer has to be a difference between who you are and what you do.”
This seems like the core metaphysical principle in Vaynerchuk’s philosophy, the one that fuses the Personal with the Professional, but it is subtended with a “grind” mentality.
In his 2018 book Crushing It!, Gary Vee gives this idea full expression:
“You’re going to go through a time where you’re not going to make any money. It’s not going to be a week, it’s not going to be a month, it’s not going to be one year. It’s going to be years. And during that time, if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out. That is something that people don’t understand when they hear, ‘Follow your passion.’ They hear rainbows, unicorns, bullshit. But the truth of it is that it’s important, because if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re going to be that much more likely to quit when shit’s hard.”
There is a hard lesson in this. Hard, not because it is complicated, but hard because it’s apparently so simple.
How does one perform the task of eliminating the difference between the Personal and the Professional? How do you manage that alchemy?
Can you find the answer on YouTube?
