The Internet is packed with rubbish, as every web user knows. It’s also a cornucopia of opportunity for anyone willing to do what’s necessary to succeed.

Gary Vaynerchuk saw this opportunity early in the life of the internet, and turned a $3 million brick-and-mortar wine business into a $60 million enterprise by using his internet marketing wizardry. 

His 2016 book, #ASKGARYVEE: One Entrepreneur’s take on Leadership, Social Media & Self-Awareness is at first a bit confusing, then mesmerizing. It’s about marketing, entrepreneurship, sales, and more. In Gary Vee’s career, it’s all in one raging torrent. 

The book is a brilliant piece of entertaining opportunism, covering any issue Gary Vee has discussed with his audience: How to become a leading digital marketer and entrepreneur, how much he respects his mom and dad and loves his wife and children, and his great desire to buy the New York Jets.

#ASKGARYVEE shows engaging genius on all fronts. Gary Vee is a long-time proponent and user of internet video broadcasting. For years he has given advice and guidance to those willing to stick their necks out and ask questions on his YouTube channel. #ASKGARYVEE is simply an edited transcript of those programs, organized into catechetical chapters with questions from the audience and answers from Gary Vee.

It’s a bestseller. The answers are often brilliant and almost guaranteed to entertain. Considering how the text was generated, it’s obviously opportunistic.

I bet every marketer and entrepreneur who reads #ASKGARYVEE will think “I wish I’d thought of that.” More to the point, how many would have the chutzpah to carry it off? One caveat, however. If you search for his videos online, be prepared for sailor talk. Gary Vee, CEO of VaynerMedia.com, can be very pungent. Search for his newest material on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/AskGaryVee/, as he now prefers that platform. 

Where does he get his immense drive? He’s been driven since he started his baseball card business as a teenager and made thousands. He keeps proving he can out-hustle and out-produce the competition. 

The Vaynerchuks immigrated from the old U.S.S.R. (Belarus) in 1978 when Gary Vee was three. At age 42 he has four New York Times bestsellers to his name, and his net worth might be $160 million or even more. When he says stop making excuses and do the hard work required to achieve, we might want to listen.

He grew up like lots of other kids in New Jersey. He’s a first-generation success story. But he will tell you to your face: If you think the main reason for success is being an immigrant, you just don’t get it. Sacrifice and hard work get it. Gary Vee existed on an annual income of $30,000 or less for five years to build a wine business.

He is an advocate for the tried and true value of deferred gratification. He even says, “we’ve become too entitled.” Amen, brother.

Along with advocating passion and hustle, Gary Vee sounds like your friendly office drill instructor when he gets going on execution. “Execute” is a word that rockets off the page like a Nolan Ryan fastball. That’s because he is committed to “clouds and dirt.”

Clouds are “high-end philosophy and beliefs that are at the heart of everything … they are the huge picture, the everything. They are not goals.” Clouds are what you believe, your deepest values, your world view.

The dirt is the details of executing, not just getting into the weeds but digging under the weeds to become the best practitioner you can be. Between clouds and dirt there is the murky area where you aren’t truly committed to belief or execution.

Gary Vee says push on both edges – up to the clouds and down in the dirt - because the “middle sucks.”

If you really want to succeed in marketing, as an entrepreneur, in a startup or in sales, you must learn to H-U-S-T-L-E. As Gary Vee says, “Put down Clash of Clans. Binge-watch Game of Thrones or Walking Dead next year. And get to work.”

To hustle, he says “pounce on every opportunity … wake up before everybody else and work into the night … hustle until there’s not a single drop of juice left.”

Sounds exhausting, but Gary Vee explains how you can do it too, if you’re truly committed.

One of my favorite quotes from this book is “I promise you Goliath will never work as hard as you.” As the man says, get to work.   

Click here to see this story as it appears in the October 2017 issue of Modern Casting