Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Pas­sion by Gary Vayn­er­chuk is for sure writ­ten by a moti­va­tional speaker; how­ever, it was also writ­ten by a phenomenally-successful self-made busi­ness­man and social media maven. Rare is the moti­va­tional busi­ness book with an actual flight plan and pre-flight check list.

The book was writ­ten by dic­ta­tion, is very spoken-word and acces­si­ble, and ends up mix­ing cock­sured­ness with earnest­ness in such a way that is very appealing.

What makes this poten­tially hubris­tic book work is that Gary throws open all the win­dows, doors, clos­ets, and cab­i­nets in his life and his busi­ness, reveal­ing his entire com­ing up, his rela­tion­ship with busi­ness, his pas­sion for sports and for find­ing unful­filled mar­kets and ful­fill­ing them.

What is revealed is that there is no overnight super­stars and you can­not make money fast and that the real world doesn’t goIPO 18-months after launch. He reveals that you need to roll up your sleeves and go for the long haul and in reward you’ll prob­a­bly be able to make fifty-grand for all your hard work — but, doing what you love and what pops you up first light and puts you to bed just before dawn.

Even though this book will moti­vate you to ignite your pas­sion, here’s some insight into some of top­ics based on chap­ter titles: 1: Pas­sion is Every­thing, 2: Suc­cess is in Your DNA, 3: Build Your Per­sonal Brand, 4: A Whole New World, 5: Cre­ate Great Con­tent, 6: Choose Your Plat­form, 7: Keep it Real … Very Real, 8: Cre­ate Com­mu­nity: Dig­ging Your Inter­net Trench, 9: The Best Mar­ket­ing Strat­egy Ever, 10: Make the World Lis­ten, 11: Start Mon­e­tiz­ing, 12: Roll with It, 13: Legacy is Greater Than Cur­rency, Con­clu­sion: The Time is Now, the Mes­sage is For­ever, Appen­dix A: Did You For­get Any­thing?, Appen­dix B: Five Busi­ness Ideas I Won’t Get to — They’re Yours.

The book starts with three rules that set the tone and are echoed again and again through­out the book: Love you fam­ily, work super­hard (sic), and live your passion.

What Gary offers in very casual, spo­ken, every­man prose is the answers to how to chan­nel your pas­sion, what real hus­tle looks like, how to attract adver­tis­ers, why build­ing a per­sonal brand through social media is cru­cial, why your busi­ness should be build on your per­sonal brand, how social net­work­ing can find your next finan­cial oppor­tu­nity, how com­pa­nies should use social net­works to share their story and brand, how to build legacy — worth more than money — to build a suc­cess­ful brand.

One thing I found inter­est­ing — and unique — in a moti­va­tional busi­ness book is that Vayn­er­chuk spent the entire book insist­ing on a long-game. He tends to offer the sort of advice my grand­fa­ther might offer: take care of your fam­ily and make sure your fam­ily and you are happy, through hard work and through devot­ing your life to your career and your busi­ness — build it up and keep work­ing your entire life, if that’s what it takes.

Do not buy the house in order to flip it, buy the house to live in it, restore it, and give it to your children.

This is sober­ing advice from some­one who often sounds like he’s try­ing to get us rich quick.  In other words, I am amazed and impressed by this moral moti­va­tional trea­tise that is actu­ally anti­thet­i­cal to most mod­ern passion-fueled moti­va­tional busi­ness books.

The book is almost entirely self-centered.  The brands of Gary Vayn­er­chuk, WineLi­braryTV, Wine Library NJ, Vayn­er­Me­dia and the Vayn­er­chuk fam­ily are the source of all of the nar­ra­tives, which is fine because that’s what Gary knows and what Mark Twain rec­om­mends, “write what you know.”  I know that while I couldn’t help but see this self-made man and think about that hack­neyed NYC joke,

Q: How do you make 50-million dol­lars?
A: Start with 5-million dollars

When Gary tells of how he turned his father’s $5M liquor store into a $50M wine super-store, but even these con­tra­dic­tions don’t work against the nar­ra­tive and good advice because the­Vayn­er­chuks are a very tight clan and Gary was there all the way from the begin­ning and the begin­ning includes emi­grat­ing from Belarus in 1979 as a fam­ily, immi­grat­ing to Queens with noth­ing, his dad take a job as a stock boy in a liquor store, and then buy­ing the store, buy­ing another store, build­ing a busi­ness, and pass­ing his DNA of work and fam­ily to his son, Gary.

This really is an Amer­i­can rags-to-riches story and Gary is a rare bird for expos­ing him­self so com­pletely and shar­ing his suc­cesses and chal­lenges with a great deal of earnestness.

I must admit that I am not a wine con­nois­seur so I never cot­toned to watch­ing Gary Vayn­er­chuk (@garyvee) every week on his WineLi­braryTV video blog. Shame on me because I really never got to know “Gary Vee” until I heard him speak at the end of August at the Grav­ity Sum­mit in Boston at Har­vard. It was then when I asked him for a pre­view of his upcom­ing book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.

I was inspired by his talk (watch it on YouTube, part 1 , part 2).  Gary moti­vated and delighted me with his pas­sion and old-world advice: love your fam­ily, work hard, and fol­low your pas­sion.  If you like his keynote and you feel his pas­sion and if you feel your heart race a lit­tle just think­ing about dump­ing your cur­rent job and crush­ing it through pas­sion, blood, and sweat, this book’s for you.

If you don’t end up falling in love with Gary, though, this might not be the book for you.

This is a very per­sonal book that will help break every­thing down for you. He doesn’t just tell you that you can do it, Gary actu­ally breaks down his entire brand, all the suc­cesses he has had, and all of the processes and habits and hard work he does — yes, he even gets to all of his email via gary@vaynermedia.com (try it) — and tell the reader which social net­works to use, which video-sharing sites (he likes Vid­dler because the sig­nal to noise ration is bet­ter), and the kind of detail peo­ple will find reward­ing such as how to mon­e­tize, how to find spon­sors and adver­tis­ing dol­lars, and how it is essen­tial not to obsess about tra­di­tional media met­rics, ana­lyt­ics, and web site hits — to think longer-term — not how many peo­ple visit but who.

Gary saves a gift for the end Crush It!  Appen­dix A offers what I like to call a “pre-flight check-list” wherein he cre­ates a list (a wine-reduction, if you will) of all the steps that you should go through and check off — 21 steps you really should take on your way towards build­ing your own per­sonal brand.

Hell, the book is wee — only 137 pages — and I read it in one-hour at the gym on the machines.  Was it worth my hour?  Well, for $13.49 on Ama­zon it’s a no-brainer.  Even for the $19.99 listed on the dust jacket and what you’ll pay at your local book­store, it still will get your juices going and I am told that these days any­thing that can get your juices going in this econ­omy is price­less.Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

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