The Whole Game Is Self Awareness

Friends: Some recent, random thoughts over the past several weeks…

There’s a lot of people that have a very happy life making 230,000 a year and live within those means. And there’s unlimited people that push themselves from 230 to 1 million, and they don’t live within those means and they hate their life. You don’t have to grind that thing to a million bucks doing stuff you don’t love anymore. Don’t want to do, don’t feel ethical about. There’s so many people really happy at the former, not the latter.

I grew up in the dirt. I have friends that are true 9 to 5, true Budweiser at the bar at five, softball team 6 to 7, wrestling three nights a week. And literally happier than friends that I have that are making 45 million a year.

When I say patience, I don’t mean complacency. There’s a reason there’s a different word called laziness, a different word called passiveness. There are different words in the dictionary.

The reason I pitch patience so much is, a lot of young men, a lot of young women, they want things too fast and they get sloppy. We know people through our lives who’ve compromised their morals because of lack of patience. They’ve made a strategic over-leveraging thing that really set them back. Or insecurity led them to wanting to have something to close the gaps of the emotional holes they had.

I get frustrated when a 27-year-old is willing to borrow money on a credit card and buy a cryptocurrency hoping to hit the lottery. A lot of people that are running around the world today are really much closer to gambling than they are to investing. They’re much more into financial over-leveraging than they are to operating and building.

I want you to be high risk 20 to 30, because that’s when you can really be high risk. You probably don’t have the family. You don’t have the responsibilities you have later in your life.

When you lack the patience in the macro, you go into compromising your moral compass and you go into gambling behavior, not business building and investing behavior. That’s what I’m trying to mitigate.

I don’t think people understand how much of an actual day-to-day businessman I am, and not a content creator.

I have six or seven active businesses that are generating between eight and nine figures of top-line revenue, where I am either the active CEO, active co-founder, or active chairman of the board. VaynerX, VaynerMedia — that is a $400-plus million a year revenue business, and I am the actual hand-in-hand to the CEO. If you look at my calendar, that is taking up most of my time.

What happened during Covid was: I went Gary Vaynerchuk, operator. I made a switch — 2014 to 2019, I was doing a lot of the content stuff. Most of the businesses were much smaller. Post Covid I got so accustomed to operating 12 hours a day. I stopped traveling as much. I stopped speaking as much. Probably the best chapter of my career these last five years is interesting because I was so far ahead on personal brand that I definitely took a little bit of a foot off the pedal the last three, four years to build the operating business empire. I was able to still sustain and accelerate even though I wasn’t feeding my content machine with as much fresh content. I just became more strategic.

It’s more internet and electricity and the automobile. Like, it’s big. It’s not derivative. The last thing that was like this, in my opinion, was the iPhone — the mobile device that was a true computer that changed everything.

No one reading this should not already be actively using AI. Whether that’s Claude, whether that’s Higgsfield, whether that’s Runway, whether that’s Nano Banana, whether that’s Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity — everybody who’s listening should be dabbling. You don’t need to be an AI wizard or on it all the time. But you need to be tasting it. It’s kind of like everybody who didn’t use the internet in ‘96, ‘97, ‘98, ‘99, 2000. They lost in opportunity.

The difference with AI is it’s moving faster than the internet did. Because it’s building on top of the internet, on top of social. When the internet came along, it had to establish all of its foundations of websites and browsers and all this. We have a compounded effect now.

Please do not put your head in the sand. Do not use a political ideological point of view on this technology to really make the excuse that you don’t want to put in the work because you’re tired and finished, or you’re lazy and unmotivated, or you’re indifferent, or you’re scared. This is an inevitable outcome. Since the advent of the wheel, and the car, and the radio, and the TV…technology laughs at humans’ opinions of it.

I’m very bullish on analog. Here’s how I think about it. It’s 2026. In 14 years it’ll be 2040. In 14 years when it’s 2040, I think it’s going to feel more like 2065. The speed of technology is about to really explode. Which means building businesses that were built in 1965 is the opportunity.

We’re about to go into a barbell as we go more extreme AI and digital. The big upside is in analog. Sporting events, live concerts, running clubs, hiking, meditation resorts, hotels, restaurants, experiences. Physical, not digital. Community.

It’s tribalism. It’s like sports. This morning I ran into 10 people wearing Knicks stuff. It’s like we’re family.

Those are the businesses to go into. Those who have businesses, you need to be able to create those experiences for your consumers, your customers, your employees, your vendors, whoever they are. Because everything else is going to be pretty even. It’s the experience you can create, the emotions you can generate.

The reason I don’t think I get burned out or tired or fatigued or like, fuck this shit, is because it’s not that important to me.

I am truly the byproduct of poor immigrants. The propaganda in my home from my great grandmother and my grandmother and my mother and father was — everyone just died so early in the Soviet Union. My mom lost her mom at five. My dad lost his dad at 15. Nobody lived to fucking 65. Everybody was drinking vodka.

People don’t know that I were born in the Soviet Union at a time that it was like North Korea, not Iran. Today, if you’re born in Iran, you can leave Iran. If you’re born in North Korea today, you’re in jail. You’re not allowed to leave. I was born in a place where you were not allowed to leave.

Because of socialism, this is why so many Cubans and Russians get scared when socialism gets thrown around. No one does shit. Everyone’s depressed, everybody’s apathetic, everyone’s indifferent. Everyone’s stealing from the government because the government owns everything. It’s just a sucky life. The cliche of Russians drinking vodka — if you understood the deeper reason, the suppression is so extreme that alcohol was the escapism from your real life.

I’ve been kind of playing with house money since I was 18. The goal was never financial or fame. The reason I love entrepreneurship and why I’ve always done what I’ve done is, I just want optionality. I don’t want someone telling me what to do.

You can only act on the internet for so long. Eventually you get away with it and you can even die without people really knowing you. But I’ve always been very big on: I’d rather the 1% of winners knew the truth about me than the 99% of people that are by default cynical, envious, jealous. I’m not mad at them. I’m actually deeply empathetic to them.

I do get great joy out of knowing what’s being said behind my back by people that know me. That is my North Star.

I’m a giver by nature. I have probably a flaw — a vulnerability around asking. It’s that immigrant stuff: no complaining, do everything yourself. I’ve navigated the last 25 years incredibly built on not asking and trying to give. My mom did a great job.

Deep down, real talk… ultimately, I’m just a good boy. That’s actually where my self-confidence comes from. I don’t know that I’m any smarter than anybody else.

I met Wayne Dyer when I was very young. At the end of it, he gave me a bunch of compliments about what I was going to do in the world. And he said something like, it’s not because you’re talented or smart or you talk really well, although you do — I just think you have a beautiful heart and great intentions. He said: Would you do me a favor all your life? Attach your confidence to your intentions, not your abilities or your results. And I’ve held on to that all my life.

Big shout out to all the parents. Be very careful what you cheer for in your house.

My mother grounded me with my bad grades, but she didn’t make me think I was lesser than because of it. She showed me accountability. If you’re at home right now and you’re fortunate that your child’s good looking — if you constantly are reinforcing that, that is where their self-worth will come in. If you are constantly only focused on the fact that they’re a great athlete, that is where their identity will mold. The great mistake most parents are making is you’re putting getting good grades on a pedestal, which is why for 100 years we’ve created so many workers — because they want to go into systems that reward them every quarter. They live for getting a good review and getting a raise every year.

A good report card was nothing for my mother. Her pompoms came out when I opened the door for the elderly lady. My whole life, all I heard is: you have a golden heart, you have a golden heart. That got so entrenched that I myself also only resonate with who I am as a human.

I’m not Mother Teresa. I’ve made plenty of missteps. My intent is off the charts. I’ve never wanted, needed out of insecurity to do something wrong by someone. Most of my missteps were lack of candor because I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings by telling them the truth.

Give thought to what you’re putting on a pedestal in your household. Your children will find their identity in that. You need to be thoughtful about what you put on as a North Star.

My dad lived long enough to see me get wealthy. Honestly, he could care less. He cares about deeper things: How are you treating people? Are you giving it away? Are you calling your sisters? Are you being kind?

I live to make my parents proud…I would argue that the foundation of my humility is knowing that I had nothing to do with it. To me, I’m the byproduct of my parents. I get a lot of pride in my businesses, the employees I’ve shaped, and the things I’m trying to build. But even that is a struggle. The thing that has kept me uncomfortably grounded is that knowing.

The whole game is based on self-awareness. The whole game.

People like you and me, we went through a whole plethora of hypotheses and feelings in our youth, in our teens, in our early 20s. A lot of it felt like you could do anything and everything. Then even if you knew you couldn’t, people like me, I was okay with it. A different version of me would try to prove that they could. That was a waste of time.

The first thing I would tell everyone about content — and then I’m going to level it up to life — is: who are you versus who do you wish you were? I wish I were Jalen Brunson. I wish I were Joe Namath. I wish I were a professional athlete. But by fourth grade I realized I was more likely to buy a sports team than play for one.

Audio, video, and written word are the three core communication frameworks. There’s drawing and animation and some others, but the core three are written word, audio, and video. One of the things that separates me is I do all of them at scale across every platform.

Know how you make content best, and make it about things you know or love. Know or love. The biggest mistake people make is they try to make content around where they think the money is. So many people — the crypto guy, four years ago the real estate guy, seven years ago the funnels guy, 13 years ago the affiliate guy. Then it’s the cannabis guy, then the wellness guy, then the fucking collectibles guy.

What do you know, whether that’s sports, sci-fi, cooking, travel, science? And what do you love? Now, God willing, if you’re both knowledgeable and passionate about the same thing, that’s where you can win as a content creator.

If you really know Boston sports and really love it, you will wake up every day for three years making a podcast no one’s listening to, to get to the other side. I did 150 episodes of wine. Nobody gave a fuck. And by the way, it wasn’t like it is today where that’s the cost of entry. I was pioneering when there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I just knew I had to it.

You need to live life for you, not to impress others.

Only you know. Even as well as people know us, there’s so much no one knows. My mom knows me better than anyone on earth. There’s still things she doesn’t know. There are certain things a human keeps to themselves.

If you lean into self-awareness — you know what a lot of people do out of insecurity and lack of self-awareness? They peacock in front when they’re not that guy or girl. The issue with that is, the winners — and I feel like I’m one of them, and when I say winner, I mean emotionally intelligent people — can sniff you out. They know you’re pretending, and then you’ve already lost before you started.

Imagine getting to the end of your life and you pretended the whole way there. Almost everyone does that.

Most people are fronting. People are insecure. They want outside validation. Most people are stuck in sixth grade their whole lives.

Final thing. When you actually give, it means you’re giving without expectation. So many people who have wanted to give to us — they’re making a deposit for the withdrawal. They were manipulating the relationship, not giving.

Doing the right thing leads to the right thing. But when you’re in a place where you don’t need it to happen, then you’re fucking completely, utterly unstoppable.