3 Lessons from Gary Vee

Recently I attended the National Achievers Congress 2019: Unlock Your Potential organized by Success Resources. Some of their keynote speakers are Gary Vee and Grant Cordone. Both of them are great in their own way.

If you don't know who Gary Vee or Gary Vaynerchuk, is someone who have the authority in the social media platform. He shared a lot of wisdom in many platform to spread out some message and building personal branding. The speech was awesome and indeed many lessons that I picked up. And today I am going to share with you 3 things that I learn from him during the session:

1. The reason why people cannot be a good leader is because they have selfish expectation to their employee

Most of the time people will assume when they are a leader, they have the rights to ask their people to do something for them. That is not true. It might sound counter-intuitive, but when we are a leader our role is to serve our people.

We heard a lot of cases that people resigned because of their MANAGER. That is because when people are being promoted as a manager, they tend to think that they deserve the position and ask people to do things as per their expectation. The employee is being paid and they are obligated to do as being told. Well that might be true towards a certain extend, but in today's world not anymore.

The role as a leader is to serve. We need to serve our people first, then as a result, our people will want to reciprocate the relationship by wanting to contribute. One of the way to do that is to understand what our people want. Give them what they wanted, and they will give us what they need. (What they wanted is not always what they say they wanted, we have to go underneath to really understand what they wanted).

Lesson 1: When we are a leader, always serve our people.



2. Pick A Decision - There is No Such Thing as Right or Wrong Decision

Most of the time, when we have two different options - and two of them have some valid reason to pursue, we tend to over analyse and not making any decision. The thing is when we have 2 options that equally good, when we pick A, we have no idea what will B look like. Vice-versa. The point is, making a decision is more important than afraid of making the wrong one which ends up not making decision at all.

Because, if we pick the right decision we just have to carry on. If we picked the wrong decision, we just need to adjust and make correction. That is far better than not making any decision.

I was once having a conversation with one of my friend. She shared that most of the time investors prefered to do business with Singaporean over Malaysian - and the main reason is Malaysian is very hard to make decisions. Our culture, for any decision we are too afraid of making the wrong one, so we want to ask our boss first, or our parents, friends and relatives.

And someone told me a story that someone once asked a wise man, "how to make the right decision". He answer, it is "wisdom". "How to get wisdom?" And he answered, "by having experience." and he asked "how do we have experience?" The wise man said, "by making the wrong decision."

Lesson 2: Just make that decision. Making wrong decision is better than not making any decision at all.



Always provide value when engaging in Social Media

Gary is a strong advocator for everyone to utilize social media as a platform to establish personal branding. Because with social media, all of us will have an equal opportunity as compared to the traditional media. But most of the time, people in social media wanted to sell something. They wanted people to buy-buy-buy, and that will chase people away.

To engage in social media is to provide content. Provide quality content and provide people with value. The idea is to give-give-give then you ask. Then you give-give-give then you ask. And when you give, give it full heartedly without any expectation for return. If you give with an intention for people to buy something from you, that too will chase people away. And I love his philosophy that in social media he is not interested to making sales, instead to build a brand. Because if you have a strong brand you don't have to sell so hard because people will come to you.

Lesson 3: Always give value first and continuously giving value to others without any expectation to take from anyone.


These are the 3 lessons that I learned during the session. Hope you find it useful. Let me know what do you think about it in the comment.

#johanirwan