- [Zak] I hate complaining.
This advice is for the complainers.
I'm not upset with you play video games all day or
watch Netflix all night.
I'm mad at you if you're doing that and you're baffled why
you're not making more money and living your dream.
If you're happy and content, you've won.
But if you're complaining it means you haven't won yet and
you should stop complaining and do some thing about it instead.
Someone I look up to most in the world,
tied with you Dad, is my mother.
Hands down--
- [Gary] Gotta make dad feel good.
Dad will be mad.
- [Zak] Hands down one of the most intriguing thing about my
mother is her inability to complain.
It's probably one of my favorite traits that
she's passed on to me.
I find it incredibly attractive and it's a quality that I adore
in my wife as well.
It's even something I to try and instill in my children because
I think complaining is ugly.
Personally, I don't complain.
If you look at my tweets historically there is to maybe
there's two or three complaints.
You'll never catch me complaining--
- You know what?
Put in there except for the New York Jets
which I complain a lot.
- You'll never catch me complaining about not seeing my
kids enough or not having enough leisure time because if I had an
issue with those things I would do something about it.
There is no shifting into the complaining zone--
- Or you know, and here's an important point, or I would
recognize that I have the ability to do
something about it.
Because that's the part.
- There's no shifting in the complaint zone when
I encounter an issue that I'm not happy with.
I'm very "put your head down" when
it comes to problem-solving.
For me, it's about assessing the problem, figuring it out and
then going directly back on the offense.
Complaining is defense.
To me, the only thing that is acceptable to complain about are
the things you can't control like the unfortunate health of
yourself or your loved ones are some other unforeseen tragedy.
I want to clarify just to set the record straight if you're
complaining about anything then you need to audit yourself.
You can's just go watch "House of Cards."
You can't play ball all day.
You can't go to ballet shows, you got to work to fix it.
- I want to add stuff.
You can't sit there and ponder what if I had rich parents,
I grew up in a better neighborhood,
I made that investment,
I went to that school.
- You got to work to fix it.
There are so many people reading this
right now who are complaining.
People love to complaint because it is easy.
Executing to fix those problems, on the other hand, is hard.
Look, I understand that many of you
have student loans and mortgages
and a rough time working two jobs
while trying to spend time with your family.
But are you happy?
If you are then you've won because you don't actually have
anything to complain about.
The real problem is that there are so many millions of people
who are unhappy and are just sitting around complaining
playing Madden for hours not actually trying to solve the
very things they're complaining about.
- I want to paint a couple more pictures.
Playing Madden for hours, or having their 18th dinner with
their other complaining friend and complaining back and forth
to each other.
Like one big god damn fucking game of seesaw complaining.
Keep the fucking part out.
- In today's world we're so ingrained to
expect instant gratification--
- By the way, real quick on that, right?
I can literally think of family member and friends right now who
literally have that one or two person in their lives and
that's their entire friendship.
Their entire friendship is predicated on they go out every
six weeks and they literally ping-pong back and forth about
how much they hate their sister-in-law and how much they
got screwed by their mom. Right?
- [Zak] It's cathartic in a way.
- [Gary] It's not cathartic, it's enabling.
It's enabling the bad behavior.
People have, yeah.
Listen, everybody should dump their stress out.
I believe in therapy.
I believe in a great HR department.
I believe in all that stuff but it's actually enablement.
People have friendships predicated on the
enablement of negativity.
Well that's how I set it up.
That is how I set it up.
- [Zak] It is. - Go ahead.
- [Zak] In today's world we're so ingrained to
expect instant gratification--
- [Gary] By the way real quick, on the counterpoint to your
point, my mom is absolutely the person once every three years
where I have to dump something that's where I go and she to me.
It can be the foundation of a great friendship but I'm telling
you like I've been observing.
All this traveling has allowed me to not only to peep at
people's phones but, fucking, it's unbelievable if you really
get your nosiness into somebody's conversation.
An ungodly amount of percentage is "I got screwed."
Everybody got screwed.
Including, by the way, I got screwed I got into a rich family
and I'm not that hungry and I don't know what it's like and
my parents spoiled me too much.
Literally you can make up anything for anything.
Born with nothing, complain.
Born with everything, complain.
Alright, go ahead.
- Patience is real and so is hard work.
Sometimes that hard work might not even be as
terrible as you think.
You need money? We live in a 24/7 world where you can make
money in your underwear.
Think about it.
If there's one thing I want you to learn from reading this
it's that complaining has zero value.
Looking at the negative, seeing the glass as half empty and
complaining are some of the biggest wastes of time a
human being can engage in.
Instead tackle the problem head-on.
Assess it, see what you can do about it and then do just that.
"Woe is me" is truly one of the biggest things that can stand in
the way of success both professionally and personally.
That is the end.
- [Gary] Love it.
What are we going title it?
A complaint about complaining?
(laughter)
- [India] I hate complaining.
- [Zak] I don't know. We couldn't think of it.
- The only thing I'll ever complain about is complaining.
- Yeah, I love that.
- [Zak] Boom! Back at it again!
- How about "One of the few things I complain about:
Complaining."
Got it?
- Yep.
- My Facebook copy on this is
"If there's truly one move that
I've seen that's held back my friends, contemporaries and
family, it's complaining.
Please read this article carefully."
And then a whole separate thing
"And make sure that" actually, leave it at that.
Leave it at that. BSU?
- [Zak] BSU we have complaining is defense,
complaining is unattractive,
complaining is easy, executing is hard.
If you're happy--
- [Gary] Complaining is easy, executing is hard.
Is that yours? Nice, congrats.
Are we done?
- [Zak] Yep. We're done. - Cool.
Now to you guys we need to title this content on content on
content, the infrastructure of a true strategy.
Look, I am so proud of what is just transpiring here it just
hit me as I turn to you guys.
I've created a couple of pillars, right, this complaining
was I guess I don't know part of a DailyVee or an episode--
- [Zak] Just a bunch of different things.
- The thought of having DailyVee and The #AskGaryVee Show that
we're about the film and we're about to and I said Staphon put
the camera on this.
This is literally in motion the strategy which is when you have
something at the top and this is something all of you need to
think about, especially if you start allocating resources to
it, 'cause for 7 or 8 years I made content by myself.
There was not all of these attractive and smart people it
was just me doing my thing.
But if you're lucky enough to take the next step and so many
of you have emailed me and said that you want to have your
DRock, you want to have your India, you've got dollars,
you realize taking home an extra $40,000 might not be worth it if
you want to make more money in the long term.
You want to start investing.
My number one thing is I don't think that I talk
enough about my strategies.
I kinda talk about my work ethic and I don't talk
enough about my brain.
This is something I brought it up a year or two ago and didn't
do anything about it. So, here I am.
This is strategy, me understanding that if I made an
investment into core pillars The #AskGaryVee Show and DailyVee
that then I could empower my team to consume that, see what
is the content of the moment and then create content around it.
So what you just saw, you've heard me talk about but this is
how we do it.
Usually on the phone because I'm traveling a bunch but you just
saw, this is how an article is made.
All those words are things that I've said synthesized by the
team down with grammar and commas and some leeway and then
you see I listen, I tweak it, I alter it, we come up with copy.
We come up with a picture on that I'll put up on Instagram
that links to it, we come up with titles and
the Facebook copy.
What's even more crazy is that is our normal content
on content creation.
Look what just happened, I just made a third piece of content.
The content of the show and all the content created
the article now I'm creating this content.
This content this is meta-, meta-, meta-.
Meta-cubed, not even squared.
What you just saw is my attempt to continue to create new
content for you guys.
This is kind of a glimpse into our process of how we take what
we do in the show and turn it into articles.
So many of the big podcasters out there that I've been up the
shows of, when I audit their content, right, Pat Flynn,
Lewis Howes, you know, Art of Charm,
they're not producing enough,
in my opinion, articles that they could be doing all day long.
All my interviews alone could have been four Medium pieces,
one clip could have been a SoundCloud clip, another clip of
my audio for three minutes could've been turned with some
visual with on top of it.
I believe that there are clearly 2 to 7, and that such an
arbitrary number, enormous amount of content that are
coming from the big piece of content that sits on the top.
It's the hacking of the mothership content into micro
content and even if you look at gif even though I know that
people want to or Stunwin it was jif.
Gif or jif however you want to call it, structure right,
almost all that content comes from bigger pieces of media.
Chopped, funny and then a lot of times, look at the success all
our content on Facebook.
Our 20 million organic reach two videos that we've had, well one
was made for it, my little college rant.
The other one with a 1:30 from my Cha interview, there is so
much more opportunity and there's not an accident behind
the fact that my Facebook fan page has gone from 500 to
725,000 fans literally in the last three weeks.
Let's put that in to context.
All the years five, six, seven to get to 500 and the last three
weeks to grow 50%.
It's our understanding of how do we do video content, caption it
properly, and all stuff like this that has led the way.
I hope you enjoyed a little look behind the curtain.
I hope you take a step back and think about hmmm, I'm doing this
one thing or hmmm how do I create a weekly podcast,
a daily video show that can lead to micro-content, other pieces of
content, what I would call sawdust.
Fascinated by sawdust.
The byproducts of what you do. Right?
The byproduct of cutting 2x4s leads to sawdust, somebody
realized one day, let me package that up and sell it.
I'm fascinated, fascinated by that.
Figure it out for yourself.
Cool. All right.
Cool, let's do the show.