Gary Vaynerchuck as postmodern Rabbi in an age of failing Christian leaders – part 1

I really don’t know where to begin with this one. I don’t really know where to take it. But it’s on my list of ideas, and I’ve actually been thinking about it a lot. I know this is going to be long, perhaps a tad meandering, and even if it sounds weird, or starts out getting all the relevant information into my reader’s minds, please just know that ultimately this will be an immensely personal series of posts that also happen to be slightly wacky and heady as well. I wanted to do a video essay with this one. It was going to be my breakout video essay on an otherwise defunked YouTube channel I have. I love video essays, especially TheNerdWriter, and I wanted to start doing one every other month, but I have a massive learning curve and I’m still getting used to being an American teacher in Asia. So I placed this idea on the back burner. I’m hoping that blogging about it will give it a bit more life.

First, Gary. If you don’t know who he is perhaps just Google him. (PS, I have a weird aversion to hyperlinks right now. I don’t know why, I’m sure it would be helpful to you, but at the moment I just want to write and publish.) I discovered him after moving across the country from Indiana to Oregon, after being accepted to a school I never attended because I started a full-time job and a full-time internship at the same time. Over time I was getting on-the-job training in web design, online marketing and more broadly in the world of entrepreneurship and tech. A new friend suggested Gary’s then newest book, The Thank You Economy, and sent me to his website to learn from “the master.” Gary is a Soviet immigrant with a natural talent for sales and self branding. He took over his father’s liquor store and built a very early eCommerce website selling wine that led to massive success. One of the ways he did it was through starting a wine tasting channel on YouTube where he took the posh culture of wine down to a laymen’s level and became a trusted authority in his field, landing spots on popular talk shows including one of my favorites, Conan O’Brien. From there he turned his marketing genius into a business and formed an agency, consulting and marketing for major clients. At present, he is also running a venture capital firm, investing in startups, and he is going really deep on a personal branding campaign with a new YouTube channel that somehow feels Truman show-ish creepy, while at the same time somehow always Truman show-ish inspiring also (my opinion anyway, I always watch DailyVee with a sense of feeling it’s strangely voyeuristic yet also helpful, more on this soon. Also, just a warning if you Google him, he cusses a lot.)

I have been devouring Gary’s content from 2011 onward. I don’t watch or read everything anymore, but I stay up to date on his major work. He did an interview a day in 2013 to anyone who contacted him and I got a very early spot. I blogged about it here, you can search my site for Gary and read it if you want (I can’t even bring myself to hyperlink my own site, it’s an illness, I’m sorry.) It was weird that he just called me like that. The dude is internet famous, business famous, tech famous and growing in mainstream fame day by day, and he just called me to answer some questions. So, I asked my top few questions before he was off the next thing, telling me to text him the link and he’d tweet my blog to his million followers. That’s exactly what happened. The next year I got married and was working at a web design agency in Portland, ORE and Gary came to do a book signing for his new work, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. It was immensely practical, all about content marketing, being generous with what you give away to your audience before you ever make your asks or hit them with sales pitches. It builds on his previous book, The Thank You Economy, with the notion that the internet has taken down the high class marketing tactics of a few channels with mass appeal, to be more like mom and pop operations with many channels and narrow appeal. Basically, the internet shortens the distance between producers and consumers, so act like you would in a small town where everybody knows everybody and reputation matters. Anyway, I met Gary there, at the wonderful Powell’s City of Books, got a photo, and got a book signed that I gave to my best friend because I’m a Kindle junkie who packs light. Beyond that Gary has tweeted back to me a few other times if I mention him. The first time was just a smiley face after I mentioned I read his book. Then right before his Portland book signing he asked if I would be there by tagging me on Twitter. Now he Snapchats like a boss, and asks for questions all the time, if you’re interested.

I promise I am not a Gary fanboy. To be honest I’m not sure I could be a still be the person I want to. I learned a lot from him at a key moment and have been impressed with his drive, openness, ethics and street smarts. I particularly enjoy his cultural insights. He says he’s not romantic about how money is made and he pays attention to what people are giving their attention to and predicting human behavior for the sake of sales and marketing. My favorite kinds of content from Gary are when shares insights on human behavior that have business implications. As a culturally curious Christian clergyman I’m always trying to take Gary’s insights and see them in a spiritual way. I don’t remember when this particular insight was made, but more than a year ago I believe I remember watching him discuss the youthification of culture, that consumer behavior was being influenced from the youth up for the first time. He loosely referenced data that revealed 40 year old mothers purchasing behavior having a direct correlation to their daughter’s influence. Naturally I began to consider my training and experience in religious institutions, the reality of similar phenomena there, and what it meant a little closer to my world. In fact, a year later when working at Logos Bible Software, I was talking to a very old Bible scholar who was recording an online course with us. He said that when he was a kid he was just an extra mouth to feed, of no real economic value to the family until he grew up. Now, when he is in a situation he doesn’t understand, especially related to technology, he looks for the youngest person in the room for help.

With all that in mind I found some recent developments in the way Gary began to share about his business very interesting. Not too long ago when discussing his work ethic and his company culture, he began to use a word to describe the essence of these things….”it’s religion baby.” This talk about making your entrepreneurial  lifestyle changes and choices based on religious level commitments and fervor have permeated Gary’s shtick for as long as I have been paying attention to him. But it wasn’t until recently that he was so clear about it. Coupled with this in one of his early Daily Vee’s (his Truman show) he cancelled an entire evening of meetings and events to sit Shiva for a deceased friend of the family, a rare showing of his practice of traditional religion as the son of Belarusian Jewish immigrants. Also, in another piece of content he talks about his intuition, and how he feels his way through many of his business interactions through an indescribable and innate sense of the reality of a situation. At first he talks about his instincts in business, when to buy, when to sell, when to invest, when to predict and so on. Then he mentions a story about being on vacation and thinking of his mother suddenly, for no clear reason, and then beginning to cry as if something was wrong. It wasn’t until months later he discovered at that moment his mother, who he is very close to, had encountered a medical emergency that she never intended to share with anyone at the very moment Gary was crying for her. He used it to make a point that part of his business skills are somewhat otherworldly, just like his intuition about his mother’s troubled state at that time. I read into all these particular stories, and more generally into much of what Gary does and how he approaches life, a very deep sense of the spirituality of everything.

With that said, I considered it against the backdrop of my experience of my religion and it’s leaders, and I found it quite perplexing. Gary, as an unapologetic businessman is spiritual about his business. Many religious leaders, unapologetic Christians, are business-like about their spirituality.

I’m going to go ahead an call it a night folks. Part 2 later.

To be continued…

The blogs I always never write…

As time passes since I started a blog, I have accumulated massive lists of ideas that I’ve never touched. I’m a content hoarder of sorts. I queue up endless articles and books and videos, among other content I plan to consume and digest over time. I gather and process for understanding, or using in my classes in some way, faster than I am able to write anything substantial or constructive. I’ve never written content I wanted to write freely about as much as I’d like to. My “writing” since the last time I was a student in 2011 has been focused on personal correspondence or work. For instance, letters to friends are my favorite things to write, getting and giving counsel, processing life and just sharing stories. However I have probably written the most for work, especially now as a teacher, responding to students, writing lessons and other avenues for speaking and teaching as they come up. But even in business I sometimes wrote for days at a time. There were client emails, proposals, project specifications, marketing copy and so on. My content production, as it were, is almost entirely relegated to private, personal messages, be it either close friends or for work. Along the way I’ve amassed a huge list I just call “ideas.” Usually these are ideas for any number of kinds of projects, possible businesses, books, dissertation topics, video projects, and lastly for potential blogs. I developed the habit of writing that kind of thing down, but have been primarily focused on my life experiences and working them out privately. Two years ago I was accepted to a dissertation only PhD program, but then I switched careers and moved to a new state. Last year I came close to launching a website focused on Indian food products and cooking videos, but right as I was about to do that I changed careers and moved to Korea. These are a couple of examples.

I’ve treated blogging almost like the dump heap of my ideas. The place my idea goes, not to die, but after it dies. Therefore, not willing to accept the death of my ideas, I rarely blog. This has not been conscious for the most part, just something that happened. I write about it now because I’ve decided I want to change it. I want blogging to be a part of the earlier steps in the life cycle of my thoughts, not the postmortem of a death cycle. I have actually written many blogs, but they are all drafts or deleted. I process what I want to process, and then don’t feel like taking the risk of sharing.

I don’t know what shape this will take yet, other than using an upcoming break from work to slow my content consumption and generate some instead. For some context, at any given time I have over 200 articles saved on Facebook, hundreds of links bookmarked on Chrome, and a book reading/listening queue well over a hundred as well. This doesn’t factor in the content I consume or generate from work, even though there is a fair amount of overlap. I don’t see this as something to brag about for a few reasons. One is that I know bigger content hoarders than myself and I find my efforts unimpressive. I also think it’s a bit excessive or obsessive, and my wife would likely agree. I’m not sure why I treat information the way I do. I think it comes from being raised in a bit of a cultural cul de sac in rural Kentucky and then slowly letting my curiosity take over to the point of some kind of dominant impulse. For some reason I feel driven to write more than I have for a long time. Probably because the semester is wrapping up and I’m looking at a few weeks of some long awaited rest. I’m most likely entering a season of withdrawal from work and wanting to use the creative engines for more personal or experimental matters. Also, while I’m certainly not alone, living abroad does have an isolating affect. Perhaps a measure of isolation is what I needed to get more of my thoughts out in the open.

In my opinion, as a reluctant yet ferocious extrovert, ideas need a lab for experimentation and testing. Usually I keep that lab under lock and key with the people around me at work or close to me relationally, but now I’m going to have at least a portion of that lab a little more open.

Remembering when I was my student’s age

The first semester of the Korean school year is rushing towards it’s conclusion. This means preparation for all the end of term activities, a rise in discipline issues along with colleague frustrations, and the inability to not daydream of summer plans. It also means we’ve been with our students for the better part of five months now, week in and week out, along with some weekends. For me, it means that my Korean students are used to the weird American, with a hair style featuring what they tell me is the potato look, a way of thinking that is decidedly more cosmopolitan than the homogeneity they are used to,  and a body modeled after the spoon as opposed to the chopstick. Their getting used to me, and my getting used to them, this event horizon in one of millions of globalization experiences of our time, brings many unknowns with the joys and pains of openness and honesty, the glory and burden of trust.

While attention spans, including my own, have all but flown the coop, at least once a week a class discussion emerges bearing this weight of trust, and with it questions that land with growing penetration each time I receive them. Time for reflection is short in this busy season, but when I get it I return to the times when I was in 7th grade and 12th grade respectively. I try hard to think about how I understood the world at those times, and then try to imagine being Korean, or being a third culture missionary kid, as this covers the full range of my student base. It feels like a futile attempt at contextualization every time, enough so that I wonder if I’m doing more harm in my attempt at relevance than any good.

Kids of any culture are playful if nothing else. This play weaves in fluidly to my student’s every social interaction, as many of them have known each other for years, and as Korean culture binds it’s people together with a type of bond I don’t think I will ever know. They all know what seems like hundreds of games they grow up playing with each other. Guess which way I’m going to look, get it wrong and get slapped on the back. Rock, paper scissors, lose and get slapped on the arm. Say a number in a really dainty voice, do it wrong and face the shame of the room until you do it right. These type of quick and silly games break out like a pandemic and retract as quickly when something else takes focus, all while holding hands, massaging arms, shoulders, sharing snacks and drinks, notes for class and leaning on each other’s shoulder. In a given day I’ll watch two of my most macho seniors touch each other more than I have made physical contact with my best bro in my life. There’s not an ounce of sexual tension. One of my best friends is from India, and we discussed how friends of our respective cultures acted around each other at length. The western discomfort of Indian male friendship made the global scene in popular Canadian comedian Russel Peter’s joke about how they often hold each other’s pinky finger while they walk together. I watched that stand up show with a group of Indians while in grad school, and we all laughed hard, because many of them had made their American friends uncomfortable without knowing it and some had learned in harder ways than others. Comedy is often the medicine the globalizing world needs. I try to offer it as often as I can myself, to much less success than Mr. Peters thus far.

Often when teaching, my entire periphery is dominated by this cadence of play and learning. When a class discussion emerges, the play may subside completely or just in the immediate area where the student or students are talking to me and each other. I teach, play in all these small ways takes place, a discussion emerges, I shush those who are too loud and distracting us, someone goes to the restroom, a class activity, play and touch in various forms passes around the room like a virus, the class comes back together, a time of reflection and response, someone loses what was once a quiet game of guess which way I was going to move my hand and gets smacked loudly, a video is watched on the theme of the class, various postures are attempted to find the best way to lean on friends to achieve the maximum comfort of all, the video ends and complaints that the lights came on too quickly are silenced by a round of relevant questions before class ends. This is somewhat typical. As the semester has progressed this planetary system of social and educational behaviors in orbit around each other have been interjected with the deep realities of life, so deep they appear as black holes in an otherwise controlled chaos. Suicide, parental neglect, abuse, spirituality, sexuality, the purpose of life and the meaning of death. These realities fall into the scene with ease for my students, part of the cadence. As a foreigner my cadence is, assumption, fail, embarrassment, sadness followed by anger followed by acceptance, repeat, one point of wisdom added, one million points needed to win the game.

I sometimes feel like the well constructed walls of adulthood and culture block me from being helpful. But I remember my adolescence well enough. I remember sadness, confusion, unending questions, new feelings, doubts and despair. I remember parents, teachers, friends and student workers who offered wisdom, hope, friendship, hugs, pats on the back, and the appropriate rebukes when needed. Nothing I learned in school prepared me for life more than those things. As the bond deepens between my students and I, and as the welcomed honesty flows with all its joys and burdens, I’m trying to remember when I was there age as much as I am able to help me teach and offer the best wisdom. This week I realized their questions were helping me deepen as a person. That my kids honesty was helping me be more honest with myself, and consider my past more carefully. As I climbed this existential mountain, I realized that I was becoming part of the cadence of the classroom too, that my place in this community was spanning age, culture and sometimes creed. As I processed the revelation, someone got slapped hard to my left, the loser of a Korean folk game I’ll never understand or be able to pronounce. One point of wisdom….