Gary V on Gratitude

In January I read one of Gary V’s books, Twelve and a Half. Now, although his comments and books on social media have been fascinating to read, I’m not really a Gary V fan, due to the impression I have that he is pretty much the face of the hustle culture which comes across as work 24/7. Gary V has once said that one of his superpowers was outworking everyone else and yes, his descriptions of his day and his prescriptions on how to handle social media consists of a lot of hours tending to social media. Myself, I can’t do that because I need my sleep, and my ideas and problem-solving capability depends on being wide awake, feeling healthy and incorporating play time or meandering time into my day. (As an aside, his appearances lately are not doing him a favor – to my eye, he looks unwell which if he is still working 18-hour days would be why. The tired haggard look is not a great advertisement for the hustle culture. I hope he is not sick.)

But, in one of the videos of Gary V and a video interviewer, he discussed the genesis for his book that strays from his usual how-to-do-social-media that he typically does. The book is about his emotional intelligence traits that he feels made him the success he is today.

But what really got me was what he is attempting to do: change the current business conversation to make “kindness” the success ingredient, not the 90s brash style of business attitude. He never said it outright, but the attitude during the 90s verged on cruelty. He started working and grew up during the 90s and he saw a lot of not so nice treatment of others. In my memory, the 90s had the Al Dunlaps’ of the world being extolled as a “mean son of a b****” and those guys reveled in those descriptions. Really, the 80s and 90s was the era when shareholder value dug in deep into the skin of the business world and money started flowing to the richest 1 percent.

Gary V wants to alter that kind of thinking: you have to be nasty in order to be a success. He feels “kindness” is a better way and so he is seeking to get the business thinking differently.

That was what attracted me to Gary V’s book. I hope he is successful in altering the conversation. We do have the ESG thing going on in the consulting world. There’s talk of businesses changing the way they regard their employees due to the impact of the pandemic. It remains to be seen if any of these efforts stick.