Recently, a writer on the Forbes site posted an article about Gary Vaynerchuk’s new social media strategy. Gary Vaynerchuk is the guy from New Jersey who parlayed a family wine business, an undeniable charisma, and the caffeinated energy of THIS guy 
into a burgeoning social media empire, bestselling books, sold-out speaking tours, and the like.
But the article rubbed me the wrong way. Essentially, the writer left the impression that Vaynerchuk was hiring a factotum. Someone to catch his pearls of wisdom. And a lot of people thought that was a great idea.
I didn’t, and don’t.
And here’s why. Gary V is not that smart, and neither am I. And neither are you.
We all do a lot of thinking during the day. We write, we present, we meet with other people. But honestly, there are very few people that I can think of that are so consistently brilliant that they, and we, would benefit from someone functioning as their scrivener. Wait. Make that nobody.
I recently purged my drafts folder on this blog. I had tons of posts in there that were half done, sometimes three-quarters, sometimes just a sentence. I regularly purge my Evernote of ideas. Why? Because they just aren’t that good. (I can hear someone out there saying “Wait a minute — you have ideas and blog posts worse than what you PUBLISH?!” I know. I’m afraid too.)
I have business ideas that aren’t great. I don’t follow up on them. I have pitches that fall flat. I have pieces of fiction that don’t get finished. Same with podcasts.
Sometimes, we don’t end up with a blog post or a piece of content because we don’t recognize it’s worth. More often, we don’t finish because somewhere in our head, we know that that particular piece of content isn’t our best, that we don’t want it to represent us, and that we can do better.
Stephen King (MY MAN!) wrote four novels before Carrie. He has lots of stuff in his archive that isn’t published. It’s not because it’s not saleable. It’s because he doesn’t like it enough.
Think about job interviews. We don’t wear just any old thing. We wear our good job interview clothes. When we’re asked to do an interview or a talk, we don’t just walk up to the mic and say the first thing in our head. We SELECT. We curate ourselves. We EDIT.
Don’t kid yourself. For every great thing we make and do, there are many other things that are merely okay, passable, acceptable, good enough. They may well be acceptable. But that doesn’t mean they deserve to be shared.
