What GaryVee Got Wrong: Don't Whore Out Your Hobby

This hobby can really be a b*tch.

When you whore out your hobby, you stop being a maker and start being a marketer. Marketers are the worst. Trust me. I’ve been one since 2014, starting in content and SEO and graduating into the rest of it: ads, email, social, the whole digital buffet. Marketers ruined the telephone with telemarketing. They ruined email with email marketing, roads with billboards, and television and social media with ads. The list goes on. I know the playbook because I’ve run it many times, and even added to a few chapters.

So when I heard the gospel of “document the journey” from Gary Vaynerchuk, of course I converted. Of course I did. I figured I could take the one thing that kept me sane — turning wrenches on a project car, going for a drive in the Santa Cruz mountains — and run it through the same machine I’d been running everything else through. I wasn’t necessarily the best at it, but I spent time improving the craft. I got good enough. I didn’t realize what it was costing me, though.

***

But here is the moment I noticed.

I was under the E36, working on something I’d been putting off for months. Doesn’t matter what. What matters is that I had the camera propped on an FCP Euro box, framed wide enough to catch my hands and the subframe, and I caught myself doing the job in a specific order that made no mechanical sense. I was setting up a shot. The bolt I should’ve started with was the one furthest from the camera, and I knew it, and I went for the closer one instead because it would look better when I cut the footage.

That was it. Not even the time it took, nor the angle. The fact that for a second I had stopped losing myself in the process and started listening to a stranger who wasn’t even in the room.

Matthew Crawford has a line in “Shop Class as Soulcraft” about the honesty of mechanical work. Something like, the bolt is either torqued or it isn’t. The machine doesn’t care how I feel about it, and that brutal indifference is the whole point — it’s why wrenching grounds me, why a bad day at the desk gets erased by an hour in the garage. The car is an objective standard. It tells me the truth. Wrenching on a shitbox has made me question my entire life – in good ways, and bad – but at least it was honest.

The camera is the opposite of that. The camera is a guess about what someone else might want to see. And it’s tied to the almighty algorithm, which is a whole other conversation in guessing.

Back to it. The second I started guessing, I wasn’t in the garage anymore. I was in a meeting with an audience that didn’t exist yet, pandering to what they might like. It was work again.

***

It got worse from there, the way these things do.

I started picking jobs because they’d film well. A valve cover gasket shoots better than a brake flush, so guess which one bumped up the queue. I caught myself researching keywords before I knew what I wanted to write — looking for the gap in the market instead of the thing I actually had something to say about. The garage stopped being a place where I built character and started being a small factory where I attempted to manufacture attention. The square footage was somehow the same, but the space started to feel entirely different. And no longer mine.

The drives went the same way. Highway 9 in the morning, the road I’ve known long enough to feel in my hands before I see it, and I’d be thinking about which corner had the best light. Which pullout had the cleanest background for a static shot. I’d catch the steering loading up in a sweeper and a part of my brain — the part that used to just enjoy it — would be calculating whether a GoPro on the fender would catch the body roll.

Not even going fast enough to experience body roll.

There’s stretches of 9 that occasionally have memorials on them. I’ve passed many, unfortunately. The road’s gotten more dangerous over the years. Lots of wrecks. Lots of death. Lots of G80 M3’s with 360-degree cameras and burble tunes. Sometimes upside down. That sounds like I’m building toward a point. I’m not. It’s just a shame that the algorithm sways more eyeballs to 11/10ths driving on public roads – or worse, wrecks.

***

The thing about being a marketer is that you can feel it happening and still not stop. The dopamine on the engagement side is real, and it doesn’t care that the inputs are hollow. A notification is a notification. My brain didn’t know the difference between the sources. But I did know the whole time that I was trading something with substance for something with reach, and I kept doing it, because the trade felt productive in the moment. That’s the whole con, I guess. It all ends up feeling like work.

Crawford’s argument, the part that took me longer than it should have to actually absorb, is that the satisfaction of manual work isn’t always about the output. It’s important, of course, but what’s more important is the relationship between you and the person or thing in front of you. Like the seized bolt. The (always) leaking cooling system. The S-curves on the backside of 9 (that’s an odd phrase if you aren’t familiar with the Santa Cruz Mountains). When you put a third party in that relationship — even an imaginary one — you’ve broken what made it work. You can still get the bolt torqued. You can still take the corner. But the thing that the work was doing for you is gone, and you don’t notice until much later, when you realize you’ve been tired in a way that has nothing to do with being tired.

The marketer in me wants to turn everything into content. But the enthusiast, “spirited” part of me wants to go for a drive and not tell anyone about it, except for my mates who I enjoy driving with.

***

So that’s what I did. I left my camera and marketer's mind at home for a while.

The first drive after was nothing special. Sunset run. Maybe forty-five minutes of road. The car did what it always does — the steering loaded up the way it always loads up, second gear pulled the way it always pulls, the brakes squealed the way they always squeal. None of it was new. That was the point. I’d been missing the part where it didn’t need to be new. Where it could just be a Tuesday evening and a familiar road and a car I know better than some people in my life.

The camera still attends a few drives. But it’s only ever used if I like a shot, not if I think it’ll be good for sharing later on social media.

I find myself wanting to write entries like this too, whenever the time is right. Documenting the journey is far less interesting for right now. Reflecting on the journey, though, seems like the right fit.

Thankfully the garage is quiet again.

And nobody’s watching, which is great. Because some experiences are best when they’re just for me.