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platforms will have already changed. Regardless of what changes we see in the little details in the user interface or individual features of these tools, they won’t affect the big picture—you can pimp your ride, but that doesn’t change the essence of how you travel in your car. These tools will take you to your audience, where you can follow them, reach out, and make them listen.
    I can show you how to use social media to plant a garden orbuild a whole new house. Some of you want to be mayor of the whole damn city, and I can help you get there. But no matter how modestly or high you set your sights, you have to keep tending and adjusting and making improvements once I’m gone. No matter how successful you get, you cannot slack off or the grass is going to grow, the paint is going to peel, and the roads will start to crumble. Stop hustling, and everything you learn here will be useless. Your success is entirely up to you.
    turn water into wine
    Here’s the deal: if you want it badly enough, the money is there, the success is there, and the fulfillment is there. All you have to do is take it. So quit whining, quit crying, quit with the excuses. If you already have a full-time job, you can get a lot done between 7:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. (9:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. if you’ve got kids), so learn to love working during those predawn hours. I promise it won’t be hard if you’re doing what you love more than anything else. I don’t care if your passion is rehabilitating abandoned ferrets; if you learn to tap into everything the digital world has to offer, you can turn water into wine—you can transform what you love into a legacy-building business that makes a crapload of money, and still be true to yourself.
    Ultimately this book is not about making a million dollars, although it just might help you do that. It’s about ensuring your own happiness by enabling you to live every day passionately and productively. Business is not just about making money, and if you think it is, you’re broken. If you’re already familiar with the social marketing tools we’ll discuss in this book, I hope you’llpay attention to the big picture. It’s too easy to forget what really matters once you’re digging deep in these trenches.
    Learn to navigate the digital waters of social marketing to build a business and promote a personal brand based around what you love most, and you will only be limited by how far you want to sail. Social media tools—Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and all the rest—are modern-day galleons that will carry you to the new world, allowing you to share your passion, differentiate yourself from your competitors, and deliver your brand to the broadest possible audience.
    My secret to success is just one guy’s way of doing things, of course, but do things my way—adapted to what works for your DNA, of course—and total happiness is yours.

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success is in your dna
    I am a walking contradiction. No one believes in himself more than I do, yet I’m well aware of how unimportant I really am. I couldn’t care less what people think about me, but I do respect and pay attention to what they say. When viewers posted comments on a recent episode of Diggnation (one of the biggest video blogs on the Internet) saying that I was obnoxious in the forums of the show, I stayed up until 4:00 A.M. apologizing to every one of them. I love building businesses and launching new ventures, but the only reason I value money is that I’m going to need a lot of it when I buy the New York Jets (I’m not kidding, I really do want to own the Jets! This has been an obsession of mine since third grade). And although the story of how I became what ABC News called the “Social Media Sommelier,” Slate referred to as “the wine guru for the YouTube era,” and Nightline named “the Wayne’s World wine aficionado” is in some ways the most common immigrant-makes-good story ever told, it’s alsounheard of, not only because the