Building a business and a life: GaryVee, Kass, and Mike Lazerow on the real grind

Executive overview

Most entrepreneurs focus on building a company but neglect building a life — and the two are inseparable. Kass and Mike Lazerow, fresh from selling Buddy Media for $800M, share hard-won lessons from their book Shoveling Sh!t and the brutal reality of launching it.

The core tension: success means nothing if it costs your mental health, your relationships, or your sense of self. The framework is simple — show up, do the work, stay generous, and stop caring what others think.

Grinding without ego, staying generous without expectation, and ignoring status signals is the operating system for a life that actually works.

Selling a book is harder than writing one

• 10,000 copies sold — considered good by industry standards, felt insufficient to them
• Social media builds community; it does not convert to book sales
• Direct ask — texting every contact individually — drives more sales than any campaign
• People who received the most help often declined to buy; write-offs were more revealing than the wins
• The title (Shoveling Sh!t) blocked Amazon ads, excluded them from some bookstores, and cost a university curriculum deal
• Workaround: show up in person — they carried a 40-pound table into Central Park and gave books away
• Rule: if you won't go to your local park and ask for the purchase, you don't believe in your product

The mental game of entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurship is the hardest game — full financial exposure, public failure, no safety net
• Venture capital provides a safety net; bootstrapping forces genuine customer acquisition
• Raising $100M at Buddy Media made failure feel existential in a way it wouldn't have otherwise
• The competitive instinct — coming back from 5-1 down in a tennis set — is what sustains you through the grind
• Hobbies you love but aren't good at matter; they separate identity from performance
• Purpose is what gets you up in the morning; without it, even financial comfort feels hollow

Keeping up with the Joneses is the real pandemic

• Status consumption — the BMW, the oversized house — is the single biggest driver of unhappiness
• Many people influencing others online are maxing out credit cards to project success
• Comparison is the thief of joy; most misery is relative, not absolute
• Romanticising the ability to go backwards — to downsize without shame — is a superpower
• Gary never posts bougie content because he doesn't believe it's aspirational; he believes it causes harm
• Most people could improve their lives immediately by living within their means

You're allowed to change your mind

• Humans falsely treat life decisions as absolute and permanent
• Gary's sister was propagandised into wanting to be a stay-at-home mum — she became a happier person when she gave herself permission to become a real estate agent instead
• Entrepreneurship works the same way: if your business is making you miserable, you're allowed to shut it down
• The swing between full-on builder mode and more checked-out phases is normal and cyclical, not failure
• Mike regrets going silent on social after Buddy Media sold; burnout is real, but it has a cost

What the book is actually about

• 30 years of mistakes, painful losses, and cheat codes — not theory, lived experience
• Covers: calendar structure, hiring, organisation, focus, and how to build a life that matters alongside a company
• Aimed at: active entrepreneurs, aspiring founders, people being displaced by AI, salespeople, junior coders, acquisition entrepreneurs, and anyone coaching the next generation
• Balance is a myth — the insight readers most respond to is that the imbalanced life is not a failure, it's the deal
• A mom at their Founders Farm community cried because the book gave her permission to stop judging herself for not being perfect at both work and parenting simultaneously

Showing vs. telling your kids

• Kids don't absorb what you tell them; they absorb what you model
• A woman in Asia resented her judge mother for missing recitals — then turned 20 and realised her mum had shown her how to live, not just told her
• Girls raised by stay-at-home mums who told them what to do but didn't model it were less equipped
• You don't know how your child will perceive your choices; you may be doing a disservice in the thing you think is a service
• Working parents who would have been too neurotic and helicoptering at home sometimes save their kids by being absent

Mental health and financial failure

• Mike's father faced severe financial problems before his bar mitzvah and communicated he didn't want to live
• Writing the book forced Mike to understand how hard companies are on mental health, especially when financial crisis spills into personal relationships
• Lesson: give mercy to people who failed publicly under financial pressure — shame kills
• Mike used the process of writing to begin forgiving his father
• The reason people jump from windows on Wall Street is not the money loss — it's the inability to go backwards without shame

What's next

• No more VC fund; they are launching and buying businesses outright
• Healthcare staffing acquisition already underway — Mike is visibly more energised by it than by investing
• Model: own more than 50%, install empathy-driven culture, implement profit-sharing from day one
• Ten pizza locations in the pipeline
• Builder identity requires being on the field, not cheering from the stands