Mark Cuban doesn’t require an introduction to most people and definitely not to Basketball fans. I had written an article about how he inspired me here.
In this series called the unabashed talks with a consulting company, ABSDeerfield, he gives a lot of insights into his philosophy and thinking. I’m highlighting some of the lessons learned here that are applicable to business.
A key message that runs through is his tenacity to try, his acceptance of failure and his passion for business. I am paraphrasing a lot below, it’s not a transcript but it has all the points in his talk.
How do you become a billionaire?
You can’t think of it that way you know. If you set out to be one in your mind it never works that way. I think I’m one of the first to agree that luck had a part to play with it. You really have to set goals. Everything that happened with me happened at the right time. I knew we had something special at that time and I remember talking to my company and telling them that it could be a billion dollar company or it could be nothing. I knew we were special we had a good thing going on but it wasn’t about thinking you are going to be a billionaire and nothing else.
It was a question of working hard. For some one aspiring to take it to the next level there has to be a certain amount of luck but I believe that more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous that doesn’t have any limits. There’s always a grind to it, if it can’t be something you visualize every business using or consumer using you can’t scale it enough to join the billionaire club.
Does passion play a part into the way you approach business?
I think it’s the other way around I think the passion I have had for business and being an entreprenuer translates into the Mavericks (he is the owner for a team). When I was in the stamp business, I would stay up till 4 am reading stamp journals and publications on stamps so that I could give myself an edge. Even when I was in college I was always reading business books and reading about business biographies. When I had my company and I had no money, I would pull all nighters on borrowed computers learning how to program. I have always enjoyed the competition.
The ultimate sport is business. You have to compete with everyone. You have to compete 24/7 and 365 days a year and you have to compete with people who come up and say that they can take you down. It’s the competitive side that drives you and I think that carries over.
What advice would you give to small business to learn?
Love what you do, too many people think you need to find the one right idea. There’s nothing wrong with failing. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail if you get it right you are an overnight success. You have to get it right one time that’s all. I got fired, I got busted many times but it didn’t matter I kept on going and going and going. Sometimes its not the idea its not who you know or how much money you have access to, its about finding something you love to do . I had no idea I loved computers and technology.
I always put my self in the customers shoes and I always put in the time to excel at what our companies did and that’s just rewarding.
Given everything you do whats the most important thing for you?
I think its knowing your strengths and weaknesses and really finding out what you love doing. If you look at it as a job then you have already lost. It’s not going to be your passion. You will start counting the hours and if you know what your strengths are then you can leverage those strengths into your business by helping others and when you know your weakness you can work with others to compliment you.
My attitude has also been that if everyones looking somewhere then thats not where the real solutions are. You have to look at another area. The attitude has always been if you want it then get off your butt and go do it. Nothing comes to you in your hand.
I highly recommend the series. Watch it.
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I have been asking myself the last few days. I thought it would be nice if included here. Nothing you haven’t heard before. But perhaps you need reminding.
Phil Ivey was going around the room, encouraging people to bet with him and good-naturedly chastising him when they wouldn’t. When someone turned him down by saying, “I don’t gamble,” Phil was dumbfounded.
“What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?”
You could argue that it’s wrong to express any admiration for a gambler and you might have a point. Gambling – the type that Phil Ivey and everyone else here is involved in – is an utterly selfish activity. Nothing is being produced. It’s a zero-sum game. A mediocre school teacher is at least trying to contribute to the education of children. An options trader is gambling, but his gambling contributes to the liquidity of the financial markets, which makes it possible for companies to raise money and the rest of us to invest for our children, for retirement, etc.
But Phil Ivey has it exactly right. What you produce for the world is obviously important. But what you contribute to yourself is what keeps you going as a human being. That period of uncertainty, between when you commit to something – representing a legal client, teaching a child, betting on a baseball game – and the outcome is where life’s excitement is. What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?
Phil was going around the room, encouraging people to bet with him and good-naturedly chastising him when they wouldn’t. When someone turned him down by saying, “I don’t gamble,” Phil was dumbfounded.
“What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?”
You could argue that it’s wrong to express any admiration for a gambler and you might have a point. Gambling – the type that Phil Ivey and everyone else here is involved in – is an utterly selfish activity. Nothing is being produced. It’s a zero-sum game. A mediocre school teacher is at least trying to contribute to the education of children. An options trader is gambling, but his gambling contributes to the liquidity of the financial markets, which makes it possible for companies to raise money and the rest of us to invest for our children, for retirement, etc.
But Phil Ivey has it exactly right. What you produce for the world is obviously important. But what you contribute to yourself is what keeps you going as a human being. That period of uncertainty, between when you commit to something – representing a legal client, teaching a child, betting on a baseball game – and the outcome is where life’s excitement is. What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?
“Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” he says. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”
On Running a successful business.
“You don’t fish with strawberries,” the banker says. “Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what you use.”
What you actively spend time on, and (far more difficult) what you choose not to do, who you choose not to spend time with, and who and what you decide to say no to — what you choose, then — is how you mark time. And that is all there is.
Time is the most valuable and finite commodity that any living thing has in this world. Think about it, everything – you, me, people, plants, animals, even the Earth itself – has a limited and set amount of time. Even our solar system is but a minute of time in the history of the universe. The average human lifespan does not even register on the clock. In many ways, time defines life itself.
Therefore, treat it as the most precious thing in existence, because it is. Don’t squander a single second. Perhaps, even more importantly, don’t waste time regretting the time you do squander. Instead, look to how you are going to use this very moment to do something… Anything. Make a mark. Don’t worry about the next until the next comes along. This moment is far too important.
I’m a firm believer in keeping things simple. This has never worked with emotions and women. But it’s fundamentally the principle by which I operate. We don’t need 65 new buttons on a remote control pad just because 15 do the job but look empty.
That doesn’t mean it has to be stupid. It’s very important to make sure smart data’s presented well and in a way that’s easy to grasp irrespective of the audience’s age and education (when presenting a general concept, not your defence thesis). A master of simplifying complex data through visual representation is Hans Rosling. Here’s a post about his technique (if I may call it that). Another master is Edward Tufte. Here is Steve Jobs’ keynote being viewed with the simplicity angle.
I’m starting a club. It’s called the “Simple Things Done Well Society,” or STDWS, if you will. We believe that Vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream (so long as it is really good), Ringo Starr is wonderful drummer, and Hemingway’s sentences are perfect, thank you very much.
Above, a toothbrush by MUJI, because your toothbrush doesn’t need to look like some sort of a neon-laced, ribbed dog chew toy with grips.
I’m going to talk about a powerful idea I learned from a colleague. The Ideasliver. You take one slice of the pie we call the world. Cut one sliver but cut it very very deep. Take it out and own the sliver. Own the idea. This now becomes your breath and your obsession. You know it’s an obsession only when you indulge yourself in it completely. This means you do away with sleeping, walking, gaming, sex, eating and never feel wanting when you are with this ideasliver of yours.
About 1.5 years back the itch to find my ideasliver started. It has been a long time and I sought desperately to seek counsel to define it. But there was one very important, albeit extremely annoying, piece of advice that I constantly received.
Only you can decide what you want to do with your life. No one can tell you how you want to define yourself. They can acknowledge it or judge it, but can’t decide it for you. You choose. And choose wisely.
Enjoy the journey.
Most people say Life’s in the journey. We shouldn’t worry about the destination. I take the example of a ship. All of us are ships on the sea. If you don’t choose a country to land in you’ll drift in the sea. If we left our journey to the universe and it’s winds, we won’t get anywhere. Winds blow in opposite directions over different points of time. A lot of ships get wrecked. A lot of them drift mindlessly. A lot of them are forced to land. The best journeys are those that you decide the country you want to land in (country = industry, expertise). This will take you to one port (part of a country). You might not like this port or even stay there long enough BUT you must decide the country you wish to sail to. Especially like me, if you are nearing 30, which I consider two fifths of your life. Or your sailing in the ocean if you will.
Jack of all trades, master of some.
But what if like me, you have many interests? Where do you get your ideasliver from? I’ll present to you an idea I had and one that I plan to test for the next 3 months. I believe to gain reasonable expertise in anything you should spend all of your waking/free time for atleast 3 months at tasks to know if you can stick on to it. I decided to split up my interests and skillsets into 2 buckets.
The first bucket I’ll call Personal. In this bucket you put in all your interests and passions. These are things you’ll do if never paid, if only for curiosity.
The second bucket is called Professional. Depending on your age, you have gained some skillsets but you wish to pick up some more that has a market value. This means you cannot be a nudist unless there was a market for it. There is, by the way, a market for almost every thing.
For the next 3 months, I plan to work solely on 2 professional and 2 personal interests and form my ideaslivers around them. I know at some point i’ll want to quit and I’ll note which activity makes me do that. But not without trying. Then I’ll keep what I have lasted with at the end of the three month period and see if I can grow that even more or squash that and pick up 2 more interests. At this rate, I can potentially learn 8 new skillsets over a period of a year. Or spend 3 months finding my ideasliver.
True happiness lies in finding the sweet spot between both of them. Steve jobs has found it, Picasso found it and so did Jimi Hendrix. It’s our turn now.
What are your personal and professional slivers?
Sometimes I speak at universities, and I ask students why they sleep in on weekends. “Why would you sleep when that’s your time to live?” I ask them. Sleeping isn’t living. You sleep when you die. – Jordan Zimmerman.
“Don’t let your parents or school system try to force you into a future that you have no interest in… Find your passion and you will be on the road to being just as relevant to society as any other ‘professional’. Sure, we need doctors, engineers and scientists. But we also need movies, games, clothes, fine-art, music and cool looking buildings, websites and cars,” he writes. “Simple but true.”
How many times have we thought about the futility of the education we have received? I don’t know how many times the information I learnt in School or in college turned out to be useless. Because the industry I got into (and the one I’m currently in) didn’t have set rules in stones. They didn’t have the factory mindset that most people have been preparing for since the started of the 19th century. More insights are in this talk by Sir Ken Robinson.
For now, Ars Technica has an article about the Gnomon School of Visual Arts. I’m thinking I should apply.
Inc. is fast becoming one of my favourite online magazines to read. I’m definitely going to subscribe to the US Edition soon. I find the Indian edition has a lot to work at. I would like to help them organise their content and bring in flavoured deliveries. The series I enjoy the most is their “How I work” series. This is a personal productivity take on the top CEO’s and founders. I had a similar run with Steve Rubel and MG Siegler at one point of time. I plan to revive that series as well.
This one is about Justin Kan of Justin.tv. He started live streaming his life about a couple of years ago. This yale graduate thought there was a business plan to it. Today his idea has about 50,000 live users streaming at a given time and many many many subscriptions. He doesn’t stream anymore. He leads a company of 27 members and he just turned 27. This is how he goes about his regular day.
Justin on Productivity (some of my personal notes collected).
I try to work the hardest I can without burning myself out. It’s not that I think working all the time is the key to success. It’s just the way I was raised. I don’t feel productive if I’m not working a lot.
I wake up every morning around 7. I check my e-mail first thing, just to make sure nothing happened overnight. Our business is live video, so the technology has to work 24/7.
I have one of the crappiest desks in the office, but I don’t care about that. I’m more concerned with making sure other people have desks they like that help make them productive. My job is to help other people do their jobs well.
At the end of the all monday meetings- Mike, my co-founder and our CEO, gives everyone a quiz based on his notes from the meeting. It’s just a fun thing, to test yourself and see if you’re paying attention. Sometimes, I’ll get five out of five answers right; other times, I might get two out of five.
When we’re starting a new project, I’ll first meet with one or two people. I try to keep the meetings small, especially when we’re doing product design. If you have eight people in the design meeting, it doesn’t work. Everybody has an opinion. Everyone wants to weigh in on what the font should look like. The end product becomes the average of eight opinions. You don’t get excellent work, just average.
In the late afternoons, I usually take the notes from my meetings and write up specs for the engineers. Then, sometimes, I sneak off to nap. We have a lounge chair on the second floor. At least once a week, I’ll crash there for 15 minutes or more.
I’m not very picky. What’s important to me is that everybody else is happy with it. I want to eat something and get back to work.
I don’t do any of the complex programming. It’s usually just some of the easier features of the site. I’m certainly not the best programmer. If I were, then I would be programming full time and somebody else would be managing. But I like coding. It helps keep me sharp. Plus, I find it hard to manage somebody’s work unless I have an intimate knowledge of how to do it myself. Otherwise, how can you differentiate a good idea from a bad one or know how long something is going to take?
Pic from Time
