My EF Huttons: Mark Cuban and David Stern.
The next EF Hutton award goes to Mark Cuban. It’s also a 3-Pt Play because three of his last four blogposts have been about business and entrepreneurship.
You may not know this, but Entrepreneurship 101 is out there, it’s free, and you don’t need to pay six figures to get a diploma that says “MBA” on it from a name-brand school.
Just go to Cuban’s blogmaverick.com and do a search on “success & motivation” or “business” or “entrepreneurship”. Try that “sleeping on a friend’s couch” thing. Trust me, that is the ultimate rite of passage for an entrepreneur. I don’t know why, it just is. For whatever reason. Without fail.
I would say that to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be really, really ambitious. You have to shoot for the moon and be really confident you will actually get there. It’s no different than believing you can be a star in your local rec league, and win championships (plural) to boot.
You have to be so confident, you would risk it all, just so you can be your own boss and be able to blaze your own trail. You have to have a certain mindset. A killer instinct, except in business, not on the hardcourt.
In the first of his latest trifecta, entitled What Will You Remember When You Are 90?, he says…
Before I do any of the many things that I get asked to do, and that I think might be fun, I have one simple question i ask myself. When I hopefully turn 90 and look back at my life , would I regret having done it, or not having done it ?
This is precisely the reason why you see Poor Man’s Commish throwing his entire reputation behind the prospects of Jeremy Lin and his NBA potential. This is why Dream League worked itself to the bone for the four screenings of Year Of The Yao, nearly five years ago, which resulted in some unbelievable relationships that I have today. This is why I quit my six-figure job in 2001, at the height of the dot-com bubble.
Back to Cuban. The second of his three-point play, The Sport of Business, I’m sure he has written about before. But it’s nice to see him post it again. In my vehement opinion (forget IMHO!), his post deserves to be quoted in its entirety and you should definitely read it, soon.
I can totally relate to his comparison of playing a sport versus succeeding in business. When I was young, like 26 as some of you Dream Leaguers are, there was nothing more important to me than the two leagues I played in: J-town in SF on Wednesday nights and Japanese League on Sundays. I made my mark pretty well, although I was only able to get myself a championship in one of those leagues. I was watching videotapes of Michael Jordan and studying the footwork. It was paying dividends. I was going to the gym a lot, although my metabolism was too high to gain any weight. I was killing the Monday night runs at Berkeley. I was picking my spots carefully, where it’d be a challenge to get to a certain threshold, yet I knew it was all relative. There’s only about a million other rec leagues out there, you know.
That ain’t nuthin’ compared to the challenges I face today as a Poor Man’s Commish.
Here’s my favorite part of Cuban’s post…
Relaxing is for the other guy. I may be sitting in front of the TV, but I’m not watching it unless I think there is something I can learn from it. I’m thinking about things I can use in my business and the TV is just there.
I could take the time to read a fiction book, but I don’t. I would rather read websites, newspapers, magazines, looking for ideas and concepts that I can use. I spend time in bookstores because 1 idea from a book or magazine can make me money.
I’m not going to go to dinner with you just to chat. I’m not going to give you a call to see how you are. Unless you want to talk business.
So, the Poor Man’s Commish apologizes ahead of time for the way he acts. That’s why my Facebook is Dream League and it will always be that way. I can’t help it. I don’t have time to post things that are not related to my business. I am literally focused on my business 24 x 7, as I ironically posted on the previous installment of EF Hutton, regarding being like David Stern (see interview question “:05″) — incidentally, my post came out on 12/9/09 at 10:51AM EST, Cuban’s was posted at 9:01PM the same day.
But back to Cuban, again. The third in his recent trifecta is Scatterbrained and in College. He gives advice to a kid in college who doesn’t know what to focus on, always going on adventures…
Being focused at 21 is way over rated. Now is the time to screw up, try as many different things as you can and just maybe figure things out.
The thing you do need to do is learn. Learn accounting. Learn finance. Learn statistics. Learn as much as you can about business. Read biographies about business people. You dont have to focus on 1 thing, but you have to create a base of knowledge so you are ready when its time.
You will never know when that time will come. But you can be ready when it does.
I’d actually advise that the kid try to make money off his adventures. He doesn’t have to do it full-time. He can do it on the side. Maybe start a company whose niche is to go off on these adventures. It doesn’t even have to be a real “company”. It can just be something he tells some friends or classmates or people he meets on Craigslist. Hey, let’s go on X adventure (which cost him $100), except tell everyone to pitch in $150. There’s your first profit margin. And when you go on said adventures with friends or clients, definitely act like and be the leader. Keep going and you’ll learn by making mistakes. The sooner you start, the better.
And it never happens like this: Oh, I’m gonna go out and make a billion dollars like Cuban. Are you telling me he expected to get bought out by Yahoo back in the day? He was just trying his best, but his ability to connect certain dots made something that seemed improbable, very likely. Start modestly, but go for it with the intention that it will open more doors as you go. When the right doors open, go through those doors as if they were meant to be opened by you.
Am I happy that I can do Dream League and basketball-related stuff 24/7/365? Yes and no. My income still isn’t all that great, but it’s somewhat steady as long as I put in the work, and I don’t have to sit in traffic on Highway 880 anymore. I have the ultimate freedom to do whatever I want, whenever. I don’t answer to The Man. And yet, I don’t feel like I’m there yet. There’s so much left to be done. And I don’t look at it in terms of dollars and cents, either. There’s just so much left to be done, to change the world. Financials are a part of it, but certainly not defined by it. It’s all of the above, that’s the only way I can describe it. Cuban calls it “the edge”.
I’d like to once again plug Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (dang, I should be his publicist!). It’s about pouncing on opportunities, but knowing when the opportunities are there, available to you. And, sometimes, available to you but not to others.
For example, that night two summers ago when I decided at the last minute to go see what this Jeremy Lin was all about at the SF Pro-Am League, then waiting for him after the game to introduce myself. Or this past summer when at the gym, I approached someone who I recognized as a former NBA coach and introduced myself, offering to add value to something only a Poor Man’s Commish could have noticed. More on this in the next few months. The plot thickens…
You might also like:
- DeMar DeRozan learning the NBA business
- Mark Cuban on having personality in the NBA
- EF Hutton: David Stern
- Nobody likes to be called out by Mister Nobody
- Three-Point Play: Jerryd Bayless
- Hear this B.S. out (Bill Simmons, that is)
- Asianballer Daniel Liu now a supermodel
- Urbiztondo starts, busts out for 24
