Transcription
I really don’t have to go to an office, so I do 99% of my work by email. It’s great because then when my kids get home from school or whatever, they can ignore me in person. “What’s for dinner?” “Buy it yourself, Dad.” “Where are you going out?” “How was school, school?” “What are you eating?” It’s really special in the Cuban house.
Hi everyone, this is Mark Cuban and these are my rules of life. Rule number one: Follow the scroll. My God, I learned so much from my kids. I learned what Skibidi is, and the world keeps changing and I keep learning from them because they are exposed to all these new technologies. Social media is an integral part of their lives. I have to understand that, you know, as a techie trying to understand how the algorithms you know influence their lives. They’re in the car and I’m driving my son, I can look over at a stoplight and see him scrolling through his Instagram or TikTok and know exactly what he’s interested in. Trying to be able to connect with him, which, as for any parent, could be nearly impossible, but it’s just being informed.
Rule number two: If you can’t, you can’t be together. My wife and I have a great relationship. She’s independent, intelligent, kind, curious. She’s always reading and learning and exposed to new things, and you know through osmosis and as much conversation as I can, I learn a lot from her. And more important, or as important, she’s in charge of our kids. I show up, but she organizes everything. She tells me where to be and when, whether it’s for photos for the welcome, whether it’s to say hello on the first date, whether it’s to pick up the kids. I also have a duty to be late, so she takes them to school in the morning, and now when they get out late, you know, anything after 10 p.m. is late, it’s me who has to go pick them up. And it’s always been that way. But we make a great duo, and uh, I’m proud of her, proud of our kids.
Rule number three: Old habits are hard to break. You know, when I started making money, I went out and bought things. I bought a house, I bought a plane. But since then, I literally even had a conversation with my wife not too long ago that’s like, okay, we can go out and buy some things. So if we want to, we’ll go look at things, but I’m not one to spend a lot. I just am not.
Rule number four: It has to be email. So a lot of people ask about my daily routine, and you’re going to be surprised. I’m looking at my phone, or I’m looking at a laptop, and I’m there eight, nine, ten hours a day. Do I go to meetings? No. Do I answer phone calls? No. Do I go to some office somewhere? No. When I was climbing the ladder, I always had to work on someone else’s schedule. When I finally sold my companies and had enough money to support myself, before I got a watch first thing I did was get rid of a watch. I didn’t wear a watch for 30 years because I didn’t want to be on anyone else’s time. And now finally, because people practically kiss my ass when it comes to business, I can tell them I’m doing everything by email, period. In history, and because of that, I can do everything sitting at a laptop or a phone anywhere in the world, and that works very, very, very well.
Rule number five: When it comes to food, if you like one thing and you like another thing and then you combine them, it will by definition be the best thing you’ve ever tasted. If you’ve never taken a french fry and dipped it in your milkshake, you’ve never experienced life. You’re missing out. If you haven’t taken mayonnaise and put it on a cookie by itself, I get hungry just thinking about it. If you haven’t taken ice cream and put something on it, there’s nothing in the whole world, I don’t care what it is that doesn’t go with ice cream. You can thank me later.
Number six: Life is half random. You know how I became a billionaire? I was born at the right time, so that when internet technology really took off and we could start AudioNet, which became Broadcast.com, which became the first streaming company to go public, and I could turn around and sell for 5.7 billion dollars in stock. That was luck. Being able to do all the work and learn how all the technology worked. That was work. The other half, however, I had no control over when the internet stock market would go up or down and the bubble would burst. Life is half random; it’s what you do with the half you can control that really sets the tone for your whole life.
Rule number seven: No matter how many times you fail, you only have to succeed once, and then everybody can call you an overnight success. I’ve had a lot of success in my life, and I’ve had failures, and you’ll laugh at the failures. I’ve been fired from more jobs than you’ve probably had. I started a powdered milk company. Yeah, you’ve never heard of it; it was crap. I thought, hey, it’s powdered milk, it’s cheaper than regular milk. And what if it doesn’t taste as good? People like milk. It tastes good. No matter how many times I failed, I only had to succeed once.
Rule number eight: How you do anything is how you do everything. The reason why that’s important is because we all have opportunities to take shortcuts. We can, you know, if you’re working out, you can do that tenth repetition, or you can stop at eight. If something spills in my kitchen, I don’t think someone cleans up behind me. Literally, in my mind, I’m thinking, you’ve got to pick that up, because how you do anything is how you do everything.
Rule number nine: Ask yourself why not me. Why can’t I be the one to change the world? Why can’t I be the one to put in the effort and make something happen? When you get to that point where you have to make decisions and you’re not sure and you don’t know the next step, just ask yourself like I did, why not me? Why can’t I be the one who, you know, I do this when I go to the kids’ school, I talk to them about entrepreneurship and setting goals and this and that, and I’ll say, I say, look around you, see that screen on the wall there? One day it didn’t exist, and then the next day somebody had an idea and created a company from it, and now the school bought that screen. Why not you? Why can’t you be the person who has the next big idea? Why can’t you be the one who starts a company that becomes the next Google or Apple or Nike or whatever? You should always be able to ask yourself, why not me? Why can’t I be the one to change the world?
Rule number 10: Everyone has the will to win, but only those with the will to prepare win. I’ve traveled all over the world, and the one thing that makes us different from any other country on this planet is the American dream. Everyone at some point in our lives has that idea, and we all go through the same process. You go to a friend, oh, I have this idea, and you say, what do you think? And he says, oh, that’s a good idea. Then you get on the internet, you do a search and you say, there’s nobody else who’s done this. And you think, oh my god, this is it. But then most people stop, or most people don’t do all the work. We think, yeah, I’m going to do this, I know this is great, but then we also start thinking about the mortgage, the kids, the car payments, the insurance, and that holds us back. You don’t have to bet everything on every idea. Everyone has the will to succeed. Everybody does. Everybody wants to succeed, but the most important part is the work you do to prepare yourself to succeed.