How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It by Cuban Mark

Author:Cuban, Mark [Cuban, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2011-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Don't Lie to Yourself

I learned a lot from Don Nelson when he was coach and GM of the Mavericks. He told me something early on that opened my eyes. I forget the exact conversation, but we were talking about players, and I asked him why he didn’t talk to a specific player about something that was going on. What he said was, “The worst evaluator of talent is a player trying to evaluate himself.”

The same applies to businesspeople and particularly to entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs. We tend to be less than honest with ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses.

I have been just as bad at this as anyone, particularly when I was getting started in the business world. For those of us who dream of starting and running a business, we know that we have to have a level of confidence in our own abilities. We don’t want to believe that there are things we can’t do. We want to believe that if we try hard enough, work long enough and get a little lucky, that the sky is the limit. The problem is that we let our confidence cloud our judgment of what we truly know about ourselves.

I’m one of the least organized people I know. Today, I have an assistant and others that help me run my life. If you ask me where I’m going to be in three days, I have no idea. I do know that I have a kick-ass assistant who is going to make sure that when I wake up that morning, I know where I’m going and how to get there.

When I was 23 years old, sleeping on the floor and starting MicroSolutions, there was no assistant. Thus, there was no organization. I was a procrastinator. Accounting was a shoebox of receipts. I was a mess.

But I lied to myself and said that I could deal with it. That I would make time to get it all figured out and organized. That if I only set my mind to it, I could be a details person. I could stop procrastinating. It doesn’t work that way.

I did the things I was good at. I could sell. So I sold. I could write software programs. I could integrate PCs. I could set up local area networks. And I did. My business grew. But it also grew out of control. A local area network or a software program without documentation is a disaster waiting to happen. And disasters did happen. Not to the point where it killed my business, but to the point where I spent far too much time fixing things rather than selling new deals.

Fortunately, one of my best customers at the time was interested in becoming a partner in my business. Martin Woodall ran a company called Hytec Data Systems. He was not only smart and a good programmer, but he was the most anal, detail-oriented person I had ever met in my life. The perfect partner for me.

Our partnership wasn’t always easy. We had more than our share of knock-down, drag-out fights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.