How Billionaires THINK | Mark Cuban & Bezos Insights

If you want to learn how billionaires like Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Carlos Slim think, act, and make decisions, then this video is for you.

I had girlfriends where it was like me or your business. And, you know, I was like, what was your name again?

You know, get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials.

You learn from mistakes.

Always.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out into the world. I started the How Billionaires Think series to try to learn more about billionaires who've had a lot of success, at least in the entrepreneurial world, and adapt some of their mindsets, their belief systems, into ourselves to help us become the best entrepreneur possible. So to help you along your journey today, we're going to look at How Billionaires Think: Success Advice from the Top, Volume 7. Enjoy. So coming up first, Mark Cuban, be willing to make sacrifices.

You know, I didn't have as many personal relationships as I probably would have liked. You know, I put personal relationships aside. You know, I had girlfriends where it was like me or your business. And I, you know, I was like, what was your name again? You know, you think I'm kidding. Um, so it, I probably took things to an extreme. Um, but yeah, I gave up on personal relationships in a big respect because I really was on a mission. And once I, once I realized I was going, so When I sold my first company, I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, and my goal was just to party like a rock star in as many countries with as many people as I possibly could. Then I went back and got involved in the streaming business, and I remember sitting there and telling, you know, we had probably 10 employees, and look, this streaming thing I think is gonna be really big, and so we really have to focus, and there's gonna be some sacrifices, and if you're willing to make those sacrifices, let's go. And if you're not, I understand, you know, you make your own decisions. And I was willing to make those sacrifices and it all turned out great in the long run, but during that time it wasn't always easy and wasn't always, yeah, it was tough sometimes.

Up next at number 2 is be long-term oriented with Jeff Bezos.

I ask everybody to not think in 2 to 3 year time frames, but to think in 5 to 7 year time frames. To not think about when somebody says to me, "Congratulations Amazon on a good quarter," which is a very common thing to say. You meet somebody, they're being nice, they looked at your financial results for the quarter, they're like, "Good quarter." I say, "Thank you," but what I'm thinking to myself is that quarter, all that, those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about 3 years ago. And so like today, I'm working on, you know, a quarter that is gonna happen in 2020. Not next quarter. Next quarter, for all practical purposes, is done already, and it's probably been done for a couple of years. And so if you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy, and your ability to look around corners gets better. So many things improve if you can take a long-term— by the way, it's not natural for humans, so it's a discipline that you have to build. The kind of, you know, get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials, you know.

It's—

and so that's something that you have to sort of steel yourself for and discipline and teach over time.

Number 3 is Learn from Your Mistakes with Carlos Slim.

Have you had failures?

Failures?

Yes.

What I say to my children, you need to have failures, but try to make small failures, small mistakes, also in business and in life, not to make big mistakes.

Do you learn from mistakes?

Always. And from the mistakes of the others you need to learn also. It's more important to learn of other mistakes that make your mistakes to learn.

Number 4 is Have Heroes with Mark Zuckerberg.

There are probably a lot of people who can run Microsoft and do a reasonable job. When I was growing up, Bill Gates was my hero.

Oh, come on.

Yes.

He's like Darth Vader. He's not Luke Skywalker.

No.

He's the bad guy.

No, he is not. Bill Gates ran one of the most mission-driven companies that I can think of. Right now, I think Microsoft, their mission is less focused than it used to be. But when I was thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up, Microsoft, I thought, had a great mission. Great mission: put a computer on every desktop and in every office, right? Or maybe it was every desktop in every home. But, and, you know, I mean, there are companies that define themselves by a way of doing things, right? I mean, there's, um, like the HP way that I was talking about, and there are companies that define themselves by making a concrete change in the world. And, um, you know, Microsoft did that. And I have a huge amount of respect for him for doing that. He pushed them, and it was an incredibly inspiring company during the time that I think that they're, they still are doing a lot of things, but I think that they've lost some of the focus. And I don't know, I mean, I think he's like one of the greatest visionaries that our industry has ever had.

Number 5 is Believe in Your Philosophy with Jack Ma.

One of the things that's so fascinating to me is that Amazon and Jeff Bezos have pursued what might be described as a very asset-heavy business model. They're buying airplanes, they want to own the entire supply chain from beginning to end. And Alibaba has effectively an asset-light business. It is very much in terms of the retail piece of this, the opposite. You don't want to own the warehouses. You don't want to own the logistics companies. How do you think about that? Is Jeff Bezos right or are you right? And is there, is there going to be a meeting in the middle?

I hope both are right. And because the world can never have one model. If the world has only one correct model, the world is too boring. We need to have all kinds of models. And the people who do the model should believe in the model. And I believe what I do. Right. The difference between Amazon and us. Amazon is more like an empire. Everything they should control themselves, buy and sell. And our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to, to service, empower, making sure the other people are more powerful than us, making sure with our technology, our Innovation, our partners, our 10 million small business sellers, they can compete with Microsoft, IBM. Our philosophy is that we, we think using internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon.

Next up is number 6, care about people, with Richard Branson.

I mean, the key, the, the key to, I think, being a good business leader is, is your— is how good you are with people. I think if you can care, genuinely care about people, um, and not just your fellow directors, but, you know, the cleaning lady, the switchboard operator, you know, everybody throughout the company. Um, you know, if you're a good, you know, if, if, you know, if you praise and don't criticize, um, uh, you know, people, people will flourish. Um, and, uh, so I think, you know, it, it, it's really your people skills that will set set you apart. And, and, and I don't think that can be overemphasized. I think you just got to, you know, if I get— if I'm on a Virgin plane, I will make sure that I always have a notebook in my back pocket, you know, make sure I get out and talk to all the staff, you know, if they've got issues, you know, make sure I don't just, you know, hear the issue and not write it down, make sure those issues get written down. You know, talk to the passengers if they've got issues, make sure those issues get written down.

Coming in at number 7 is Cross the Jungle with Ray Dalio.

Firstly, can you tell us, are you authentically satisfied and fulfilled? Do you have an experience in life of being successful?

I don't think that success is like a lot of people believe it is. And for any really successful person, I think that Everybody's always struggling, and what happens is, you know, you just struggle at a higher level. It's like learning how to ski or play some sport, and you're just kind of doing this higher thing, but it doesn't feel like that. It just feels like I'm struggling, and I think it's, and it's a good feeling. The way I think of it is, I've always thought that it's like, in order to be successful in life, you have to cross a jungle. Or you could stay on the other side of the jungle and not cross the jungle. But if you choose to cross the jungle, the jungle has all sorts of things that can do you harm and bite you and everything along those lines. And so the west— best way to do that is to go into that with people who can see things differently and watch themselves and struggle to make it to the other side. And then what I've discovered along the way is that it's always a struggle and I enjoy being in the jungle.

Jungle.

I don't want to get to the underside. I don't want to get out. So that's what it feels like to me.

Next up at number 8 is Be Curious with Sam Zell.

An entrepreneur is someone who thinks differently, someone who recognizes and understands opportunity but combines that recognition of opportunity with solutions. And then in the end, it's all about curiosity. I've never met an entrepreneur who was successful who wasn't extraordinarily curious.

Number 9 is Don't Rely on Luck with Jack Dorsey.

I think that's one of the strongest things you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is to, um, not rely on luck, but cultivating an ability to recognize fortunate situations when they're occurring. Odio was a very fortunate situation. Could have taken that idea, not told it to Evan, not told it to Biz, not, not told it to Noah and all my other co-workers at Odio, and tried to start my own company with, with that idea. But the fortunate situation was that I was working with some really amazing people. And we had a great team. So of course, you know, it makes sense to start there. The fortunate situation for Square was that in 2008, the end of 2008, the entire market was crashing down. Like all of these abstractions we built upon abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction in the financial world, which no single human understood, were now falling apart. And suddenly, we were getting back to basics, back to fundamentals. Management teams were being asked to leave. Banks were failing. People were clarifying around, like, we need to start getting innovative. We need to start treating our customers so poorly. We need to stop encouraging bad behavior to reap fees. Like, we need to really turn this whole thing around. And anytime there's a recession or a depression, that's a great time to innovate, start a company, start a project, you know, do anything. So, you know, we recognize, we recognize that time. And at the same time, my co-founder Jim, uh, re— you know, recontacted me. He— I've known him since I was 15 years old. He was my boss when I was 15 years old. And, uh, he's like, Jack, I want to talk to you. Um, I want to, I want to build an electronic car company. I'm like, that's interesting. And he was thinking about it because the car industry was failing as well. And like, he was like, why don't we just give these car companies to well-seasoned entrepreneurs? Like, why don't we give Ford to Steve Jobs? And like, you know, that would be amazing. Yeah, it would be amazing. Um, and like, you know, GM to, uh, Ellison or like whatnot. He's like, and also I want to start an electronic car company. I'm like, you know, that, that's ambitious. Um, but in that moment we decided not to start an electronic car company but we wanted to do something together. And we kept having these weekly conversations about what that thing was. And I was researching a lot with finance and healthcare because I was looking at, you know, doing something in those spaces. And Jim called me one day, one of our scheduled meetings, and he said, I just lost a glass sale. He's an artist. He sells glass. And I lost the sale because I couldn't accept a credit card. And here he was talking on his iPhone, his general purpose computer, and I was talking on my iPhone. And like, we couldn't— A 1 GHz computer sitting in the palm of your hand, but no way to accept credit cards. He couldn't accept $2,000 from someone who wanted to pay him.

Right.

Like, why is that? So we decided that we wanted to answer that question, and we did a bunch of research, and I started writing some server code, and we hired a guy to write some iPhone code, and Jim built some hardware, and in a month, We had a little— well, it was actually quite a big device that plugged into the audio jack of your iPhone and could swipe a card, take a payment. It would go through the merchant process and then generate a receipt with a map on it. And I went around, I showed it to a bunch of investors, and they were all amazed that it could even work. So we decided to really focus on it and make it a, make it a company. And it really just comes down to like recognizing that fortunate situation, recognizing the people around you that could help, and just owning it.

And number 10, solve problems with Travis Kalanick.

My, I like to say my management style is problem solver in chief. And so what I do in a given day is I have a set of problems that need to be solved and I start at the most important and work my way down. And for the problems I don't have time for, somebody else gets to solve them. Now, if somebody's already solving another problem— solving a problem, I don't need to get involved if the problem's getting solved. But, you know, people go, "Wow, so your day's just full of problems." I'm like, "Yeah, I've got a lot of problems." But it's sort of like how a math professor thinks of problems, right? Is that think of a great math professor who has no math problems to solve. He's a very sad math professor. And so that's very much how I look at it. Solving problems is an, you know, every problem is an opportunity for innovating and being creative and finding something new. And that's what I love to do and I do it every day.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd have to say number 5, Believe in Your Philosophy with Jack Ma, is my personal favorite. I'd love to know from you guys, was number 5 your favorite? Was there something else that had a bigger impact, more immediate impact on you? I'd love to know. Leave it down in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to Debujyoti Banerjee. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting it to your social media accounts. I really, really appreciate the support, and I'm so glad you enjoyed my book. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever Your one word is much love.

I'll see you soon.

Raise your standard.

Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.

I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

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