How To Win At The Sport Of Business – Book Summary

The Dream

In How To Win At The Sport Of Business Mark Cuban says that when you’re an anal retentive person so much detail-oriented you will be missing huge opportunities.

You never quite know in business if what you are doing is the right or wrong thing. Unfortunately, by the time you know the answer, someone has beaten you to it and you are out of business.

I read every book and magazine he could. Heck, three bucks for a magazine, twenty bucks for a book. One good idea would lead to a customer or a solution, and those magazines and books have paid for themselves many times over. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson. Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it. Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage.

To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the Internet making it so readily accessible, I can get an advantage in any technology business. Of course, my wife hates that I read more than three hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses.

Lessons Learned: My First Business Rules

Lesson #1: Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service. How can they put you out of business? Is it price?, service? or Is it ease of use? No product is perfect and if there are good competitors in your market, they will figure out how to abuse you. It’s always better if you are honest with yourself and anticipate where the problems will come from.

Lesson #2: Always run your business like you are going to be competing with biggest technology companies in your industry— Google, Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, whomever. If you are ready to compete with the big guys, you are ready to compete with anyone else.

The Sport of Business

In sports, you know who your opponents are. You know when you are going to play a game. You know pretty much how long the game will last. It’s mentally and physically exhausting if you are at the top of the game, but it still pales in comparison to the effort required to be successful in business.

The sport of business isn’t divided into games. It’s not defined by practices. It doesn’t have set rules that everyone plays by. The sport of business is the ultimate competition. It’s 7 × 24 × 365 × forever.

I read websites, newspapers, magazines, looking for ideas and concepts that I can use but I don’t read fiction. I spend time in bookstores because one idea from a book or magazine can make me money.

It’s not whom you know or how much money you have. It’s whether or not you have the edge and the guts to use it. That’s what success is all about. It’s about the edge.

The edge is;

• Spending 24 hours straight working on a project and you thought only a couple of hours had passed.
• Knowing that you have to be the smartest guy in the room when you have your meeting and you are going to put in the effort to learn whatever you need to learn to get there.
• Knowing that you can fail and learn from it, and just get back up and in the game.
• Recognizing when you are wrong and working harder to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• Being able to drill down to identify issues and problems and solve them solve before anyone knows they are there.

Every single day someone has an idea of a business they want to start and their entire goal is to beat the hell out of yours.

Every day some stranger somewhere in the world is trying to come up with a way to put you out of business. To take everything you have worked your ass off for, just take it all away.

If you are in a growing industry, there could be hundreds or thousands of strangers trying to figure out ways to put you out of business.

In the sport of business that is where the ultimate competition is. It is face off, my ability to execute an idea vs. yours. My ability to subvert your business vs. your ability to keep it going. This game doesn’t have a time limit. It’s forever. It never ends. It’s the ultimate competition.