Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, what better way to kick off the biggest personal growth event of the year than with television’s most famous shark – Mark Cuban.
Approximately 200,000 personal growth enthusiasts joined Mindvalley Summit 2021 for three days of live sessions with the world’s most in-demand teachers, philanthropists, philosophers, scientists, and artists, with the occasional billionaire entrepreneur thrown into the mix.
Cue Mark Cuban, the legendary Shark Tank investor, media personality, owner of The Dallas Mavericks, and founder of the Mark Cuban Foundation; who came on for a wide-ranging discussion with Mindvalley founder and CEO Vishen Lakhiani about Cryptocurrency, minimum wage, and entrepreneurial success.
Mark started his entrepreneurial journey early, selling garbage bags door to door, at the age of 12, showing the kind of initiative and work ethic to set him up for success later in life. After graduating from Indiana University – where he briefly owned the most popular bar in town – Mark moved to Dallas.
A notoriously keen basketball fan, in 1995, Mark and long-time friend Todd Wagner came up with an internet-based solution to not being able to listen to Hoosiers Basketball games out in Texas. That solution was Broadcast.com – streaming audio over the internet, a company which Mark later sold to Yahoo for $5.6 billion.
In 2000, Mark acquired the NBA franchise, Dallas Mavericks, where he’s seen passionately supporting to this day. Outside of the business and sports worlds, Mark found widespread fame when becoming a ‘Shark’ on the popular ABC show Shark Tank, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now, the point of this whole production,
Dan Gosling, Mindvalley Member
Was to give Mark a fine introduction.
Mark Cuban is great,
His words we await.
If we’re smart, we will heed his instruction.
Mark’s seen some pretty bizarre pitches on Shark Tank over the years, with investment-seeking entrepreneurs getting increasingly inventive with their attempts to impress the sharks. But has he ever faced the combination of acoustic guitar, saxophone, and CEO rapping haikus and limericks from his customers before?
Well, he has now. Vishen was joined by his son and budding saxophonist, Hayden, and Mindvalley teacher, Ronan Oliveira — who Vishen called upon to achieve a lifetime ambition of playing guitar in front of more than 3,000 people.
In Vishen’s words, it may not have been a work of art, but the aim of the game was to make Mark Cuban smile, and it was mission accomplished as Mark said:
“You’ve got to get me a copy of that because that is the best thing anybody has ever given me ever for one of these.”
He also saved a word of praise for Hayden: “It’s the saxophone that made it. I got to just say the saxophone was everything.”
It’s very volatile, and it’s very speculative.
You don’t get one of the world’s most famous investors to have a chat without using the opportunity to get an opinion on Crypto, so Vishen got to that straight off the bat.
“It’s very volatile, and it’s very speculative,” says Mark, who recently took a hit on a flyer he took on Titan. But he does see parallels between the development of blockchain technology and the infamous dot com bubble and the success he had in the 90s.
“I get excited about crypto assets and these things called smart contracts and blockchains.
I just think they’re game changers for developing businesses and developing new applications. And I’m not talking about speculating in Bitcoin versus Ethereum, but actually developing applications for personalized finance for buying and selling digital assets.
There are just so many applications that are going to change because of the way blockchains and smart contracts together allow businesses to be developed much more efficiently.”
To me, as an entrepreneur, the idea of one of my employees needing government assistance really makes me upset.
“I’m all for raising the minimum wage because the stronger the community around your business, the more vibrant, the more economically capable they are, the better your business is going to be.”
Mark encourages all entrepreneurs and business owners to look after the needs of their staff by not only paying them above the minimum wage and above the national living wage, but by offering stock options too.
“If you want income inequality to be reduced, you’ve got people who are just making, you know, $15 an hour and trying to live their lives. If they don’t have any appreciable assets, it’s really hard to improve your financial position.”
According to Mark, you need to have assets, whatever. They may be stock in a private company, maybe property or savings, but you need something, anything that can grow in value. And as an owner or employer, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the people working for you have that.
“Can you really take pride in your own business if the employees that you have, the people that do the work for you, don’t have enough financial wherewithal to avoid government assistance? No entrepreneur should say yes to that.”
I tell people – everybody’s got something inside of them. That’s great. The hard part is finding it.
We get things we’re passionate about, but often the things we’re passionate about are not the things we can be great at.
“But then we get on with our lives, and we find we have bills. We have a house we have to pay for; we have a car we have to pay for.
And we get stuck in that position. I’ve been in that position.
My advice is just to be great at your job.
When you’re great at something, well, it always feels good to be great. And nobody quits things that they’re great at.”
Because the reality of life is you can’t just always quit your job. You can’t always just go in and say, give me the raise or give me the promotion, or I’m outta here.
“So when you’re stuck, you know, you’ve got to find it within yourself to say, okay, this is where I am. And if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be great because not feeling good is not working. It’s just creating too much stress. But if I really go for it, maybe I can be great at it.”
And you’ll find that attitude will take you far. If you’re great at your job, other companies will find you. Or it creates an opportunity for you to be an entrepreneur.
Mark says to try as many things as you can when you’re young or younger, before you’re stuck for financial or other reasons, try to find the thing you can be great at.
“And if you can’t find that thing, be great at what you’re doing. And, you know, your joy level just goes up.”
One of the things we love about our founder is the originality of his questions, like this Vishen classic:
“Mark, if we were to take you, put you in a blender and turn you into a cologne, and that cologne would imbue the wearer with the ultimate quality of Mark Cuban, what would that quality be?”
“Wow. What a Question!” Mark laughs. But being the personal growth junkies that we are, we loved his answer even more.
“I love to learn. When I pick up new tidbits, it’s like a ball of yarn. When you start to create a ball of yarn, it’s all messy, right? Because you gotta wind it first.
And then, as you start to add more and more knowledge to your own personal ball of yarn, it gets bigger and more solid and more powerful.
And knowledge is the same way. It’s hard at the beginning within a particular industry or topic, or job to start picking up that knowledge.
But each and every day that you add something, that knowledge gets stronger and more powerful, and you get more capable, and you get more confident.
And so every day, I’m trying to add knowledge.”
P.S Look out for Eau D’Cuban coming to a perfume vendor near you soon ;).
To finish up, here are some of our favorite Mark Cuban Quotes:
“Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don’t do it.”
“What I’ve learned in these 11 years is you just got to stay focused and believe in yourself and trust your own ability and judgment.”
“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once, and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success.”
“It doesn’t matter if the glass is half-empty or half-full; all that matters is that you’re the one pouring.”
If you enjoyed these snippets from Vishen’s conversation with Mark Cuban, you can watch the entire interview from Mindvalley Summit 2021 as a Mindvalley member. Check out how to join below.
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