Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
He made a lot of money in the first dot com boom of the late 90s when he sold his company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for nearly $6B. Not bad.
Since then he’s become an HD pioneer, one of the most outgoing sports owners in the business, and a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. He’s also a blogger - and a pretty good one.
His latest post is about effort. As we head into a new year, and we search ourselves for ways to improve our lives, change our ways and make things better - this is a piece of advice I will staple to my bulletin board:
In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.
I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better.
And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did i need to do to close this account. What did I need to do to win this segment of business. What did i need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone. What did I need to do to find an edge. Where does that edge come from and how was I going to get there.
The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t. [link]
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[...] I also plan to focus on maintaining an accurate budget, an organized workspace, successful blogs, a less stressed attittude, and, simply, trying harder. [...]