Omar Usman – 3 Things I Learned from How to Win at the Sport of Business Mark Cuban
AI: Summary ©
The path of least resistance is the process of most people achieving success in their business or personal lives. It's crucial to set up meetings with higher-up managers to eliminate inconveniences and avoid acting on the onus of others. It's also crucial to master sales and empathy, learning to be the best at what you do, and measuring success by measuring customer demand. Three lessons from Mark Cuban's book, including empathy, learning to be the best at what you do, and being the best at what you do, are recommended. Viewers are encouraged to subscribe to their books and share feedback.
AI: Summary ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book How to Win at
the Sport of Business by Mark Cuban. Mark
Cuban is well known. He's the owner of
the Dallas Mavericks. He's a star of the
show Shark Tank. And this is a book
book that shares kind of his blog post,
his thoughts on things like entrepreneurship.
The first lesson that I learned was to
understand the path of least resistance.
He quotes Aaron Spelling in the book as
saying that TV is the path of least
resistance
from boredom. What that means is that it's
easier
for someone to sit there and to watch
TV
than it is to sit there and do
nothing at all. And once you understand that,
you understand the key to good business decision
making. He gives the example of Amazon.
What makes Amazon successful was that they've mastered
the path to least resistance.
They save your payment information.
They offer fast shipping. They offer one click
order. And you can pull up something, see
that you like it, and buy it with
one click. Now you might go to a
competitor's website and you might find a product
for cheaper. But what happens?
You'll sit down and you're like, oh, here
what here's what I want. It's, you know,
5 or $6 cheaper. Let me go ahead
and order it. You go to the checkout
page and it's, do you wanna create an
account or sign up as a guest? And
you're like, okay, let me sign up as
a guest. You go sign up as a
guest, try to check out, and then what
happens? Oh, apparently, you made an account with
this website 3 years ago and forgot about
it. Now you have to use that account
to check out. And well, guess what? You
forgot your password. Now you gotta go back
and reset your password. You reset the password,
turns out your credit card information is out
of date.
You know, all these steps add up, and
you reach a point where, like, you know
what? It's not worth saving the $5. You
close it out. You go back to Amazon.
You hit the buy with one click, and
then you order the item.
That's the path of least resistance. That's what
gives people an advantage over other people.
Google's website
is the most
valuable real estate online, the Google homepage.
They could monetize that for an insane amount
of money, but they don't because
their product is the search engine. What they
want people to do is to come and
to search for stuff from their website. And
so their homepage is set up as the
path of least resistance to searching. You pull
up the site, you search, and you go.
There's nothing else for you to do there.
To have a successful product, you have to
understand this philosophy.
Your product has to be easy to understand.
It has to be easy to use. It
has to be easy for people to get
what it does. You know, if you look
at Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, there's a
lot of products that come through
where
the product is really good, the product is
great, but people won't invest in it because
they because they'll say
the potential with this product is not so
high because it requires too much consumer education.
This product only works if someone's actually over
there physically demonstrating it. And although that might
be worth it, but as an investment, it's
not worth it because they know it won't
scale at the level that they want it
to scale because it's not easy to use
and easy to understand. By the same token,
you have to make sure that your stuff
is easy to buy. It's easy for people
to acquire. Otherwise, they'll otherwise, they'll go somewhere
else where it's easier to do. Now this
concept of the path of least resistance is
not just sales and businesses and products,
but think about when you're networking or you're,
you know, emailing people, trying to get things
done. Think about situations at work where,
let's say you want to meet up with
somebody, and you're trying to meet with someone
who's higher than you. So, you know,
maybe your manager or something like that. Someone
who's busier than you are. How do you
set up that meeting? Do you just email
them and say, hey, are you free to
get coffee? Let me know what's a good
time for you to meet. What you're doing
in that situation
is you're putting the onus of work on
the other on the other individual.
There's not a path that's a very difficult
path of resistance for them to go to
like, oh, man, I gotta sit down, I
gotta look at my calendar, I gotta figure
out what is this person you wanna talk
about? How long is it gonna take? And
all those questions add up, and it moves
us into a state of not acting. But
if you were to turn around and say,
hey,
I'd really like to speak up with you
about x topic. Here's some of the questions
that I had about it. I'd love to
grab a cup of coffee with you. Here's
the address of a coffee shop that's, you
know, one mile away from work.
Would you be free at 3 o'clock on
Tuesday?
If not, let me know a better time
that works for you, and I'll work around
your schedule. Now there's a path of least
resistance. They can look at it, they know
exactly what's going on, they know the locations
close to them. You're trying to eliminate as
many inconveniences as possible. In the best case
scenarios, they can reply and they can simply
say yes and be done with it. And
if the answer is no, you've given you've
structured it in such a way that they
know what to say and how to say
it. So there's not a lot of thought
process involved on their side. Think about something
like where maybe you need to go to
someone for advice or input or feedback. It's
one thing to say, hey, here's a bunch
of issues that I'm having. I kinda don't
know what to do with it. I'd like
to pick your brain. When you say something
like, I wanna pick your brain or I'd
like to just sit down and get your
feedback,
that person's thinking, oh, man, I've gotta sit
down and figure out this whole thing for
this person. And It's gonna be very hard
to get that meaning. On the other hand,
if you adopt this idea of the path
of least resistance, you might email that person
and say, hey, I know that you're really
well versed in this particular subject or this
particular thing.
Here's where I'm struggling. Here's a list of
all the things that I've done. You know,
I tried looking this up, I went to
this person for help, you know, I searched
this, I went through this other, you know,
article.
Here's all the steps that I've gone through,
here's the roadblock that I've reached, this is
where I'm stuck, this is where I need
your input as to how to get around
this roadblock, would you have some time to
sit down and talk with me and help
me figure that out? Now you're giving them
something that's much more structured, much more defined,
much easier for them to process, and much
easier for them to reply to. The second
lesson I learned was the importance of sales.
And that that sounds very simplistic. It's just,
yeah, of course we need sales.
Mark Cuban says that you have to get
a well rounded business education. You need to
know marketing. You need to know finance. You
need to know all these different subjects, but
you also need to be able to master
sales.
Sales is valuable no matter what kind of
organization you go into because the ability to
understand what a customer wants and to be
able to articulate that back, that's a very
valuable skill because you can show that we
understand what the customer wants
and how we're able to deliver
on what it is that they're looking for.
So that that value of sales
is universal.
And one of the there's a couple of
things that Mastering Sales, like Cuban, points out.
The first is empathy. And this is again,
it's a buzz word. It's something that's thrown
around a lot, but at the core of
sales really is empathy.
It's can you put yourself
in the customer's shoes and understand
what are the problems that they're facing, what
are their burning pains, what are the things
that they're really looking for a solution to,
and can you actually provide that solution?
If you can do that, the sales take
care of themselves. We always hear that phrase
that a good product sells itself.
Well, a good product only becomes a good
product if you're able to empathize and put
yourselves put yourself in the shoes of your
customer
and see what it is that they actually
need and what they're looking for and why.
And when you do that, you master sales.
Another aspect of sales
is learning when to take no for an
answer. And that's counterintuitive for salesmen.
Because we often think of sales or a
good salesperson as someone that's pushy, that's persistent,
that stays after it until they get the
sale. And Cuban says that that's not always
the best way. He says that's actually a
very lazy way of making sales, it's just
to be persistent and pushy because that's easy.
Anyone can be persistent, anyone can be pushy.
What's harder is that route of empathy. It's
that route of understanding
what do my customers need and more importantly
who my customers are. And if I've got
something that's of value,
I need to do the homework of finding
qualified prospects.
Where are the people looking for what I
have so that I can go and deliver
it to them. That makes the job of
the sales itself easier but there's just a
lot more homework involved in getting to that
point.
The third lesson I learned from Mark Cuban's
book was be the best at what you
do. Again, one of those cliche advices but
it's once you find what it is that
you wanna pursue or your calling or, you
know, whatever it is that you're trying to
go down, he says become world class. Become
the best in the world at at your
niche.
And the way that you measure that, there's
there's 2 ways. 1 is the trap. 1
is the self deception trap.
Don't let yourself be the judge of how
good you are at something, but rather let
the market look at it. How in demand
are your services?
The best want to work with the best.
And the better that you get,
the more demand that there will be for
what you're doing for your service or your
product, and the higher caliber and quality people
that will be asking for it. So use
that as your metric. Keep working. Get good
at what you do. Become the best at
what you do. That's 3 things I learned
from the book How to Win at the
Sport of Business by Mark Cuban. If you
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