Oxstones Investment Club™Today’s advice comes from Mark Cuban, American businessman and basketball team owner, via MSNBC:
“It’s not about money or connections — it’s the willingness to outwork and outlearn everyone… And if it fails, you learn from what happened and do a better job next time.”
Entrepreneurial endeavors are fraught with risk. According to Cuban, accepting and learning from failure separate those who make it to the top from their counterparts.
One critical component of this lesson is there is no shame in failing; basketball lore tells us that sophomore Michael Jordan didn’t earn a spot on his high school’s varsity basketball team. Yet in a Sports Illustrated feature, Jordan’s high school coach Clifton Herring said that “if Jordan distinguished himself at all during the tryout, it was through his supreme effort. He was first in line for the conditioning drills, and he ran them as hard as anyone, and when they were over he wanted to run some more.”
Jordan was clearly willing to “outwork and outlearn everyone,” and if he had let the disappointment of being placed on the J.V. squad kill his dreams, he never would have materialized into one of the greatest basketball players in history.
“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.”
Tags: basketball team owner, being entrepreneurial, businessman, Clifton Herring, connections, failure, Mark Cuban, Michael Jordan, money, no shame in failing, outlearn, outwork, risk, Sports Illustrated, Success