If you can’t think of a New Year’s resolution, Mark Cuban will help you.
On Sunday, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks told Bill Maher on the “Club Random” podcast that everyone over 30 should read a book every day. Otherwise, they are limiting themselves and their careers, he said.
Cuba said: “Someone 40 years old or older, even 30 years old or older, if you don’t read, you will die… because you don’t open your mind.” “I tell my children… ‘He who doesn’t read lives one life, someone who reads countless lives.'”
Turns out, Cuban was up to something. A 2016 study conducted by the Yale School of Public Health, researchers found that reading for 30 minutes a day helps participants aged 50 and older lived an average of two years longer than non-readers, regardless of health, wealth, gender, and education level.
Cuban himself is an active reader. In 2018, he told CNBC Make It he reads four to five hours a day researching national and local news, email, and tech research.
And it seems Cuban’s two eldest daughters have drawn on his love of reading – or at least being bribed to read. Cuban said that as children, both girls would be rewarded with “shoes or whatever they want” after they read a certain number of pages. The family can then chat about what they read.
But Cuban said he had to adopt a different strategy for his son, now 13, who doesn’t like reading. Cuban worried that his son’s conflicting attitude to books would “hurt him in the long run” – until he realized his son was learning in different ways.
“They consume a lot of information [online]”, Cuban said. “The challenge is not so much, are they learning? …The challenge for me is to understand how they learn.”
After noticing his son was absorbing business concepts like gross profit margins and royalties from watching YouTube and TikTok videos, Cuban realized that these platforms could function as parenting tools.
“[Tiktok] is the best parenting tool in the world because… [it’s] “Artificial intelligence is based on what you watch,” Cuban said on the podcast. “So if I want to know what my kids love, I just have to check out their TikTok feed.”
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