When Mark Cuban was in his 30s, running the tech company that would eventually make him a billionaire, he was laser-focused on productivity and results.

These days, he regrets it. “I wish somebody would have told me to be nicer,” said Cuban, 64, when asked what advice he’d give his younger self. “Because I was always go, go, go Ready, fire, aim. Let’s go. Let’s go faster, faster.”

At first, Cuban’s hustle-forward outlook tanked the company’s morale and performance, he said: “Sometimes it took my partner Todd telling me, ‘Look, you’re scaring some people, [and] they’re typically going to [quit] and you can’t get mad.’”

The business may not have grown so much — and Cuban might not be a billionaire — if he hadn’t learned the “underrated” skill of being nice.

“I went through my own metamorphosis, if you will. Early on in my career,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do business with me when I was in my 20s [and 30s].”

“So I had to change, and I did, and it really paid off,” he added.

Kindness is a valuable leadership trait. Workers have “four universal needs” when it comes to their bosses: trust, compassion, stability and hope.

Employees become more engaged in their work, leading to higher productivity, lower staff turnover and overall monetary gain.

“It not only affects employees themselves. It has a downstream impact on the business,” Duffy said.

“For a while, there was this idea that we are treating people well, and we are going to get beaten by a competitor that is more aggressive,” Zimmer said. “There was a misunderstanding about those values [not being] tied to building a great business, which they are.”

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The 64-year-old investor, serial entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks says the strategy helped him accumulate his own wealth — a net worth of $4.6 billion, according to Forbes. He recently broke down his rules for GQ, noting that while they’re meant to help you earn cash, they’re really about being able to “control your own destiny.”

“If you want to be a millionaire, you can do it, but there’s a couple things you have to be able to accomplish,” Cuban said.

1. His first rule: “Find something you can be good at. Then, be great at it.”

To do that, you’ll probably need to study your subject relentlessly. Counterintuitively, you may also need to “cross-train” your brain by studying other topics of interest, too. Research published by the Association for Psychological Science last year noted that what separates Nobel Prize winners from national-level winners is often multidisciplinary experience.

Similarly, the research found that competitive athletes had “greater sustainability of long-term excellence” if they played more than one sport as a child. Those athletes didn’t immediately excel at their preferred sport, but showed a more consistent route to eventual mastery over time, the authors added.

2. Cuban’s second rule is “know how to sell.” His own sales career started early: At age 12, he sold trash bags door-to-door to earn money for new sneakers, he said.

The billionaire has previously given out advice on how to succeed at sales — by showing people how you can help them in the first couple of seconds of your pitch.

“Selling isn’t about convincing, it’s about helping,” Cuban told the School of Hard Knocks in a TikTok. “When you understand what people need and want, you put yourself in a position to help them,” he said. “Then you make good things happen, close deals and that’s how you create companies.”

3. The third rule: “Be curious and always learning,” Cuban said.

Having a “lifetime learning mentality” correlates with both objective and subjective success — from the number of promotions you get to how happy you are in your job — according to a 2020 study from University of Waterloo finance and education researchers.

Lifelong learners can even save their employers money in the long run, study co-author Judene Pretti told UWaterloo’s “Alumni Know” podcastin April.

“As technology continues to move at the rapid pace it is, employers need their employees to … undertake learning and development to stay on top of what the latest technologies are,” Pretti said. “It isn’t a matter of needing to replace workforce. Instead, develop and grow the existing workforce.”

4. Lastly, Cuban’s fourth rule is his longest — and perhaps his most important, especially for aspiring entrepreneurs.

“When you walk into a room, you [need to] know your s–t better than anyone else in the room,” he said. “That’s when it’s time to start a company. Then, you can start to control your own destiny.”

Knowledge, of course, doesn’t guarantee success. Before Cuban started his first company, he quit or was fired from three consecutive jobs and slept on the floor of a three-bedroom apartment he shared with five roommates, he wrote in Forbes in 2013.

He touched on a similar subject in his 2011 book “How to Win at the Sport of Business,” writing that it “doesn’t matter how many times” you fail. “You only have to be right once” to be “set for life,” he added.

That lesson may be why Cuban seems confident enough in his four rules to stake his own livelihood on it. Even if he lost everything, he’d build himself back into a millionaire again, he told NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast in 2016.

“I would get a job as a bartender at night, and a sales job during the day, and I would start working,” Cuban said. Could I become a multi-millionaire again? I have no doubt.”

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But he hasn’t used his success or his age as reasons to rest on his laurels.

“Every morning, I am rising, I am grinding, I am learning,” says Cuban

1. Start the day with a positive attitude

“My rise and grind is to get up every morning knowing how I am going to kick everybody’s a–, first of all, and then get after it,” Cuban says.

The Pittsburgh native grew up in a working-class family. His father installed upholstery in cars and his mom worked any number of odd jobs. But he’s always had a can-do attitude, he says.

“People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future.

“Nobody had high hopes for me,” Cuban says in an interview on “Shark Tank.” “But I was a hustler.”

2. Tackle his email inbox

“Usually, I will do my emails — spend about an hour doing that.”

Cuban conducts almost all his business over email.

“No meetings or phone calls unless I’m picking up a check. Everything is email,” Cuban says “Love it. Live on it. Saves me hours and hours every day. No meetings. No phone calls. All because of email. I set my schedule.”

That’s important to Cuban because the entrepreneur considers time the most valuable resource. “You can’t buy it. You can’t find it. You can’t store it. You can’t trade it,”

3. Get up to speed on current events

“Then, I will catch up on all the news.”

Cuban tweets regularly about current events, and for a time, was on a short list of potential presidential candidates for 2020.

“If I was single, I would do it. For sure,” says Cuban, during a court-side interview at a Mavericks team practice in October.

4. Educate himself by reading

Cuban is relentless about staying on top of new trends.

“Then, I start reading. Right now I am learning all about artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, that is the wave of the future. So when I have a topic that I think I need to get up to speed on to stay ahead of everybody,” he reads about it.

Cuban says the first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur and everybody should be educating themselves on the topic.

“Whatever you are studying right now if you are not getting up to speed on deep learning, neural networks, etc., you lose,” says Cuban, speaking at SXSW in 2017. “We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation.”

Thanks for your Wisdom Catherine Clifford