On Friday early morning, as I was waking up, I heard Mark Cuban, the successful business entrepreneur, being interviewed on ESPN Radio. He said that he has many businesses but also employs people to manage them, so what he does is he has certain days during the week where he goes over reports from each of those people in meetings.

The key thing he said was that he asks people to tell him the bad news first, because he always expects good news so if he knows the bad news right away, he knows how to help each person resolve the issue. THAT is a brilliant concept given by a highly successful, highly respected business leader on leadership. These are the types of things that one can truly learn from – listening to a leader speak. Unfortunately, from personal experience, I get the impression that many managers would tell their staff not to bother them with bad news and just figure out the solutions on their own.

Just as unfortunate is that in our daily lives, we hear nonsensical things that do not help us improve, things like shoes and fashion and clothing and relationships and babies and cars and accessories and gossip and random comments. Thus, I conclude that one probably learns more from studying a rock than listening to daily conversations as you learn nothing from the latter but you might understand things by studying nature and gathering your thoughts. Otherwise, try to listen up and pay attention when business leaders are speaking (especially when you are listening to them for free), and then apply them in your life.

While this has nothing to do with my professional life, I am happy to know that in my personal life, I do what Mark Cuban does because I always encourage my peers to talk to me about what’s wrong so I can help them. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of intelligent people like Cuban out there.