Mark Cuban on the habit all 30-somethings need to succeed: Without it, 'you're not expanding your mind'

If you can't come up with a New Year's resolution, Mark Cuban has you covered.

On Sunday, the Dallas Mavericks owner told Bill Maher on the "Club Random" podcast that everyone over 30 should be reading every day. Otherwise, they're limiting themselves and their career, he said.

"Somebody 40 and over, even 30 and over, if you're not reading, you're f---ed… because you're not expanding your mind," Cuban said. "I tell my kids… 'Somebody who doesn't read lives one life, somebody who reads an unlimited number of lives.'"

Turns out, Cuban is onto something. A 2016 study conducted by Yale University School of Public Health researchers found reading 30 minutes a day helped participants 50 and older live on average two years longer than their non-reading counterparts, regardless of health, wealth, gender and education.

Cuban himself is an active reader. In 2018, he told CNBC Make It he reads four to five hours per day studying national and local news, emails and technology research.

And seems Cuban's two older daughters picked up his affinity for reading — or at least were bribed into it. When they were younger, both girls would be rewarded with "shoes or whatever they wanted" after they read a certain number of pages, Cuban said. Then, the family could have conversations about what they read.

But Cuban said he had to adopt a different strategy for his son, now 13, who doesn't like to read. Cuban was worried his son's ambivalence toward books would "hurt him long term" — until he realized his son was learning in different ways.

"They consume a lot of information [online]," Cuban said. "The challenge wasn't so much, are they learning? …The challenge for me was understanding how they learn."

After noticing his son was picking up business concepts like gross margins and royalties from watching YouTube and TikTok videos, Cuban realized the platforms could act as parenting tools.

"[Tiktok] is the best parental tool in the world because… [it's] artificial intelligence based off of what you watch," Cuban said on the podcast. "So, if I want to know what my kids are into, I just look at their TikTok feeds."

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