Read the frickin' manual

by Dale Davidson March 18, 2026

Mark Cuban of Shark Tank fame has an old blog post talking about why he was successful in his 20s as a software salesman.

Mark Cuban's old blog

Every night I would take home a different software manual, and I would read them. Of course the reading was captivating. Peachtree, PFS, DBase, Lotus, Accpac… I couldn’t put them down. Every night I would read some after getting home, no matter how late.

Of course it was easy on the weekends. After drinking that cheap champagne, I wasn’t getting out of bed till about 9pm, so I had tons of time to lie on the floor and read. It worked. Turns out not a lot of people ever bothered to RTFM (read the frickin’ manual), so people started really thinking I knew my stuff. As more people came in, because I knew all the different software packages we offered, I could offer honest comparisons and customers respected that.

Mark is right. Most people don't RTFM. They just throw their hands up in despair and give up.

But if you're willing to RTFM, you can become a successful solo 1099 federal sub-contractor.

I was successful in the consulting project that led to my 1099 gig because I just read instructions on how to do VLookups in Excel.

Then I looked up to use pivot tables and all of a sudden I was 10x faster at doing data analysis than my peers.

RTFM, go 1099.

RTFM again, find another project.

Now I look for employees who have a habit of RTFM when they don't know something. The modern version is Googling the manual. Those employees are usually successful.

So, RTFM.

Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.