Mark Cuban’s advice for making lots of money? Try new things until you figure out what you’re good at. Then, work to become “great” at it.
“When you find something you’re good at, go for it … Just do everything you can to be great at it, and that’s when you really make money,” Cuban told Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings on the “Earn Your Leisure” YouTube show in January. “That’s how the money’s made.”
The advice is worth considering if you’re evaluating your life and work ahead of the new year — and, the billionaire entrepreneur and investor noted, it’s useful for people who are young or financially struggling.
“If you’re broke, now’s the time to try. Because what’s the worst that could happen, right? You’re going to stay broke,” Cuban said. “But if you keep on trying different things, when you find that one great thing, then amazing things happen.”
Just expect a lot of trial and error.
“I think a lot of people get frustrated, because it’s hard to find something that you love to do and that you’re good at,” Cuban said on the YouTube show. “Life’s about the grind, and life’s about learning. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.”
For instance, on his path to tech guru, Cuban, now 63, has said he tried many things, like bartending and TV repair. Then he landed a job at a computer software sales company in his early 20s, but according to Cuban, he’d only taken one computer class in college — and he’d cheated at it.
So, he started reading computer manuals to teach himself the technology. When he started his own computer software company, MicroSolutions, he kept learning. “I really put the effort in and it went big,” he told Bilal and Millings.
Cuban sold MicroSolutions for $6 million in 1990. Today, his net worth is $4.5 billion, according to Forbes. And even as a billionaire, Cuban said, he keeps learning: If he’s going to invest in a piece of tech, he needs to know how it works.
“I still read the manual,” he said. “I want to be that guy who really knows his stuff.”
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