Mark Cuban believes you’re capable of greatness — as long as you stay open-minded enough to discover your strengths.
“I’m a hardcore believer that everybody has something that they’re really, really, really good at — that could be world-class great. Every single human being on this planet,” Cuban recently told the “Lex Fridman Podcast.”
“The hard part is just finding what that [greatness] is and, in some places, having resources to enable it,” he added. “But be curious so you can find out what it is.”
He has a point, according to psychologists. Curiosity can help you learn more while keeping you better engaged in your career or hobbies, research shows — which will make you happier, and more likely to succeed. Even if you don’t unlock “world-class” greatness, cultivating your own curiosity throughout life can have long-term benefits.
Cuban shared an example from his own personal experience. Despite the fact that he’s now a tech billionaire, he said he never showed an affinity for — or even an interest in — technology until after he’d graduated from college.
“I [only] took one technology class in college, Fortran programming, and I cheated on it,” Cuban said. It wasn’t until after he’d finished school and started working for Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh that Cuban discovered his interest in technology while learning the computer programming language RAMIS.
“I realized, ‘Oh, this is interesting to me and I like it,'” said Cuban. “And that’s what got me a job selling software, and going on from there.”
At age 23, Cuban left Mellon and moved to Dallas, sleeping on the floor of an apartment he shared with five friends. He got a job selling software, and realized his skill and affinity for sales and technology.
“I could go seven hours, eight hours [of coding] without taking a break, thinking it was 10 minutes, because I was concentrating so hard and so excited and really loved it,” Cuban said on ABC’s “Shark Tank” in 2016. “That’s when I realized that I can be really, really good at technology.”
After getting fired from that sales job, Cuban started a software company called MicroSolutions, which he sold to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990. Five years later, he became a co-founder of AudioNet, which turned into Broadcast.com. That company sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999, making Cuban a 40-year-old billionaire.
His advice to young people, he said on the podcast: Don’t panic if you haven’t yet discovered your biggest strengths. Instead, stay curious and open-minded.
“You just don’t know what that’s going to be until you go out and experience different things,” he said, adding: “Enjoy your life, find things to smile about, be curious, read, watch, expose yourself to as many different ideas as you can, because something’s going to click at some point. You may be 15, you may be 25, you may be 55, but it can happen.”
Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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