While Mark Cuban is known today as a billionaire investor who built his fortune in tech, his early career looked a lot less glamorous. Before he finished college, he was selling trash bags, slicing deli meat, giving dancing lessons, and bartending.
Those jobs weren’t necessarily stepping stones to Silicon Valley, but they gave Cuban a look into the benefits of showing up and getting things done. Now, as Gen Z graduates face a difficult job market, Cuban has a simple message for anyone struggling to land their dream role: Stop waiting for the perfect job and start somewhere.
“Don’t get the perfect job because those are hard to find. Just get a job,” Cuban recently said on The Diary of a CEO.
That could mean taking a job at McDonald’s, where Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once worked as a teenager (as The Diary of a CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett and Cuban pointed out). Or at Dairy Queen, the fast-food chain Cuban once worked a shift. The point isn’t necessarily to stay there. It’s to show a future employer that you can take on responsibility, put in the work, and move up.
“Even though your life mission isn’t to be the manager of a McDonald’s or a Dairy Queen or whatever, the fact that you can show a future employer that you moved up the line…that’s what you need,” Cuban said.
Getting out of a career slump starts with a mindset shift, according to Cuban
A major career upgrade can take two or three years, Cuban said. But “most people don’t want to think like that,” and can get in their head that they’re stuck. The key is recognizing that frustration without letting it take over.
He also told Fortune how young workers can make the most of their first job, starting with learning how to work on a schedule and developing the people skills that will serve them throughout their careers.
That means “learning to work for a boss and doing a great job,” he said, as well as “learning how to reduce the stress of your boss” and “getting along with coworkers, no matter how different you are from” them.
Beyond interpersonal skills, Cuban said, young workers should understand the path to move up the ladder, learn how their employer makes money and think about how they can help it make more. “Trying to figure out how to become more productive at your job,” he added.
Taken together, these skills can help young workers stand out, earn their managers’ trust, and position themselves to achieve bigger career goals down the road.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google’s Sundar Pichai say your early career matters less than you think
As Gen Z workers weigh everything from work-life balance and workplace culture to meaningful work and pay, other CEOs agree with Cuban by arguing that early career decisions matter less than young people might think—and that learning to navigate imperfect circumstances can pay off over time.
Speaking to Stanford University graduates earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the choices causing the most anxiety early in a career aren’t necessarily the ones that will define it.
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret: While these things matter in the moment, they are much less consequential than you might think,” Pichai said.
Some decisions, he added, are critical to perfect—such as choosing a partner, deciding whether to start a family, or making a major career pivot—but among the rest, “very few of them are make or break.”
“But if you are able to filter the signal through the noise you can nudge your life in these moments into having the impact you want,” Pichai said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose first jobs included washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms at Denny’s, echoed that having low expectations helps develop resilience.
“People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang also told students at Stanford. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.
He added, “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you.”
Written by Preston Fore for Fortune as “Mark Cuban says Gen Z should think more like Jeff Bezos and stop chasing the perfect job: ‘Just get a job’—even at McDonald’s or Dairy Queen” and republished legally through syndication agreement with Reuters Connect.
