Even billionaires think about starting side hustles.

If Mark Cuban was 16 years old again and “needed to make some extra money,” he’d start one specific side hustle in just three steps, he tells CNBC Make It.

First, he’d learn how to write prompts for artificial intelligence language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Next, he’d teach his friends how to use those prompts on their school papers. “Then, I would go to businesses, particularly small- to medium-sized businesses that don’t understand AI yet,” says Cuban. “Doesn’t matter if I’m 16, I’d be teaching them as well.”

More than half of Gen Zers in the U.S. currently have side hustles, a LendingTree report found in February. AI prompt engineering — or, the ability to phrase inquiries to chatbots to get desired responses — can be a particularly lucrative opportunity. The average pay for AI tutors starts at about $30,000 per year, and full-time AI prompt engineers can make up to $129,500, according to job board platform ZipRecruiter.

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You don’t need a college degree to become an AI prompt engineer, but you do need practice — and, often, certifications — to learn how those large language models operate. Some online certification courses, like Vanderbilt University or IBM’s offerings on Coursera, say you can master the basics in one month.

Cuban’s hypothetical side hustle is more high-tech than his actual first job, selling garbage bags door-to-door to his neighbors outside of Pittsburgh at age 12 to save up for a new pair of basketball shoes. He continued to earn extra cash as a teenager by selling collectibles like baseball cards, stamps, and coins, eventually helping him pay to attend Indiana University. There, he bartended, hosted parties with cover charges and even picked up work as a dance instructor.

After a brief post-college stint in banking, Cuban turned to entrepreneurship full-time. He sold his first company, a software startup called MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990. His second company, audio streaming service Broadcast.com, made him a billionaire when he sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999.

Today, Cuban has a net worth of $5.7 billion, according to a Forbes estimate. He spends much of his time advocating for his online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs, which aims to make a variety of common prescription drugs more affordable by selling them at cost, plus a 15% markup.

 “I was a hustler … I have always been selling,” he said during an episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank” that aired in 2016. “I always had something going on. That was just my nature.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Cuban sold garbage bags door-to-door at age 12.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” which features Mark Cuban as a panelist.

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What if I told you that unleashing success starts with realizing how successful you already are?

It’s true. As a leadership and success expert I get asked a lot about “keys to success.” My first response is always: “Before you start changing, adding, or subtracting, spend some time appreciating.”

Success is more than just how much money you make, what job title you’ve achieved, or what accomplishments you’ve stacked up. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but true success is broader. It’s about the kind of life you’re living and who you’ve chosen to become.  

When you think about success in a more holistic way, it requires resilience, confidence, and other aspects of mental strength I talk about in depth in my recent book, “The Mentally Strong Leader.” 

A true measure of success requires introspection on a set of questions beyond the typical “how much” and “how high” metrics. If you can answer “yes” to the following six questions, you’re more successful — right now — than you may have realized.

The little things you do every day exemplify who you are. The little impressions you make leave a big, permanent impression. The question is: Do you choose to behave in line with your values? For example, if a core value is kindness, are you consistently kind, even when it’s hard? 

Intentionally living your values shows you’re centered and disciplined, and both are forms of success. Doing this is no small feat — it’s not easy to clearly articulate your values, let alone intentionally live them. 

If you’d like to start by articulating your values, there’s an exercise in “The Mentally Strong Leader” to help you do just that.

We all need to work in our lives, navigating our daily routines to get stuff done. But sometimes we get jammed up in habits, systems, or processes that no longer serve us — or anyone — well. 

Greater success comes from working on your life, too.

Are you stepping back from time to time to envision the life you really want to live and the person you really want to be? Are you reflecting to discern if you’re heading where you really want to go?

This is how you spot unhelpful patterns and habits you’ve fallen into — and give yourself a chance to change them.  

As the Rolling Stones once lamented, “You can’t always get what you want.” But happiness and success flow from focusing on what you do have. 

I know from my own experience — and I imagine you do, too — that it’s easy to get caught up feeling like what you have is never enough, to always be looking to the next thing, to constantly seek the next rung of the ladder to climb. 

The ability to consistently show gratitude for all you have and have already accomplished, versus always needing more, is a key trait of the most successful people.

As you strive for success, you’ll make mistakes. The key is: How do you react?

Do you let mistakes beat you down? Or do you see yourself as successful only if you’re making mistakes, making incremental improvements, and adapting along the way? 

True success requires you to fall in love with the process of improving and achieving, not just the achievement itself.

That can be difficult at times, especially when the work might feel repetitive, uninteresting, or far removed from what you’re ultimately aiming to do or get. But it’s attention to the little stuff that pays off in big moments.

For example, I’m often asked about becoming a professional speaker. People tell me, “I’d love to get paid to talk onstage for an hour.” But to do so requires intensive research to uncover insights worth getting paid to talk about and hours of repetitive rehearsal. It’s a process. 

As Ina Garten points out with her new memoir, you have to “be ready when the luck happens.” 

A friend of mine told me recently she felt like a failure for not getting a promotion she wanted. But when I pushed her to define what success really meant to her, it wasn’t that promotion at all.

She’d fallen into the trap of thinking, “This is what I’m supposed to want.” She realized success to her was having a team that she could coach and nurture — something she could achieve in the role she was already in.

It breaks my heart when I hear someone say they don’t feel successful based on someone else’s definition instead of their own. When you define what success means to you, you might discover how successful you already are.

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

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If you’re saving in a tax-advantaged retirement account, you generally have one of two flavors to choose from.

The choice lies in when and how you’re taxed. “Traditional” versions of 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts are funded with pre-tax dollars, meaning you get a tax break in the year you make contributions. Roth accounts work in reverse: You pay taxes up front, but can withdraw your money tax-free, provided you meet a few rules, in retirement.

The argument over which type of account to use typically revolves around how much money you make. Early-career, low-income workers are better off in a Roth, the thinking goes, because they’d save money by paying taxes when they’re in a low bracket instead of waiting until they’re bringing in more in retirement. High earners, meanwhile, are generally steered toward traditional accounts and their upfront tax break.

However, some money pros don’t think you should bother with that particular calculus.

“I don’t care what tax bracket you’re in,” says Suze Orman, a financial expert and host of the “Women & Money (and Everyone Smart Enough to Listen)” podcast. “You have to be crazy to do anything other than a Roth retirement account.”

Orman’s thinking echoes that of Ed Slott, a certified public accountant, founder of IRAHelp.com and one of the internet’s leading Roth evangelists.

When it comes to the question of paying your taxes now or later, nearly everyone would be wise to pay now for two reasons, he says.

1. Roths don’t tax your gains

Investors in traditional accounts can deduct the amount they put in from their taxable income for the year they made the contribution. But in exchange for that break, they’re generally not allowed to take their money out until retirement without penalty. And when they do finally withdraw it, they owe income tax on all of it — their contributions and their gains.

If the market goes up over the course of your career as an investor — and, historically, it has — then every cent you earn is adding to your eventual tax burden.

“That tax is constantly building,” Slott previously told CNBC Make It. “The values are up, but that means the eventual share that will be going to Uncle Sam will be higher, too.”

Roths, meanwhile, tax your contributions going in. You can withdraw up to what you’ve contributed at any time from a Roth without penalty. And provided you’re 59½ and have owned the account for at least five years, everything you take out of a Roth IRA or 401(k) is tax-free.

2. Roths take advantage of low tax rates

The traditional thinking around traditional versus Roth accounts revolves around your personal tax rate. High earners should pay tax later; low earners should pay it now.

But what about the overall tax rate? After all, the government could raise taxes across the board, which would generally spell bad news for those who put it off.

While no one can predict how tax rates will change in the coming decades, it’s worth noting that tax rates are just about as low as they’ve ever been, says Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar, and the author of  “How To Retire.”

“Tax rates are low, secularly, compared with where they’ve been historically,” she says. “So the idea is that you’re better off taking your tax medicine now at relatively low tax rates.”

Benz, though, isn’t quite as convinced as Orman or Slott that Roths make the most sense for everyone, period.

For one, if tax rates stay relatively low, the traditional logic may still apply to some retirement savers, she says.

“It depends on the household. For higher-income earners, their tax rates in their peak earnings years may be their highest level in their lifetime,” she says. “So if they can get a tax break on their contributions, that may be the way to go.”

Of course, it can be tricky to pinpoint exactly where you are in your career and retirement savings trajectory, which makes this a decision where professional input may be helpful.

“This is an area where financial planning software, a financial planner, can really add a lot of value to help do some projections in terms of how much you’re contributing, how much you have already and what your tax rate will look like in retirement,” Benz says.

What’s more, Benz doesn’t see the harm in having a mix of money in Roth and traditional accounts for retirees.

“The concept of tax diversification appeals to me. It’s difficult to know where tax rates will go in the future. So having a combination will give you a blend,” she says. “You’re sort of diversifying the tax treatment of your investment assets. I think that makes sense, just as you would diversify other aspects of your investment portfolio across asset classes and across investment styles and sectors.”

Basically, there’s a chance that if you follow Orman and Slott’s advice, and put everything into Roth accounts, you could end up paying more in taxes than you would have had you been a little more strategic.

But as Slott is fond of saying, you end up with a pretty decent consolation prize in retirement: “You’ve locked in a 0% tax rate on your retirement [withdrawals].”

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Gary Shapiro has one interview question he always poses to job candidates: How soon can you start?

It’s a straightforward inquiry, but a person’s response can be immediately disqualifying, says Shapiro, the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, a trade organization that produces the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

If an interviewee says they can start in less than two weeks — and they’re currently employed — “they don’t get the job, because they’ll treat us the way they treat that former employer,” Shapiro, 68, tells CNBC Make It. The pass-fail question doesn’t apply to candidates who are currently without a job, he notes.

“I want an [employee] with a level of commitment to their organization — even if they don’t love their job — where they won’t leave their employer hanging,” says Shapiro, who’s been the CTA’s CEO for the past 33 years.

How people leave their jobs is “really important,” he adds. The principle applies to his own employees who leave for other organizations: Departing under good conditions — for example, by giving at least two weeks’ notice — is often a consideration whenever CTA rehires “boomerang” employees, Shapiro says.

Shapiro asked his go-to question while interviewing a candidate whom he ultimately hired as CTA’s chief operating officer, he says. Her response, as Shapiro recalls, was that she’d need up to six weeks to adequately transition from her former job.

“I was very thankful she answered” that way, he says. “I said, ‘That’s perfect. You got the job.’”

The question — and its make-or-break nature — may sound extreme “at face value,” says Joyce Guan West, a San Francisco-based executive and career coach. You shouldn’t deploy it as a standalone query, she adds — but if you ask it alongside other character-focused questions, you’ll stand a good chance of effectively determining whether a candidate’s values align with your own.

“I would be surprised if the majority of high-quality candidates, or candidates at a more senior level, would say less than two weeks,” West says, noting that executive-level candidates often need more than two weeks to offboard from their current roles. “It seems like kind of a softball question that most smart people are going to answer correctly.”

West recommends pairing Shapiro’s question alongside others that probe why the candidate is interested in the role and the company, and why they’re looking for a new role at all. A well-suited candidate will have done their research and offer enthusiastic, compelling answers — while steering clear of speaking negatively about their previous employment experiences, she says.

The additional questioning helps you find someone “who’s going to do the right thing, as opposed to someone who’s just looking out for themselves,” West says.

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There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, says Tovah Klein.

“Being a parent is so humbling. It’s throwing at us probably daily [reminders that] we are far from perfect,” says Klein, a child psychologist, author and director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.

Fortunately, making mistakes and owning up to them is one way that parents can actually help teach their kids how to become healthy, successful adults. “Perfection is impossible, but it’s also important that we’re not [perfect], because our children learn how to handle real life,” Klein tells CNBC Make It.

Even so-called experts are no exception. In her latest book “Raising Resilience,” which was published in September, Klein shares some examples of moments she let her emotions get the better of her when raising her own three now-grown children.

Like most parents, Klein raised her voice in heated moments on more than one occasion: “I could really yell at my kids,” she says. She points to “rough times” in the evenings when her children were younger and could become rowdy between dinner and bedtime.

The rowdiness could sometimes devolve into loud arguments that left Klein “embarrassed if people would have come over to my house at 6 p.m.,” she says. Yelling is common, even understandable, in the heat of an argument, she adds — but it’s far from ideal, and parents should commit to repairing the situation once everyone has calmed down.

“I wish I had never been that parent who went over the top and really got into battles with my children. But I did,” Klein says. “And, when I did, I had to very shamelessly own it.”

In her book, Klein writes about how these difficult moments create a “disconnection” in the relationship that can have harmful effects if they go unaddressed. Raising your voice or lashing out, even in a heated moment like a toddler’s tantrum, can be disruptive and potentially scary for the child. 

A child might mistake their parent’s outburst as something more serious and long-lasting. That can lead to self-blaming and shame, which can cause negative long-term effects to their mental health. Children who are regularly yelled at are more likely to develop behavioral problems, low self-esteem and depression, according to a 2013 study published in The Journal of Child Development.

Parents should quickly apologize to repair the relationship and put their child’s mind at ease, says Klein. She recommends being “honest and direct.” That can be as simple as saying, “I’m sorry I yelled,” or, “I apologize. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Apologizing models exactly the sort of positive, mature behaviors parents want their children to emulate, according to Klein. It “brings relief to your child and provides a model of how to deal with anger and disruptions in other relationships in their lives” going forward, she writes in her book.

Accepting the fact that you can never be perfect, and being open with your kids about your mistakes, will benefit both you as a parent and your kids as they grow into mature adults, says Klein.

“I’m most proud of the moments that I could catch myself and [remember], ‘You’ve got to be the adult in this room,’ even when it was really hard to be,” she says.

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Start today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through November 26, 2024.

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