Mark Cuban Used To Stay Up All Night Reading About Stamps

Cuban's habit of getting as much information as he can dates back to when he was a kid trading stamps and baseball cards.

Even then his curiosity helped him gain an edge over other buyers.

"I remember staying up till three, four, or five in the morning reading about stamps," he told us when we spoke with him at his offices in Dallas.

"I memorized the value of everything so that when I went to a stamp shop, I'd know. I learned early on that most people don't do the work and that if I was prepared, I would have an edge."

"It was same with baseball cards. What was the demand for baseball cards? I probably was ten and there's a park down the street where I grew up and I would repackage baseball cards that I bought and go down there and I could charge a premium. I was doing the math so I could make money. I just think I was wired that way."

This habit served him well over the years when the transactions started to get larger and more serious.

Cuban formed MicroSolutions in the mid-1980s to service the burgeoning population of business computer users.

Penguin Group (USA) LLC"I was still just ten months from my first introduction to PCs, and had no clue about multi-user systems," he has written about his first days in business. He learned what he needed to know by taking the time to read about it. "I read every book and magazine I could. One good idea would lead to a customer or a solution, and those magazines and books paid for themselves many times over."

Reprinted from "The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value" by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen with permission of Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, 2015.