Try and try until you succeed may be an overused axiom but it still holds in any field, including investing. Mark Cuban understands this well after his first-hand experience of failures led him to be one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of today.

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We all know the chiseled face: you may have seen him on TV and that’s because he is a shark in the Emmy Award-winning ABC show Shark Tank, which searches for promising ventures in the United States. Mark is also the owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks and he has a net worth of more than $4 billion.

With that much money and being considered an expert enough to be a judge on the hit series mean one thing: Mark knows what he is doing. But despite his status as one of the few billionaires in America, he is not shying away from the fact that he had traversed through rough roads in the past just to get where he is now.

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As a college student, Mark already faced a lot of disappointments that could wreck a person of his age. By 20, he was already gearing to become a senior student at Indiana University when he opened Motley’s Pub bar, which didn’t last long because a minor won a lewd contest conducted inside the spot.

The entrepreneur maintained he checked the 16-year-old’s ID, which means the girl showed him a fake card. After graduating from the institution in 1981, Mark went home to Pittsburgh and secured a job at Mellon Bank, but he immediately quit just because he didn’t like the boss.

Then he worked for a TV repair shop called Tronics 2000 but that didn’t last long, too. Mark tried his luck in a venture selling powdered milk, which was a weird product to start with, in Dallas but that didn’t work out as well.

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He became a salesman at Your Business Software but was immediately fired after the CEO learned that Mark didn’t consult with him about a deal. With everything that had happened, he was clearly in a bad place – he slept on the floor of an apartment he shared with six people, power was usually cut off because they didn’t pay the bill, and his credit card bills were skyrocketing.

What people didn’t know is that being fired from Your Business Solutions paved the way for Mark to put up MicroSolutions, which he sold to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990.

So his advice for those who need it? Try and make each move a success.

Joseph McCannon