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Billionaire Mark Cuban was just 12 years old when he started his first side hustle, so he knows what it takes to start a career young.

And, he says there’s one simple thing to keep in mind if you want to do it.

“The key to starting a business at a young age is to do things you can do yourself – things you can do on your own time,” Cuban recently told a group of high school students at Louisville High School in Texas.

That means starting with what you know, he said.

“If it’s a product, make it something that’s easy to find and sell,” Cuban said. What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

Cuban began learning early to run his own business as a teenager, selling garbage bags door-to-door in a Pittsburgh suburb. Later, he sold a variety of collectibles, from baseball cards to coins and stamps, saying the proceeds helped pay for his college education.

In each case, the Cubans used household items and collectibles accessible to the child and sold them for profit – following his own advice for teenagers today.

Similarly, while a college student, he worked as a bartender and taught dance classes to earn extra money. Cuban later demonstrated his dancing skills publicly by appearing on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2007, where he finished 8th in the competition.

Cuban said on a 2016 episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank.” “I was shy … I was always selling out. I always had something. It was my nature.”

Now, he says, he regularly tells kids and teenagers who want to start their own businesses to do what Cuban did. “Build it around what you do or the service you can provide to friends, family and neighbors,” he told CNBC’s Make It in September.

That’s easier said than done: successfully launching and growing your own business is incredibly challenging. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of new businesses fail within a year of starting.

“Being an entrepreneur and starting a business isn’t going to be easy and suddenly you’re going to make a lot of money,” Cuban told his students at Louisville High School. “Being an entrepreneur is the hardest way.”

If it was easy, he added, “You all work right now and come on ‘Shark Tank’ and take my place.”

It’s hard to find something you can control and do yourself. Being nice — which happens to be Cuba’s No. 1 rule for making money — is hard.

It involves extensively researching your business plan and your potential competition, seeking funding and creating backup plans in case you need to adjust along the way, the billionaire previously said.

As long as you don’t struggle to do that work, especially after you choose your business, a world of opportunities can open up to you, Cuban told the high school students.

“If you are willing to take the initiative and start a business, anything is possible,” he said.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive rights to “Shark Tank” off the network.

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