Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban Agree - This Is the Best Investment You'll Ever Make

Few Americans are as successful as Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban. Both have reshaped what's possible in the business world, and both started out from very humble beginnings. When it comes to getting ahead financially, both Cuban and Buffett have interesting, slightly unorthodox perspectives on how to do so.

Here is what Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett believe is the best investment you can make, and what it actually means in practice.

Cuban and Buffett's number one investment advice

The top piece of investment advice from both billionaires is actually quite simple: Invest in yourself, and success will follow.

In an interview with Forbes, Buffett put it plainly: "Ultimately, there's one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself." His reasoning is that the return on your own ability can't be taxed, can't be inflated away, and can't be taken from you, and that almost everyone is walking around with potential they've never bothered to use.

Cuban said the same thing in a Men's Health interview: "Some of the best investments I ever made were investing in myself." When you're starting out with no money and no certainty, he points out, the one asset you do have is time. And time spent getting better at something keeps paying you back for the rest of your life.

But what does that look like in practice? Investing in yourself can take many different forms.

How to invest in yourself by building in-demand skills

The clearest form of self-investment is learning to do something the market wants more of.

An example would be investing in training to become a data scientist. The BLS projects employment of data scientists to grow 34% from 2024 to 2034, making it the fourth-fastest-growing occupation in the country.

The trades tell a similar story: BLS expects jobs for electricians to grow 9% this decade, driven by the data centers that power all that AI. You don't need a doctorate to step toward either one.

A skill compounds like a good stock because it keeps working. That's something both Cuban and Buffett have preached for years, and it makes perfect sense to align your skills with the demands of the market.

Investing in your health pays off in focus and longevity

While this section might get dismissed as wellness-poster talk, that's a big mistake because the numbers are real.

The healthier you are, the longer you will live, and the longer your overall health span will be. A study that followed more than 100,000 adults for three decades, published by the American Heart Association, found that people who hit two to four times the recommended weekly amount of moderate exercise had a 26% to 31% lower risk of dying over the study. The baseline is a modest 150 to 300 minutes a week, a brisk half-hour walk most days.

The payoff also shows up on a much shorter timeline. The CDC notes that regular physical activity sharpens memory and thinking, lowers the risk of cognitive decline, and helps you sleep. Sharper focus and steadier energy are the raw materials for everything else here.

Why building a strong professional network pays off

Networking has a less-than-sterling reputation, but it can be useful if done correctly.

In 2022, researchers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and LinkedIn ran what may be the largest experiment ever conducted on the question and published the results in the journal Science. They varied the connections shown to more than 20 million LinkedIn users over five years, during which 600,000 new jobs emerged. The result was that weaker connections, the acquaintances rather than the close friends, drove more of the new opportunities.

Your closest contacts mostly know what you already know. Someone a step removed has access to rooms you don't, so they can open those doors if you need them to. Stay in touch before you need anything, and a network compounds like a reinvested portfolio.

How financial literacy helps you keep more of your money

The evidence here is almost uncomfortably direct. Knowing more about money changes how much of it you keep.

Most Americans are working with less knowledge than they assume. In the 2025 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index, U.S. adults answered only 49% of 28 basic personal finance questions correctly, a number that has barely moved in nearly a decade. The same research found that adults with very low financial literacy are twice as likely to be constrained by debt and three times as likely to be financially fragile as those with high financial literacy.

And it reaches the big decisions, not just the small ones. Economists Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell, who pioneered the modern study of financial literacy, found that people with greater financial knowledge are more likely to plan for retirement, follow through, and end up wealthier as a result. Understanding interest, fees, and diversification helps you avoid the quiet tax of credit card balances and high fund fees.

Bottom line

The best investment advice from two billionaires who agree on almost nothing costs very little. Self-investment asks for time and attention more than capital, so it's available no matter what today's balance reads. Pick the category that you're weakest in, whether it's a skill, your health, your network, or your handle on money, and put a little work into it this week.

Buffett's own favorite example is worth thinking about. Terrified of public speaking as a young man, he paid about $100 for a Dale Carnegie course and later called it the investment that changed his life. It was a small bet on getting better at one thing, not a stock or a building, and it paid him back for sixty years. 

That's why if you want to build real wealth, you have to build a solid personal foundation first, and watch your professional and personal self grow exponentially.