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The Street
The Street
Jeffrey Quiggle

Mark Cuban, Jim Cramer and Adam Grant favor open-minded career habits

Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money on CNBC (CMCSA) -), offers stock advice and market analysis for his television audience.

He has a large fan base, but also draws fire from critics regularly, which is sometimes viewed as a sign of his popularity.

DON'T MISS: Barbara Corcoran Says This Embarrassing Moment Changed Her Whole Career 

But before all the notoriety, he has a story about how it was important for him to resist his first instinct early in his career.

"Never buy all at once," he said. "I can't stress it enough." 

Cramer emphasizes the importance of staging buys. He recounts how he wanted to prove how clever he was, so he would buy large amounts of one stock, such as Caterpillar (CAT) -).

"When I think back about that young Cramer, mostly full head of hair by the way, all I can say is that I was one arrogant son of a gun -- arrogant and wrong," Cramer said.

Mark Cuban, the passionate owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and co-host of ABC's (DIS) -) Shark Tank, is outspoken about his opinions and investments.

But he recently offered a piece of career advice that runs counter to many people's first instincts as well. His thought may even seem to be the opposite of something a lot of people hear.

He recalled what he said was the worst piece of career advice he had ever received.

"'Follow your passions.' No. Follow your effort," Cuban told Adam Grant on a recent video posted to Ted.com.  "If I followed my passion, I'd still be trying to play professional basketball."

Cuban also said that the only thing a person can control is their effort.

Readers may be sensing a theme. The common career habit Cuban and Cramer share is having an open enough mind to pivot from following initial instincts when another behavior is more effective.

Author Adam Grant suggests a leadership tip

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a best-selling author. The professor at Wharton School of Business is also a TED speaker and podcast host.

In today's highly competitive workplace, Grant suggests a way for workers and leaders to succeed in business and in relationships with colleagues.

One's first instinct might be to aggressively tout one's own success. That is, it seems there is a logical importance to calling attention to one's accomplishments.

But Grant recommends a more nuanced approach to handling this task: sharing credit.

"Sharing credit doesn't hurt your image. It makes you look good," Grant posted on X (formerly known as Twitter). "7 studies: people who trumpet their strengths and successes look capable but self-centered. If they add a shout-out to others, they project care along with competence. Recognizing others serves you as well as them."

Grant cites one specific paper, "Dual promotion: Bragging better by promoting peers," that was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors, Eric M. VanEpps, Einav Hart and Maurice E. Schweitzer, summarized the paper (actually a review of seven studies) in an abstract, which Grant also posted to X.

Abstract

To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one's past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term "dual-promotion," individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions.

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