Mastering the right soft skills can mean the difference between thriving and falling behind. Mark Cuban identifies three critical soft skills — curiosity, agility, and adaptability — as essential for success in navigating the complexities of modern life and work. These skills help professionals remain relevant and enable them to embrace change and turn challenges into opportunities.
In this article, I expand on Cuban's insights, offering actionable strategies and three carefully selected books to help you cultivate these indispensable skills. Together, these resources and approaches will empower you to grow, adapt, and excel in any environment.
It’s worth noting this article is a response to the article, “Mark Cuban: 3 Soft Skills Lead To Success — Why He Says They’ll Never Stop Doing So” by Laura Beck.
The Importance of Curiosity, Agility, and Adaptability
Curiosity, agility and adaptability are complementary skills. So it makes sense to learn these three soft skills together.
- Curiosity drives the desire to explore and learn. This enables you to always stay ahead of changes.
- Agility ensures you can pivot quickly when circumstances change. No one can predict every change that will impact them. However, if they’re agile, they can respond quickly to the change.
- Adaptability allows one to thrive in unpredictable environments. We’re living in a dynamic environment. Since it’s unlikely that you’ll foresee every change that will affect you, knowing how to adapt to new circumstances will serve you well.
In the next section, I recommend books you can read to develop the three complementary skills.
Three Books to Cultivate These 3 Soft Skills
Curiosity: A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
- This short but powerful book outlines a structured approach to generating ideas by combining knowledge and curiosity.
- Why recommend: It emphasizes the importance of being curious about diverse fields and drawing connections between them.
Agility: The MacGyver Secret: Connect to Your Inner MacGyver and Solve Anything by Lee David Zlotoff
- This book teaches creative problem-solving and adaptability by leveraging intuition and resourcefulness.
Adaptability: The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
- This book helps readers build resilience and adaptability by reframing obstacles as opportunities for growth.
I’ve read the three books and they’re worth your investment in time to read them. Below, I summarize the three books. Reading the summary will enable you to decide if you’d like to read any of them.
Have you read?
Summary: A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
Summary: The MacGyver Secret by Lee David Zlotoff
The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, Book Review
A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas emphasizes that curiosity plays a foundational role in generating creative ideas. According to Young, ideas are essentially new combinations of old elements, and the ability to produce them depends on recognizing and forming relationships between these elements. Curiosity is the driving force behind gathering both specific and general knowledge, which fuels the creative process.
Young outlines five systematic steps for producing ideas: preparation, examining information from new perspectives, incubation, illumination, and verification. Each step encourages active curiosity, such as seeking diverse knowledge sources, exploring relationships between facts, and allowing the subconscious mind to work during periods of rest.
The book highlights that being idea-prone requires a disciplined yet open mindset. Young contrasts “speculators,” who embrace novelty and exploration, with “rentiers,” who prefer routine and resist change. Speculators thrive because they habitually seek connections across disciplines, fueled by an innate curiosity to challenge the status quo.
To foster creativity, Young urges readers to develop the habit of continually asking questions, investigating relationships, and experimenting with new combinations of knowledge. This relentless curiosity not only sharpens the ability to generate ideas but also enriches one’s perspective, making it an indispensable tool for anyone aiming to innovate and adapt.
The MacGyver Secret: Connect to Your Inner MacGyver and Solve Anything by Lee David Zlotoff
Lee David Zlotoff's The MacGyver Secret emphasizes agility through a structured yet flexible process for creative problem-solving. At its core, the method relies on engaging your subconscious mind—your “inner MacGyver”—to tackle challenges with innovative solutions. The process involves three key steps: defining the problem, stepping away to engage in low-demand activities that allow mental incubation, and returning to actively seek answers.
This framework highlights mental agility by teaching individuals to toggle between focused attention and subconscious processing, enabling the brain to approach problems from multiple angles. This approach is powerful for adapting to unexpected challenges, as it encourages creative exploration while maintaining a clear problem-solving structure.
By promoting habits like refining questions, stepping back to gain perspective, and practicing consistently, Zlotoff’s method builds the mental flexibility necessary for agility. The process allows individuals to shift gears effortlessly between identifying key aspects of a problem and exploring unconventional solutions. This practice encourages rapid adjustments, adaptability to evolving circumstances, and the ability to synthesize new insights.
Whether solving workplace dilemmas or personal challenges, tapping into your inner MacGyver fosters a mindset that thrives on adaptability and quick thinking, essential traits for succeeding in fast-paced, unpredictable environments.
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way emphasizes adaptability as the cornerstone of transforming challenges into opportunities. Holiday outlines a three-step approach—perception, action, and will—that helps individuals navigate obstacles effectively. Adaptability begins with reframing how we view problems, detaching emotionally, and adopting an objective perspective.
By finding opportunities within challenges, focusing on the present moment, and controlling what we can, we create the mental flexibility needed to respond constructively to adversity. This approach is especially valuable for career stagnation or personal setbacks, where solutions often require lateral thinking, backward steps, or even radical changes.
Holiday also stresses the importance of emotional resilience and persistence in fostering adaptability. Through practices like managing expectations, learning from mistakes, and embracing a process-oriented mindset, individuals can thrive amid uncertainty. The book encourages leveraging adversity as a tool for growth, using the energy of challenges to propel forward.
By accepting the unchangeable, preparing for difficulties, and embracing the journey over the destination, readers can cultivate the mindset and habits necessary for long-term adaptability. This philosophy underscores that while we may not control external events, we can always adapt our responses to overcome and grow stronger from any obstacle.
30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge
Want to learn curiosity, agility and adaptability? Starting on January 13th, I’m hosting the 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge. While participating in the challenge, read books that teach you the three soft skills. I created this reading challenge. And I’ve completed it about eight times. I’ve successfully led others in this challenge, so you’re in good hands.
You can develop the three skills by reading the right books. However, you can also develop the skills by connecting the books you read during the challenge. In the previous 30 books in 30 days reading challenges, I’ve used them as opportunities to create content for my membership site, the Art of Learning Leadership Academy. And I’ve used them to learn important skills.
It’s amazing what happens when you connect seemingly unrelated information. I invite you to join the 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge.
Sharon Horne-Ellstrom has taken part in the 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge a few times. Here’s what she has to say.
“Avil has been an incredible coach and mentor to me. As a legally blind business owner, one of the challenges I was searching for answers about, was staying up-to-date and continually improving my skills. Reading, which I have always loved to do, has had to take a back-burner as a strategy in my personal growth and development…until I met Avil! She creates and shares the most amazing book summaries and has taught me how to ‘read' books without having to actually read every word of them. On several occasions, I actually wondered if she was psychic because just as I was thinking about a topic or looking for solutions…she published a post on the exact topic I needed. Thank you so much for making my life easier!”
Actionable Steps
Choose one of the three books I mentioned and read it. Apply the principles and see what happens. Another action is to take part in the 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge. Choose books that will help you professionally. I advise you read nonfiction books under 200 pages. And that you spend only one hour on each book. I’ll be teaching a short webinar on strategic reading to help you focus on what’s important to you in each book.
Conclusion: 3 Soft Skills
Mastering curiosity, agility, and adaptability is more than just an advantage in a rapidly changing world. It's essential for success. Whether through exploring structured approaches to idea generation, harnessing creative problem-solving, or reframing obstacles into opportunities, these skills are attainable for anyone willing to put in the effort. Books like A Technique for Producing Ideas, The MacGyver Secret, and The Obstacle Is the Way are excellent starting points, but true growth comes from consistent practice.
Joining the 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge is a powerful way to accelerate your development in these areas. By exposing yourself to diverse perspectives and actively connecting ideas, you can build the mindset needed to thrive in any environment. The path to growth isn’t always straightforward. However, with curiosity, agility, and adaptability as your guiding principles, every obstacle becomes an opportunity for transformation.
Next Steps
If you want access to my Bookish Notes, please consider joining my membership site, the Art of Learning.
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