How To Become A Millionaire | Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary

Hello Mr. Wonderful, I have two questions for you today.

Number one is about you. Did you ever see yourself being a multi-millionaire or being on a TV show? Going through high school, college, let's hear from Joseph.

Number two is about day trading. I'm making about four hundred dollars a day. I'm a junior in high school and have to start looking for colleges pretty soon to apply to. I was wondering if I should save up that money for college, to pay off my car, to pay for my college, or should I just spend it on food for myself? Or should I just save it for college when I'm in college or out of college?

Okay, Joseph, you got a couple of questions in there, and they're interesting.

First of all, the one about me. No, I did not see it coming. And no, entrepreneurs that are really focused on what they love do you know? It's kind of starting in the basement. You're focused on your business; you're working twenty-five hours a day. One day you wake up, and someone wants to buy your company for 4.2 billion dollars. Yeah, it happens, but you don't see it coming. You're so focused on the task at hand; you love what you're doing, and that really is what matters at the end of the day. Everybody I've ever talked to, that’s how that experience has told me the same thing. It wasn't about the money; it was about the journey. I feel the same way.

Now the question about the $400 of day trading. First of all, to make that a day is not easy, so you're probably pretty good at it. It's giving you some background and some basis and some sort of foundation upon which to become an investor later.

But college is coming up, and you got to pick what discipline you're going to pursue. I would rather be saving that money so that you can have as little debt as possible coming out of college. So get that little nest egg put together; keep it in a safe place, a money market account so you're not risking it too much. And don't go crazy day trading; don’t use a lot of leverage in case you blow up. You know, day trading is never that easy.

I appreciate what you're doing there, and I've done it myself, but this thing is about getting out of college now with as little debt as possible and getting a degree that's going to help you get a job. I mean, I'm not against liberal arts, you know? There's always the serendipitous chance that you'll find a job coming out of a history degree, but usually, that doesn't happen. The three that I like the best are engineering. I like engineering. Oh yeah, did I mention engineering? Pretty well everybody that's in the engineering class gets a job, and it's a well-paying one, starting like 100 grand or more, and you can pay off your debt like that.

But anyways, I gotta tell you Joseph, I like your questions, but I'm concerned that you really start focusing on that whole college nest egg. Making sure that you do that with as much cash as you can, so you come out with as little debt as possible. And while you're in college, get a job and work so you can pay off more debt. I hate that; that sucks.

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This is Vasilis. Hello, Mr. Wonderful, my name is Vasilis, and I come from the beautiful island of Saipan. Hey, I love Cyprus! I grew up there. I went to junior school; my brother went to the English school. My dad was posted there with the United Nations. What a fantastic island! I still go. I could tell right away when I heard from the Seeley's there’s a Greek Cypriot; great guy, wonderful people. What does he have to say? From your perspective and your experience, what do you think is the number one factor for success for any entrepreneur? Thank you for your response.

A fantastic question! What is the number one attribute of a successful entrepreneur? I'll tell you what I think it is.

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All right, I need a little musical interlude to gather my thoughts, but I'll tell you what it is. A mentor taught me this years and years ago. When you're an entrepreneur, there's so much noise coming at you, there's so much distracting you, and you're trying to make everybody happy. You try to solve problems for everybody that works for you and the customers that you have, and it's so powerful that sometimes you lose focus. Sometimes you forget why you're there.

You have to set goals, both short and long-term, and stay myopically focused on achieving those. You have to shut out the noise; you have to shut out the criticism; you have to shut out the haters, the guys that are hassling you, the people are calling you your competitors. All that stuff is distracting. If you have the ability to just shut that out of your head, you'll be successful, because you stay focused on the prize.

People are very, very challenging to work with sometimes; you're going to find that out. It doesn't mean you can't work with them, but if you're trying to make everybody happy, you will make everybody unhappy eventually because you can't do it. You have to think about three things: your customers, you're taking care of them; two, your employees, you're taking care of them; and number three, your shareholders are the people that loan your money to run your business. They are what you spend your time on twenty-four seven.

You can't solve all the world's problems; you can't take care of every baby whale; you can't clean up all the oceans overnight. You have to stay focused on your business to make that successful. Then after you've become successful, and hopefully you will, you can start focusing on all the other things that are really important to you, but if you try and do that at the beginning before you solve for your customers, your employees, and your shareholders, you're gonna fail.

That's what many, many entrepreneurs don’t understand. You've got to have a myopic focus to shut out that noise. I know it's not easy to do that. Making people unhappy with you because you're so focused can often feel troubling to you. But if you can't do that, you're not a leader. If you can't do that, you will not be a successful entrepreneur. If you can't focus, you just won't make it.

So remember that these are tough love suggestions. All right, it's just the nature of how it works. But if you can and you ask me what makes it much more successful, it's myopic focus on the long-term and short-term goals and not letting anything else distract you.

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Hard Sandhu here; let's listen to his question.

Hi Mr. Wonderful, my name is Parm Sandhu from Canada, and I have a bit of a different take. I don't know that I actually see myself as an entrepreneur. Currently, I'm more interested in pursuing a career in consulting. However, I'm a little worried that consulting, especially at the mid-tier firms like Deloitte or PwC, might be a dying breed. What are your thoughts on this?

Okay fun, let me tell you about consulting. Now first of all, consulting is never going to be a dying breed. It's always going to be around, and PwC is not really me. If you're talking about McKinsey & Company or Bain Capital, PwC, they're all in the same ilk. What you gotta understand is you're gonna be top of your class to get into these places because you're competing with a lot of people with perfect scores. You have to be a strategic thinker, all right? And you have to want to work basically a hundred hours a week.

Because they weed out; they call the “word after” twenty-four months, and they want to get rid of the ones that aren't the true strategic consultants. So just letting you know, it's a tough, tough job. I work with a lot of consultants. I have in the past; I still work with them today. But it's, I'll tell you why it's interesting.

You almost sound like you might have the right temperament for it. I can tell by just how people speak. But for me, consulting is a really fantastic way to go visit a whole bunch of different companies, a whole bunch of different sectors, a whole bunch of different opportunities.

What the majority of the class that's sort of into the thirty-six month doer - not a lot of them will say this - is they jump off the consulting boat and they land in one of these companies that they were consulting with, and they become partners in the other, or they become part of the startup, or they become part of the team, and they take their career in a new direction with one company that they found because they were in the consulting platform.

I think that's a very, very cool idea, and I'll tell you why. It reminds me of the apprenticeship programs that the Swiss, or the Swedish, or the Danish run. Well, you basically get steeped into a company culture, and in this case through doing all this consulting and learning how hard it is to do that, learning about all the metrics of what running what makes a consumer company work or whatever company or consulting line.

With all that expertise, you jump off and you land in there. So I'm cool with it. I am okay with it, and I don't care which firm you work with. I mean, they don't waste you; they're gonna build you out. So PwC's global; know all these terms I'm talking about. But if you're gonna become a consultant, interview three of them. Try and get offers from two, but all the empty package is the same.

But I'm telling you my friend, you better get ready to work your ass off. There’s no other way to put it.

I mean, we would just sit back, you know, chopping it up, reminiscing about the good old days, and not if you don't track.

Of my roots, where I came from.

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But like I say, man, always say it’s not about the destination; it’s all about the journey. Ain't nothing change with the weather. The dangling carrot, it hangs from the river. Your dreams in the past ain't nowhere. Did you backseat drivers got nothing but uses shotgun riders to buy and say y'all liars?

I should get a cave forever, and I'm too tired, but I'm never giving up. This one kind of hit my role model like it, and I got a plan.