How I Made MILLIONS After Being FIRED | Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary Ask Mr. Wonderful

You are going to meet people in your life you do not like. They may not like you. Doesn't matter. If you have to decide, I'm going to pursue that path which is going to be really, really hard and difficult and take many, many years and be a great sacrifice, or am I going to pursue being a great employee?

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Okay, Chef Wonderful here. But I'm not going to be talking about cooking, although I am going to make some dinner. I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone. I want to answer some questions for the Ask Mr. Wonderful channel. I've got lots of them, particularly around career.

One of the suggestions made recently was, "Why don't you show your watch before you start your channel?" I thought, well, do I really want to do that? And I thought, yeah, wait a minute, what is watch buying all about anyways?

Let me explain why I have so many watches. I support artists. You don’t need to make watches anymore. The best place to read the time is on your phone; it's the most accurate you can get. So why would anybody build a watch, make a mechanical watch? Today, I am wearing a Sea Dweller, which is a big honking Rolex. Really a great weekend watch. A rubber band, a Rubber B band, which is red. Rolex doesn't make a red band for it, so I use this company called Rubber B. They're not a sponsor; I don't own any of them, but they do the best integration, so I use their bands. Just terrific.

I'll do a little close-up here. You can see it. Isn’t that beautiful? Fantastic watch.

Anyways, the point is when you buy a watch, you're supporting an artist because they spend their whole lives from a young age learning how to do that. That's why I do it on lots of watches. I support lots of artists. If I wasn't buying them and others weren't buying them, they wouldn't make them anymore, and that's a sad thing. That's a lost art. If you want a great watch, go ahead and buy one. You're supporting somebody just like you would if you're buying a painting from an artist.

So anyways, I'm going to make salmon tonight. Love cooking. I'm going to do a Mediterranean salad with it: cucumber, tomato, lemon, olive oil, that's it! Salt and pepper. Very, very, very healthy Mediterranean diet. Very good for you.

Anyways, let's get to the business at hand. I get so many questions about career, talking about, you know, the stepping stones of your career and everything. Let me start with my example. I've told the story before, but I'll tell it again. There's a lot of lessons in it, a lot of things I learned. You might be interested in hearing.

I'm in high school, grade 11. There's this girl in my class I'm really hot for. She works at a shoe store in a mall. Across from that shoe store, it's an ice cream store, and they're looking for somebody to be a scooper. I'm figuring, okay, she's at the shoe store. The whole mall closes at five. At that time, it was during the week; it closed very early. That's not the way it is anymore, but that's how it was back then.

The idea was, at five, we would go out and maybe cruise around a little bit—that was my plan anyways. So I sign up, and I get this job. In ice cream stores, still the same today, you have all these vats of ice cream. People come in; they line up, and they want to get a little taster. They know if they want the chocolate, they want the vanilla, whatever it is, or the strawberry ripple. And so you give them a little wooden spoon, a little ice cream on it, and then they try it; they sample it.

But often they have gum in their mouths, and they throw it on the floor before they sample, right? So my first day, I'm really excited; I had a great day scooping. The woman who owns it comes over and says, "Listen, before you leave, Kevin, scrape all the gum off the floor. We don't want to stay in there overnight; it turns dark." I went, "What?" Now I'm really worried because the girl I'm hot for is looking at me. Remember, she's right across the mall waiting for me to get out, and now I'm going to be on my knees scraping gum.

I said, "No, not going to do that. I am a scooper, not a scraper." She looked at me and said, "No, actually, you work for me, and you're going to do whatever I say. And right now, I'm saying, before you leave, get on your bike; you're scraping that gum off the floor."

I said, "Not doing that." I'm thinking, I've got to hold the stand here. Otherwise, you know, we're not going to establish a working relationship. She says, "Okay, how about this? You're fired."

I’m like, "Whoa!" I'd never—it's one of my first jobs—I’d never been fired before. It was very, you know, I thought, I said, "What do you mean I'm fired?" She said, "What it means is you're leaving here. I'm going to pay you for one day, and you're going to go home and tell your parents I fired you."

Yeah, that's what happened. I was really humiliated, and it was an amazingly difficult moment for me. But it was a crystal-clear moment, a very important moment.

This is the lesson learned: you don't know these things in life, but at that moment, I realized there's two types of people in the world: there's the people that own the store, and there's the people that scrape the shit off the floor. You kind of have to know which one you are.

I've said this many times before: there's no shame in being an employee, but it's not the same as being an entrepreneur. That's the lesson I want to talk about because if you think about financial freedom in the long run, the only way you're going to get that is if you take huge risks. What is that? That’s a definition of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs do what they do 95% of the time to pursue their own destiny and have control over their own lives.

It's not the right path for everybody. I estimate that only a third of the people out there can do it. Now, you may be in that group, and you may not be, and there's no shame in being an employee. We're going to talk about how to be a good employee too.

But my point is that crystal-clear moment for me happened, and I realized years later that I have a huge debt to that woman in the ice cream store. Dave went back years later and tried to find her with a camera crew; she was long gone. So was the ice cream store.

This is Magoo's Ice Cream Parlor. It was my second day working there, and the owner had hired me to scoop ice cream. It was right here; the counter was right here. And I was finishing work one day, and she said to me, "Get down on your knees and scrape the gum off the floor." Right here, it happened. Right here changed my life forever.

I have never, ever in my life worked for someone again. Ever. No one has ever had control over me. Ever. And never will.

But at that point, I was financially free. I could afford to bulldoze the mall if I wanted to, just bulldoze it to the ground. In fact, that did happen to that mall, and somebody who heard the story before sent me a piece of it. He went out there in his car, grabbed a piece of the stone, and sent it to my office, which is a really nice thing to do because I use the story a lot to talk about career.

You have to make that decision for yourself. You have to decide: am I going to pursue that path which is going to be really, really hard and difficult and take many, many years and be a great sacrifice, or am I going to pursue being a great employee?

Now, if you want to be a great employee, you've got to remember something: you're hired to help someone else achieve their goals, which is cool. There's nothing wrong with it. But if you don't understand that, you are not going to be a good employee.

So you have a boss, and they say, "Here's our goal for the quarter. You're going to help me get there." You work like hell to make sure that they achieve that goal. You're part of that team. That's very important. And then you keep moving up the ladder.

The great thing about that is if you're a good employee, you can also do very well. It's not the same as being an entrepreneur; you're never going to probably make as much money as you could have had you started the company, is my point. But you'll get the Saturdays off, the Sundays, hang out, go to the soccer games with the kids, have a more balanced life. There is no balance in entrepreneurship.

Now, one thing to remember about both sides of this equation: you are going to meet people in your life you do not like. They may not like you. Doesn't matter. The point is, in work, you're achieving results towards a goal. Now, you don't have to love everybody you work with; it's a nice bonus, but it’s not going to happen.

You've got to kind of realize they are stepping stones in your career. They are stepping stones. If you're an entrepreneur, they're points of resistance, they're roadblocks, they're, you know, pitfalls, they're bumps, whatever you want to call them. But you've got to achieve success. You've got to get over them; you've got to work with them, and you're going to move on.

If you dwell on those, if they eat at you and they take away from your focus, then you're losing, and that's something you have to learn. You have to learn to deal with the noise—people that don't like you, people that hassle you, people you don't like. But that has nothing to do with achieving the objective, whatever that is.

So if you own a business and you're starting a company, you know what you've got to get done. Number one: you've got to take care of your customers. Number two: you've got to take care of your employees. And number three: you're last on the list. Take care of yourself; you're always last on the list when you're an entrepreneur. You have to take care of everybody else.

Along the way, you're going to be throwing all these challenges; they're potholes—that's what they are. But I learned long ago from great mentors that you've got to deal with that.

So think about that. You also learn things along the way that do not seem important while you're learning them, but years later end up being a really big deal.

Let me explain one that happened to me, and you could be learning something today that you're just storing away and is going to be very, very important to you down the road, which is why it's really important in life to shut up and listen. A lot of people haven't figured that out; I have.

I know I'm talking to you right now but one of the things I've learned, and the more I spend time in business, the more this is important. The more time I spend in life, this is important. You should listen two-thirds of the day and talk one-third. You learn a lot more; you become more powerful.

Here's an example: my stepdad was very influential with me. He basically said, "Look, you're going to starve to death; you've got to go to business school." I go to do an MBA, a two-year course, because my dad said, "You don't know what you want to do, so you might as well just get some technical training," which I did. I got three months off. I got to find a gig—summer gig—got a job at a company called Nabisco Brands.

Okay, they have a pet food division: Miss Mew cat food. I get the job. I'm working for a Dutch product manager, a very cool guy. First day on the job, he takes me to the rendering plant where they make the basic pastes that you make cat food with.

Either you make it with Sea of Japan tuna, the dark meat, or you make it with beef rendering and chicken faces, where they take beef lips, beef faces, chicken faces, render them with papaya juice, crush them down, make a paste, and then you add, for example, this is good—I mean, you take little celery bits, for example, and you add it to the paste.

So let's say you're putting celery with, um, Japan tuna, and you call that tuna casserole. Now maybe you call it tuna Mediterranean salad, whatever it is—you know, bits of other stuff—but it's basically the paste you have. Two things: you got the Sea of Japan tuna, you got the chicken faces, the beef renderings—they make up everything, and all the rest of the facings or market shares are based on the little add-ins you put into that cat food.

Anyways, I spent my three months working on a new flavor. My job was to launch a new flavor that September before I went back for my second term. And there were about a hundred salesmen and women in the room, and I have to present the flavor.

The thing you got to know about cat food is we had this place in Upper Vermont—a farm—where we tested the cat food on cats, and I learned that cats actually would prefer more water in their food. But that's not an easy thing to sell to people. When they open the can, it looks like soup; they don't like it. So you have to find that balance between how much water is in there versus, you know, what the cats like versus what the people like.

But I was a rookie, and I didn't get the joke, and the salespeople did this every year to the, you know, intern. I'm telling him how great the flavor is. I think it's going to be a big hit in the market. I can't remember whether I made it with the cat food or with the Sea of Japan tuna; I think I did.

And they said, "Yeah, it's great, Kevin. If it's so good, why don't you eat some now?" It smelled like absolute shit, and it was soupy towards the side; the cats liked it. And I looked at it and went, "Whoa."

But, you know, I'm the rookie; I didn't get the joke. So I did—I put it on a cracker, and I ate it, and it was bad. But cats like that. I knew that from the test. Everybody roared with laughter. They told me it's the standard joke they do on interns. But I get it, you know, and it worked, and I got a nice bonus after those three months working there.

But here's the thing: here's my revenge, if you want to call it that. Years later, now we're in software. We're at The Learning Company; we're in Boston. We're the world's largest educational software company. We make software: Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, or Oregon Trail—you name it, we make it.

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We spend millions on R&D, but basically in education, in our school system, there's 110,000 schools, all right? The majority of them in New York, Florida, Texas, California. We sold to the school systems too, and what parents wanted, what teachers wanted, and what students ultimately needed was to advance their reading and math scores. Reading, math: Sea of Japan tuna, chicken faces.

All of a sudden, I'm sitting at lunch, and I'm talking to the guys, and we're thinking about next year and the millions we're going to spend on R&D. I said, "Guys, let me tell you this story about cat food."

I said, "If we're really just doing reading and math titles and throwing in bacon bits in the form of another character—Big Bird, Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego, or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, whatever it is—he's just a character, but the basic code is reading and math. Why don't we consolidate down to two engines, save millions in R&D, just have two teams and some graphic artists that put in the characters on top?"

The kids don't care; they're four to seven years old. I'm not saying kids are cats, but you know what I'm saying. We saved millions that next year, where our cost of capital went way down, and we acquired all our competitors.

Where'd that come from? That was the lesson the Dutch guy taught me in the cat food business. My whole point is you don't know when you're learning a lesson, so shut up and listen. You'll learn something and just file it away, and then one day, ichi, you're going to pull it out of your brain's file folder and say, "Here's how I'm going to solve that problem."

I guess they call it experience, but I'll never forget that story. Absolutely incredible. I mean, thank you, Dutch guy. Thank you, Miss Mew cat food.

Hey, that's how it works. My whole point about this is your career is serendipitous. You don't know what's going to happen. Spend more time listening. Realize you're going to have to work with a lot of shit. That's okay; it doesn't matter. Stay focused on the goal at hand, whether you're an employee or not, and you will find your path.

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