May 8, 2026
Kevin O'Leary has built a career on being blunt. But the 71-year-old entrepreneur and venture capitalist says the best career guidance he ever received came from someone he considered brilliant but "nasty": Steve Jobs.
Speaking alongside fellow "Shark Tank" (1) investor Robert Herjavec in an interview posted Wednesday by The School of Hard Knocks (2), O'Leary recounted what the late Apple co-founder once told him about cutting through distractions.
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"There's only three things you have to get done every day. That's called the signal," O'Leary recalled Jobs telling him. "Everything else that stops you from getting the three things done is the noise. If you understand what I'm telling you, you'll be successful."
O'Leary admits he pushed back at the time.
"I said, 'Steve, you're such an a****** — why would I believe you?'" he told host James Dumoulin. Jobs' response? "Trust me."
Signal versus noise
Separating the signal from the noise was a key part of Jobs' leadership at Apple, particularly after returning to the company as CEO in the late '90s. In a now-famous 1997 appearance at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (3), Jobs told the audience that "focusing is about saying no."
Jobs, to his credit, made the bold decision to kill numerous low-priority projects and have his team focus on just a few specific categories, which ultimately propelled Apple's eventual turnaround in the personal computing space.
For O'Leary, this principle around discipline became a hallmark of his career. The Toronto-born investor co-founded SoftKey Software Products in 1986, which later acquired and rebranded itself as The Learning Company. He sold the children's educational software business to Mattel for roughly $4.2 billion in 1999 (4), according to The New York Times — a deal that, while disastrous for Mattel, made O'Leary fabulously wealthy.
He's since continued to grow his platform, particularly through his "Mr. Wonderful" role as a judge on ABC's "Shark Tank," where he's become a household name.
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Herjavec, 64, who built and sold cybersecurity firms before joining "Shark Tank," agreed with O'Leary that focus and discipline tend to be the common thread among the wealthiest people they've met. "I've never met somebody with great wealth who doesn't have great purpose," Herjavec said.
"Billionaires don't care about money," O'Leary added. "They're on a mission."
How 'three things a day' lines up with productivity research
Studies on attention and focus have consistently found that constant task-switching erodes performance — and that recovery from interruptions is slower than most people think. Research by UC Irvine professor Gloria Mark, outlined in her book "Attention Span" (5), found it takes roughly 23 minutes on average to refocus after an interruption.
That tracks with how O'Leary describes his own routine: Pick three priorities, treat everything else as friction and keep moving.
Beyond the Jobs anecdote, O'Leary and Herjavec used the conversation to push two other points at younger viewers: Learn AI — and learn how to sell.
You can watch the entire exchange between O'Leary, Herjavec and The School of Hard Knocks here (6).
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
ABC (1); TikTok (2),(6); YouTube (3); The New York Times (4); Gloria Mark (5)
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
