75+ INSPIRATIONAL KEVIN O’LEARY QUOTES FOR SUCCESS

Kevin O’Leary is a highly successful businessman, entrepreneur, author, and venture capitalist who is most well-known from his participation as a panel member from the wildly popular reality T.V. show, ‘Shark Tank’. He’s founded, invested, and sold many companies over the years, (including one for over $4 billion) and has achieved massive financial success and fame in the process. As such, we’ve pulled together some of the best and wisest Kevin O’Leary quotes to give you a bit of insight into the mind of this business icon.

So, if you’re looking to get inspired, or just want to peer through the eyes and thinking process of this business genius, then let’s dive right into these Kevin O’Leary quotes for success:

BEST KEVIN O’LEARY QUOTES FOR SUCCESS

1. “Life is hard, money doesn’t care, your tears don’t add value.” – Kevin O’Leary

2. “The road to riches is never straight and narrow. It can be riddled with financial land mines.” – Kevin O’Leary

3. “You may lose your wife, you may lose your dog, your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.” – Kevin O’Leary

4. “You don’t do it for the money. It’s not about the greed. It’s about personal freedom. The reason you want to be an entrepreneur is to be able to do whatever you want with your time anytime you want. That’s the whole idea. It’s to set yourself free to pursue the dreams you have.” – Kevin O’Leary

5. “A salary is the drug they give you to forget your dreams.” – Kevin O’Leary

6. “Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” – Kevin O’Leary

7. “Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we’re going to win.” – Kevin O’Leary

8. “I like to take risks, that’s how I make money. But they are calculated risks.” – Kevin O’Leary

9. “Don’t let the dark clouds of greed confuse you.” – Kevin O’Leary

10. “Money has no gray areas, you either make it or you lose it.” – Kevin O’Leary

11. “The personal sacrifices of entrepreneurship are huge.” – Kevin O’Leary

12. “There are two types of people. There are the people who own the store, and the people who scrape the sh** off the floor. You have to decide which one you are.” – Kevin O’Leary

13. “What are the most important qualities that make a successful entrepreneur? The ability to communicate. The ability to express your idea with certainty. That’s how you become a leader, even if you’re unsure. Your ability to explain your vision and your direction is the attribute you need the most. Articulate your idea in 90 seconds or less.” – Kevin O’Leary

14. “When you’re 21 years old, or 20 or 18 or 19 and you start putting aside 10 percent of what you make, you’ll have over $1,000,000 by the time your 65. If no one else is going to worry about your retirement, I want you to worry about it.” – Kevin O’Leary

15. “Whatever you do, somebody can do it better. You have to bring your A game in every single day. There’s nothing unique about any one individual. What’s unique is their passion, their ability to execute, to meet targets and exceed them.” – Kevin O’Leary

16. “I’m not planning on giving my kids any of my wealth. They know when their education is over, I’m pushing them out of the nest. The bird you see dead under the nest is the one who didn’t think about the future.” – Kevin O’Leary

17. “I don’t consider myself an ordinary investor anymore. I don’t care what the last round was valued at. This may sound arrogant, and perhaps it is, but I’m Mr. Wonderful. What I can do for businesses is remarkable.” – Kevin O’Leary

18. “I was working once in an ice cream parlor, when I was about 15 years old, my first real job. On the second day, I was asked to scrape the gum off between the Mexican tiles on the floor. I said to the woman who owned this store, it was called Magoo’s Ice Cream Parlor, ‘You didn’t hire me to scrape gum. You hired me to scoop ice cream.’ This girl in the shoe store across the way that’s looking at me, I don’t want her to see me scraping the gum. She said, ‘What are you talking about? I’ll do anything I want with you. Get down on your knees and scrape that gum.’ Then I said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ She said, ‘You’re fired.’ Last job I ever had. “I owe that woman everything.” – Kevin O’Leary

19. “You need to be willing to fire someone once they lose their direction with the business. There is no debate on this one — you have to fire them.” – Kevin O’Leary

20. “If you want to control your own destiny, you work for yourself. That’s how it works.” – Kevin O’Leary

21. “I’m not a tough guy. I’m just delivering the truth and only the truth and if you can’t deal with it, too bad.” – Kevin O’Leary

22. “I like gold because it is a stabilizer; it is an insurance policy.” – Kevin O’Leary

23. “If you want a friend, buy a dog.” – Kevin O’Leary

24. “I’m not trying to make friends, I’m trying to make money.” – Kevin O’Leary

25. “Working 24 hours a day isn’t enough anymore. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, including your personal life, your family life, maybe more. If people think it’s any less, they’re wrong, and they will fail.” – Kevin O’Leary

26. “You don’t build wealth part time.” – Kevin O’Leary

27. “I have had some great successes and great failures, I think every entrepreneur has. I try to learn from all of them.” – Kevin O’Leary

28. “I have met many entrepreneurs who have the passion and even the work ethic to succeed – but who are so obsessed with an idea that they don’t see its obvious flaws. Think about that. If you can’t even acknowledge your failures, how can you cut the rope and move on?” – Kevin O’Leary

29. “The only reason to do business is to make money; that’s the only reason for doing business.” – Kevin O’Leary

32. “Money equals freedom.” – Kevin O’Leary

31. “If you can’t make money after 36 months, it was a hobby not a business.” – Kevin O’Leary

32. “Money is my military, each dollar a soldier. I never send my money into battle unprepared and undefended. I send it to conquer and take currency prisoner and bring it back to me.” – Kevin O’Leary

33. “I do not own single security anywhere that doesn’t pay a dividend, and I formed a mutual-fund company with that very simple philosophy.” – Kevin O’Leary

 34. “Nobody forces you to work at Wal-Mart. Start your own business! Sell something to Wal-Mart!” – Kevin O’Leary

35. “If you want to be an entrepreneur, know that there will be stretches of time when you will have to work for other people.” – Kevin O’Leary

36. “Vision is nothing without a plan to execute it.” – Kevin O’Leary

37. “Whatever you pay attention to grows. Quit wasting time and money” – Kevin O’Leary

38. “There is a discipline required as an entrepreneur about working to optimize the business. There is no balance in life as an entrepreneur. You can’t expect to work 9 to 5; that’s never going to happen. You have to expect that it’s going to consume your life for a period of time. That’s the downside, but the upside is that you buy yourself freedom in perpetuity.” – Kevin O’Leary

38. “There’s only one side with me, the right side. You get the correct version of the facts.”

40. “In business, if you are not growing, you are dying.” – Kevin O’Leary

41. “Debt is evil” – Kevin O’Leary

42. “I want to go to bed richer than I woke up.” – Kevin O’Leary

43. “Don’t cry for money, it never cries for you.” – Kevin O’Leary

44. “So much of life is negotiation, even if you are not in business.” – Kevin O’Leary

45. “Running a successful business is an all-consuming, all-encompassing venture, which totally invigorates some, and totally exhausts others.” – Kevin O’Leary

46. “I want to go to bed richer than when I woke up. The pursuit of wealth is a wonderful thing, but the thing is you have to be honest about it, you have to tell the truth.” – Kevin O’Leary

47. “When the stakes are high, you have to become ruthless about the bottom line.” – Kevin O’Leary

48. “If you don’t know how to pivot, you’re going to zero.” – Kevin O’Leary

49. “The best motivator in the world is money. And if that doesn’t work, try more money.” – Kevin O’Leary

50. “Vision is easy, execution is hard.” – Kevin O’Leary

51. “I’d rather invest in an entrepreneur who has failed before than one who assumes success from day one.” – Kevin O’Leary

Related: Motivational Quotes For Entrepreneurs

52. “You never put more than 20% in any one sector, and you never put more than 5% in any one stock.” – Kevin O’Leary

53. “You may not achieve your ultimate goal, but you’ve got to go in that direction. If you’re lost, you’ve got to have a plan.” – Kevin O’Leary

54. “The best investment in your life will always be on you.” – Kevin O’Leary

55. “If you’re going to take a risk, the person to risk on is you.” – Kevin O’Leary

56. “The time in your life when you invest in venture capital is when you’re giving back, after you’ve made a ton of money. Then you say okay I’ll put 5 or 10% in a bunch of deals and help out the next generation of entrepreneurs, that’s what I am doing. But the real dough is sitting in a very conservative portfolio.” – Kevin O’Leary

57. “I predict in the next ten years crypto, blockchain, bitcoin, all of this innovation will be the 12th sector of the S&P.” – Kevin O’Leary

58. “Very often nepotism is what kills the golden goose.” – Kevin O’Leary

59. “The backbone of the success of our country and capitalism, and the most noble thing you can do in your life, in my opinion, is to start a business and quit your job.” – Kevin O’Leary

60. “If at first you don’t succeed, get over it and get to work on something better.” – Kevin O’Leary

61. “Downturns are the best time to start businesses, because you develop discipline that’s very lean and mean in terms of how to spend money. And those habits serve you very well in good times.” – Kevin O’Leary

62. “Every entrepreneur I meet is very passionate, that’s just part of the equation. I actually argue that what matters most is executional skills.” – Kevin O’Leary

63. “Experience is the most brutal teacher you’ll ever have, but the best for results.” – Kevin O’Leary

64. “Money may go to bad people but it never goes to bad ideas.” – Kevin O’Leary

65. “We’ve made a big mistake in the last 10 years vilifying capitalism, I am one of the people who want to take that back.” – Kevin O’Leary

66. “Everybody knows that success is an addictive, obsessive, and often fleeting thing. So my best advice is: Enjoy it as much as possible and whenever you can! Why else are you working so hard?” – Kevin O’Leary

67. “If you don’t know how to fail, you’ll never learn how to succeed. Hitting rock bottom with grace and learning what you need to do better next time is an art form that almost every successful person has mastered. There will always be rejections, bad ideas, and mistakes. It’s what you do AFTER that matters.” – Kevin O’Leary

68. “Know when to cut the rope! Entrepreneurs who care in love with bad ideas kill companies and send money running.” – Kevin O’Leary

69. “My answer is always going to be, if your goal is to get rich or famous, you’re doing it wrong. Fame and fortune is byproduct of great work, but freedom is the ultimate reward.” – Kevin O’Leary

70. “Don’t start something that you don’t have a lot of passion for.” – Kevin O’Leary

71. “A**holes get rich because they are not afraid to ask for what they want.” – Kevin O’Leary

72. “Go out every single day with the mindset that you will win.” – Kevin O’Leary

73. “You have to believe in yourself, you have to believe in your business, and you have to believe that you can take it all on and WIN.” – Kevin O’Leary

74. “A lot of entrepreneurs get lost in the day to day hustle that they lose sight of the long term goal. What’s your BIG picture! Be clear about your goals, and make sure that everything you’re focusing on daily aligns with it. Let’s stop investing time and money into things that ultimately are leading us nowhere.” – Kevin O’Leary

75. “The key to success that I would’ve taught myself 20 years ago — shut up and listen.’ – Kevin O’Leary

76. “If you’re not totally in love with what you’re doing, you’re screwed. You have to make the assumptions that the person you’re competing with really loves what they do and is willing to work 25 hours a day.” – Kevin O’Leary

77. “If you don’t think business is war, you’ll be one of the people that loses.” – Kevin O’Leary

78. “Business is a competition, that’s what it ultimately comes down to. You’re constantly competing for the best ideas, the brightest minds, and the most market share. It’s always war.” – Kevin O’Leary

Related: Kevin O’Leary Net Worth

Bonus Kevin O’Leary Quote On Success

Bonus: Alright, here’s our last Kevin O’Leary quote for success. Our philosophy here it at the strive aligns 100% with this message. So, we hope you enjoy it and embrace it as much as we do.

“The Only Thing That Can Stop You Is Excuses.”

– kevin o’leary –

Final Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed this inspiring and insightful collection of Kevin O’Leary quotes. Certainly there were many valuable success gems hidden within, so if you need to, bookmark this page and revisit it often.

Also, if you enjoyed these Kevin O’Leary success quotes, then you may also enjoy these inspiring quotes from fellow Sharks:

• Mark Cuban Quotes
• Barbara Corcoran Quotes
• Daymond John Quotes
• Robert Herjavec Quotes
• Lori Greiner Quotes

That said, Kevin knows a thing or two about success, and he generously puts it out all out there for all to learn, on what it takes to succeed financially and in business in this day and age. So, pay attention and never stop learning.

Till you achieve your aims,

STRIVE