Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary on Overcoming SELF-DOUBT: Don't Worry What Others Think - Just Tell the TRUTH | Kevin O'Leary EP 632

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Everybody now knows that the show supports entrepreneurs and American families. And my job is to be the conduit of that and help those people. And in the meantime, I'm serving, like, I'm an investor. You know, I put my money down these companies. I take a chance. I give them 300, 500, whatever it is. And I want to make my money back. And I want to, our interests are aligned. We want to be successful. This is not a charity. This is the shark tank. Right. You're trying to make money at the end of the day. Yes. You seem to have all the confidence in the world and everything that you take on. You master the skill and you have confidence around it.

0:50How did you overcome self-doubts or do you have doubt now? And what do you do to help yourself overcome that so that you can have confidence in your day-to-day life? I think everybody has doubts. And I was dyslexic when I was young, so I had a lot of problems with that, just learning how to read and keep up in school. But I didn't let it get in my way. These are things you have to start treating a different way if you're going to overcome them. But the way I look at it now is, I talked about the lying thing. So I'm not going to lie to anybody, and that's going to cause me a various amount of problems, but I don't care.

1:26And then, let's say I'm doubting an investment I'm going to make. Well, I've learned that don't bet the farm. In other words, only put up capital you can afford to lose. And then you know that if your assumptions are wrong, so I don't use debt, I don't have any debt, I don't want to have debt, I don't want to think about it, I don't want to owe anybody anything. But, you know, if you're being honest with people and you're being diverse in terms of how you invest, you want to win of course and you want to be successful but what's the worst case I say to myself if I can stay healthy and I can get some of these investments right and I'm enjoying what I do with the cooking and photography the music and all that stuff what else can I do like I mean this is the way you're supposed to spend your life and then one day they turn off the lights you take your watches and you go away that's what happens and that's going to happen to me too but But at least when people look back, they'll say, well, the guy didn't lie to me.

2:24I made money with him. And he can cook some good stuff. I mean, you know, I look at it that way. You've got to be pragmatic. And this comes over time. I mean, somebody said to me, don't you worry what people think about you? And I actually thought about that for a while. And I thought, no, I don't. I just don't. Did you used to? Yeah, I think I did. And I think that really contorted me. I think as long as I'm telling the truth, I don't worry about it. I've said that countless times now. but why would I want to stress myself out worrying about what someone thinks about me? What benefit for either they or I is that energy?

2:56That's a complete waste of time. And I would ask people that don't have, they have a lot of anxiety or they're self-conscious about what others think about them. This is one of the biggest mistakes in social media. Why do you care? The only people you should worry about are the people in your family and your close friends. and maybe that's a total of 50 people. I worry about them. I don't want to lie to them. I want to keep in touch with them. But, you know, if some random person wants to rag on me, I don't care. I don't know them. And if they want to be that way, I don't want to know them. It's sort of, you know, I love meeting new people, but I'm certainly worried about my family and my friends first.

3:38And I think everybody should treat themselves that way. And you'll be a lot happier. You can't make everybody happy, ever. It doesn't matter what you do, you can't. And I think it's great advice for my kids. I often talk to them about this, saying, what are you doing? Why do you care? How will it change your life if everybody you know just thinks you're great? Who cares? It's what you think about yourself that matters. That's how you can get confident. How do you change the perception about yourself? It's like quitting smoking. I quit smoking decades ago because I said, this is stupid. Why am I doing this?

4:12This is a really stupid thing. And I have to prove it to myself that I can do it. What's your definition of greatness? Again, I go back to the core anchor that we've had all day. Greatness is anybody that can actually tell the truth their whole life. Very few. Very few. Even in history, politicians and generals, great liars. That's true. Often dying in misery as a result of lying so much, being strung up by their own people or being abandoned on an island somewhere or being defeated by others that didn't like them because they lied to them. You become a big student of history. You go back and look at all the catastrophes.

4:51It's always the big lie that killed them. That's it.

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5:54Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.