Cold Hard Truth On Business, Money & Life – Book Summary

THINK THE WAY MONEY THINKS.

In Cold Hard Truth:On Business, Money & Life, Kevin O’Leary admonish readers to think of money like gravity. It is a law, an absolute.  Some people think that making money is a matter of being good or right. But money doesn’t care about any of that. It also doesn’t care about you or your family or your country. Money is neutral.

Money goes only where it knows it’ll be safe, and that’s generally in the vicinity of more money. So building wealth requires the ability to think the way money thinks, which means never confusing money with emotion. In fact, feelings are often obstacles to wealth, because feelings, like the weather, are mercurial, unreliable, and ever-changing. Money deals strictly with fact.

WHATEVER YOU PAY ATTENTION TO GROWS

Pay attention to the critics, and you absorb that negativity into your DNA, which infects whatever you’re working on. Money will flee that inhospitable environment. Pay attention to the horizon line, keep your path uncluttered, tune out unnecessary noise, guard your precious time, and money will take root and thrive.

When it comes to money there is no gray zone. You either make money or lose it; you have it or you don’t.  Here’s the ultimate truth about money: even though it doesn’t care about me or you, to make money requires us to care deeply about it.

SPEND THE INTEREST, NEVER THE PRINCIPAL – AND OTHER LESSONS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME WHY

Money’s great, money’s the point of everything, and I can always earn more. But time is a scarce commodity. It is the true universal currency, because you can’t invent, manufacture, or buy time.

Unless there’s money to be earned, I don’t take meetings with people I don’t know or need to see. I guard my time as fiercely as I would a few bars of gold.

Never let them see you sweat … and never pay with credit.

MONEY = FREEDOM

Know your weakness as leader and surround yourself with solutions, by so doing you don’t have to worry about your weaknesses.

Avoiding unnecessary debt. In fact, my mother always believed that debt was the source of almost every problem known to man. To her, debt was like a cancer, and if you didn’t stay on top of it, it could completely consume you.

Georgette’s (O’Leary’s Mum) philosophy: never spend the principal, just the interest. She would only invest in stocks that paid a dividend or interest. As far as she was concerned, a stock without a dividend was pure speculation. To this day, her advice guides me. It’s the bedrock upon which O’Leary Funds is based.

I learned early on that money didn’t come from wishes and prayers. It came from hard work. Even at the age of four or five, I was aware that there was a direct correlation between work and money. She also taught me that you needed to leave money alone if you wanted it to grow. You should always save a third of your paycheck, investing it in stable stocks or bonds that pay dividends or interest. You spend that—never the principal.

YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG (OR OLD) TO UNDERSTAND MONEY

In Cold Hard Truth, Kevin O’Leary says that money is more powerful than any institution, he also advises the readers not to let others determine their worth.

I have never felt less than or better than anyone, in any company, no matter where I am in the world. By knowing that you’re not a lesser person, or greater than other, will make you impervious to mean-spirited attacks.

“No” means negotiate

Money goes where it can multiply