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Kevin O'Leary Says Steve Jobs Gave Him The Best Advice: 'There's Only 3 Things You Have To Get Done Every Day'

O'Leary references a conversation with Steve Jobs in the mid-1990s.

By Chris Lewis, CEPF , Edited by Andrea Basse

Updated Aug. 26, 2026

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Kevin O'Leary has sat across from hundreds of entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, built and sold multiple companies, and managed a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio. If you ask him which piece of advice has done the most to get ahead financially across all of it, he points to a conversation with Steve Jobs in the mid-1990s, which is when O'Leary's educational software company, The Learning Company, was working with Apple to put Mac computers in schools.

"There's only three things you have to get done every day," O'Leary recalls Jobs telling him. Everything else competing for his attention? Noise. And the ability to tell the difference between the two, Jobs said, is what separates people who achieve extraordinary results from people who stay perpetually busy without moving forward.

O'Leary said he pushed back at first. Jobs, by his own admission, was not an easy person to work with. But Jobs' response was simple: trust me. O'Leary has been practicing the principle every day since.

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The idea in O'Leary's own words

O'Leary has described the Jobs framework in multiple interviews and posts, and the core is consistent. "He believed that you needed to do three things, and you had to get them done every day," O'Leary told Business Insider. "You need a ratio of at least 70% signal, which are the three things, and the 30% could be noise, whatever is going to stop you from getting the three things done. So I pick three things I want to get done that day, and I don't let anything get in the way until those three things are done."

In other interviews, O'Leary has described the ratio closer to 80% signal and 20% noise, and has explained that Jobs viewed those daily priorities not as long-term goals or abstract ambitions, but as the specific actions that had to be completed in the next 18 to 24 hours. They are the things that move your mission forward that day. Once they are done, new critical tasks emerge tomorrow.

O'Leary has said his own three daily priorities often include exercise, which he does religiously at 5 a.m. before nearly anything else. The noise side? His inbox. At 2,000 to 4,000 emails per day, he stopped trying to manage it and now barely touches email at all, which is a choice that would paralyze most people but that he frames as a deliberate application of the same principle.

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Jobs practiced what he preached at Apple

At Apple's 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, returning to a company on the brink of bankruptcy after years away, Jobs answered developer questions for nearly an hour. One of the most quoted lines from that session: "Focusing is about saying no," Jobs said. "You've got to say 'no, no, no,' and when you say 'no,' you piss off people."

His engineers at the time, he said, were working in 18 different directions and were "good engineers, lousy management." Within a year of returning as CEO, Jobs cut Apple's product line by roughly 70%. The result of that focused product strategy, sustained over the following decade, was the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and the transformation of Apple into the most valuable company in the world.

Jobs later told Nike CEO Mark Parker the same principle: "Focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done."

Herjavec's echo: Focus as the common thread

Speaking on "The School of Hard Knocks" interview series, O'Leary recounted Jobs' advice to fellow Shark Tank investor Robert Herjavec, who has made a similar observation about the people he has studied across decades in business. Focus and clarity of purpose, Herjavec has said, are the traits that consistently separate the highly successful from the merely talented.

The specific system varies. The underlying discipline of choosing what matters and protecting it from everything else does not.

Why the brain resists this and why it matters

There is a research basis for why O'Leary treats the three-priority framework as non-negotiable rather than just useful. Studies cited by the American Psychological Association found that switching between tasks could cost as much as 40% of productive time due to the mental cost of reorientation, a finding that has held across more than two decades of cognitive research. And recovering full focus after an interruption takes longer than most people realize, with some research putting the average time to refocus after a distraction at more than 23 minutes, meaning a single interruption mid-morning could cost most of the session that follows.

The practical implication is that managing attention is not a soft skill. It is a performance variable with measurable output consequences. When O'Leary says he does not let anything get in the way of his three priorities until they are done, he is not being dramatic. He is eliminating the compounding attention cost that makes most people's days far less productive than their hours suggest they should be.

Applying it beyond the boardroom

O'Leary's framing is directed at entrepreneurs, but the principle applies just as directly to anyone managing time, money, and competing demands on a fixed schedule.

For someone in or approaching retirement, the daily three-priority framework translates naturally. A financial task like reviewing a Medicare plan during open enrollment, calling about an overdue Social Security correction, or reading through a beneficiary designation on an old account does not require a full day, but it does require protection from displacement by easier tasks that feel productive and accomplish nothing. Putting it in your top three makes it happen.

The same applies to health routines, downsizing projects, or building a side income. O'Leary himself has described entrepreneurship and side income as achievable within the constraints of a focused schedule, specifically because the three-priority approach creates the protected time that large goals require without demanding a wholesale restructuring of your day.

The noise is not going anywhere. Emails accumulate, notifications fire, and the to-do list never empties. Jobs' insight and O'Leary's application of it is not that the noise disappears when you ignore it. It is that the signal still gets done regardless.

Bottom line

The Jobs framework O'Leary describes is simple: pick three things that genuinely must get done today, treat them as non-negotiable, and let everything else compete for whatever attention remains. Repeated daily, O'Leary says, those three completions compound. "When you repeat this," he has said, "your business goes geometric."

For readers thinking about how to make extra money through a side income, build better financial habits, or tackle the kind of high-stakes tasks, which is long-term care planning, estate documents, retirement account reviews, that keep getting pushed to next week, the three-priority filter is the lowest-friction version of focus discipline available. You do not need a new system or a new app. You need to decide what three things have to happen today, write them down before you open anything else, and not negotiate with the noise until they are finished.

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