I'm 'Shark Tank' investor Kevin O'Leary. I wake up at 5 a.m. with no alarm and refuse to answer emails.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Canadian businessman and entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary , 71, who gained popularity spending over nearly two decades as the blunt-talking investor on " Shark Tank " sarcastically nicknamed "Mr. Wonderful." The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I grew up in Montreal and Ottawa and received my MBA in 1980. My second business, the software company SoftKey, became successful enough to acquire the educational software company The Learning Company in 1995. Four years later, I sold it to Mattel for $4.2 billion . I became a venture capitalist, mutual fund manager, and did some Canadian TV, starring on "Dragon's Den," a reality series where entrepreneurs pitched ideas to a panel of investors. A few years later, Mark Burnett took me to lunch, as he wanted me to be one of the investors in a US version of "Dragon's Den," called "Shark Tank." "I'm looking for a real asshole, and you're it," he told me. The rest is history. I'm also acting for the first time, playing a business tycoon named Milton Rockwell in the Timothée Chalamet movie "Marty Supreme," which is in theaters on Christmas Day. Here's what a typical day in my life looks like. I wake up around 5 a.m. without an alarm clock and bike 12 miles I don't need an alarm. Sometimes, when I have to be somewhere, I'll set it. But it's just a natural rhythm for me to get up at 5 a.m. Generally, in business, there are five stories that start in Asia and then come sweeping across the globe. So I get up and watch the different feeds from Europe and Asia so I'm up to speed. At about 6:45, when it gets light out, I get on my bike and ride for about 12 miles. I don't eat breakfast, and I make my own coffee, because it's stupid to pay for it I generally work out for about an hour and a half every day. It's for longevity and mental acuity; I have to do that, otherwise bad things happen. I don't eat breakfast. I fast for 16 hours and only have two meals a day. I'll have coffee in the mornings, but I don't buy it. That's stupid. Why would I pay five bucks when I can just make a coffee? I don't get it. Every day, I use a 'signal and noise' goal technique I learned from Steve Jobs I used to work for Steve Jobs. Before I sold The Learning Company to Mattel, we worked with Apple a lot to get the Mac into schools. He had this concept of signal and noise. He believed that you needed to do three things, and you had to get them done every day. You need a ratio of at least 70% signal, which are the three things, and the 30% can be noise, whatever is going to stop you from getting the three things done. In entrepreneurship, and certainly in...

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