“If you’re an educated man, they can’t take anything away from you.” -Shaquille O’Neal
In my mass communications class on February 18th, 2020, Professor Chambers showed us a clip of Shaquille O’Neal doing an interview with Wall Street Journal, discussing his path to where he is now. I found the interview to be very interesting, and I got to learn quite a few things about Shaq that I didn’t know before.
- Shaquille O’Neal is technically considered a doctor because he has a PhD in education.
- O’Neal owns several different franchises with many companies, including Krispy Kreme, Five Guys, and 24 Hour Fitness.
- His first big investment was in Google.
Throughout the course of the interview, Shaquille O’Neal emphasized the importance of being educated. One thing that he said that stood out to me, was that he was “taught by scare tactics” to become a businessman. I thought O’Neal’s choice of wording was very interesting when he said that, but I agree that it’s very important to be a businessman and to understand what you’re spending your money on if you want to a) accumulate a lot of money, and b) maintain your wealth. Another thing that stood out to me was how much energy he’s willing to put into things he believes in, but how little he will put into things that he doesn’t believe in.
Shaquille O’Neal shared a very interesting story about an opportunity he was once offered to be featured on the cover of the Wheaties box of cereal. Even though I’ve personally never had Wheaties before, I’ve heard about it before and I’ve always known Wheaties to be a pretty reputable brand. However, O’Neal shared that at the time, he’d never tried the cereal, and he didn’t care to because it wasn’t one of his favorite cereals. Therefore, he passed up the opportunity. As shocking as that was to me to hear at first, it showed me that O’Neal cared about more than just the potential money that he could make from the opportunity. This just further reinforced that O’Neal will only invest his time/energy into ideas that he genuinely believes in, which I find to be pretty respectable.
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