Anthony Scaramucci wants you to know about everything he’s done wrong: He failed the bar exam twice, got fired from his dream job at Goldman Sachs, and nearly lost his investing firm during the 2008 financial crisis.
Today, his firm is back in the black, while Scaramucci is a well-known financial pundit, a trade-show entrepreneur and one of Donald Trump’s economic advisors. “What sometimes happens on Wall Street is, we sanitize our success,” he tells Yahoo Finance in the video above. “It didn’t really happen like that.”
Scaramucci writes about his setbacks and comebacks in the new book, “Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure Into Success.” Why focus so much on things gone bad? “We have to pay things forward to a younger generation,” he says. “For young people to get an accurate window into what really happens, as opposed to the sanitized, sound-bite nonsense that we sometimes are forced to read.”
Bookshelves are swollen with volumes on the virtues of failure (including my own contribution, “Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setbacks to Success“) and Scaramucci’s memoir summons many familiar adages: Never quit. Acknowledge failure instead of denying it. Learn from your mistakes instead of repeating them. Do what you love.
But he’s also disarmingly honest about a Wall Street culture in which one day’s wardrobe can cost two weeks’ pay for the average worker. The book describes one unnamed investing guru who tried to impress potential clients and partners with the architectural flair and costly artwork in his lower Manhattan office. “He’ll be out of business in one year,” Scaramucci predicted to a friend. In reality, it took two years before “the cardinal sin of business—overspending on the wrong things,” sank the flashy guy’s firm.
Budding entrepreneurs will learn a simple lesson about hedging, or protecting yourself if things don’t go the way you expect. One of Scaramucci’s earliest ventures was selling Hood ice cream out of a truck during the Boston Marathon in 1986, during his senior year in college. He rented a parking spot from a gas station along the race’s route and spent $2,100 on ice cream, hoping to double his money. But race day was frigid and rainy, and the young businessman lost half of his investment. “I had no hedge,” he writes. “I had no cold-weather products to sell. No coffee. No hot chocolate. No donuts.”
For those who might be wondering, Scaramucci confirms there is, in fact, a proliferation of arrogance on Wall Street. To guard against it, he says, “surround yourself with honest people. Reduce sycophancy in your life. You can get infected with your own self-worth and your own success, and start to separate yourself from other people. It can be very damaging.” The other people are well aware.
Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.