Reality check for entrepreneurs in crisis | Anthony Scaramucci | Big Think

Reality check for entrepreneurs in crisis
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Anthony Scaramucci isn't afraid to admit his failures as an entrepreneur. The founder and managing partner of investment firm SkyBridge Capital says it's the journey that matters, and that being an entrepreneur means accepting that some things, including successes and failures, are out of your control.

A hard but necessary question that entrepreneurs have to ask themselves is if they can live with the worst-case scenario.

In a time of crisis, Scaramucci's advice is to clear your mind, accept all possible outcomes, and to dial down fear-based instincts so that you focus on being aggressive in business.
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ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI:

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and current managing partner of investment firm SkyBridge Capital. Scaramucci published an autobiography, Goodbye, Gordon Gekko: How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul, in 2010, and made a brief appearance in Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Scaramucci is also the author of The Little Book of Hedge Funds and his latest book Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole https://amzn.to/2AHqKS7
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TRANSCRIPT:

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: To speak with absolute veracity to future entrepreneurs, current entrepreneurs or potential ones, what you have to know about your life is if you're going to be an entrepreneur you have to accept that some of your success or failure is providential. There's only so many things that are inside your control.

CHRISTINE ROMANS: The Coronavirus pandemic has tanked the global economy with unprecedented speed. Millions out of work, markets plunging, business slammed to a screeching halt

VARIOUS SPEAKERS: U.S. markets tumbled Friday because of concerns of the outbreak…The Dow Jones Industrial average closed down nearly…Wall Street ending one of the worst weeks of trading since the financial crisis in 2008.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: You can work hard, you can build a nice relationship network, you can sell good products but you have to have the right environment to work inside of and some of that's beyond your control. We can't predict terrorist attacks like 9/11 or debacles like the WorldCom accounting disaster, the Enron accounting disaster of '01 to '03. The 2008 global financial crisis. None of these things we can predict, and so you have to live your life recognizing that a sense of your life is out of control. That's hard for the average person but that's par for the course for the entrepreneur.

ELON MUSK: The odds of coming into the rocket business not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Running a business the first thing you have to do is you have to drop your ego and your self-identity of whatever it is you think about yourself. And so there was great sadness that I had while my business was failing because my self-pity was, at a scale of one to ten, it was at a 16. And what was the self-pity? 'My god, I went to Harvard Law School. I should be doing way better than I'm doing and my business is failing and woe is me, woe is me.' So the first thing you have to do is you have to drop all of your self-pity and you have to accept your journey in life.

The second thing you have to do is you have to stop comparing yourself to everybody else. I think that is a huge, dangerous thing that business leaders do and even competitive athletes do. And then once you're able to do both of those things then your mind clears up. And once your mind clears up and you start to accept that there are so many things about the next forward steps of your life that are uncertain no matter what you do. No matter how brilliant you are, you could still fail and you're comfortable with that then you finally have made it as an entrepreneur because at the end of the day Steve Jobs has his set of failures. People don't remember this about Bill Gates but his first operating system failed. He had to go to digital research in Seattle and buy that and change it from DR-DOS to MS-DOS, and so every great entrepreneur, if they are being honest with you, will tell you about disastrous things that happened to them.

Michael Dell's notebooks, we're talking about this Galaxy 7 catching on fire. In 1993, Michael Dell's notebooks were catching on fire...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/entrepreneurs-in-crisis