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

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, bursting into flames, and his stock went from 41 to 7 and he had to re-create the entire business right there. And so every entrepreneur will tell you when they're going through crisis: number one, clear your mind, accept whatever the possibly outcome will be, and then the steps that you have to take are non-fear based, and that's the biggest, biggest problem for people because we all have these fears.

You have to remember you're in a 100,000-year-old piece of machinery that hasn't had any real major evolution in the last 100,000 years. So your personage, you're the same person that was walking around in ancient Rome, so you're filled with all these primordial instincts. You've got to dial down your fear-based instincts and you've got to focus on being aggressive in a time of crisis.

Because if you don't do that you have a very high likelihood of failure. You have to say to yourself, 'What is the worst that could possibly happen?' And then, 'Can I live with what is the worst that could possibly happen?'

I've got buddies of mine I graduated from law school with, and they went on to investment banking. And the worst thing that could have ever happened to them is any scintilla of failure. Any scintilla of failure. And so therefore, they're not going to take any risk, and they're going to stay in this little bubble of what I would call the establishment complacency.

And I've got friends of mine that are like, okay, I'm going to try this thing. They failed two or three times in different businesses and now they're very successful. And so you have to ask yourself, self-diagnostically, what is the worst thing that could possibly happen, and can I live with the worst thing that could possibly happen?

I'm comfortable walking into the cocktail party and saying, 'Yes, I am a middle-aged has-been. I happen to suck as an entrepreneur.' I'm also comfortable walking into the party saying that, 'You know what, I tried my hardest and for me it was the journey that was way more important to me than the destination or the status related to whatever the positive outcome is.'

You've got to have a thick skin and you have to steel yourself for whatever's going to be out there that could be potentially against you. And so, for me, those are two big lessons I share with people.

Drop the elitism, try to get out into the public and understand what is going on in society—that will make you a better person and more prepared. And number two, if people are railing against you or saying nasty things, what other people think of you is none of your business. Who cares? Just go out and live your life and do what you think makes sense for yourself.

The world has completely changed with Big Think and all these other social media websites and Facebook and Twitter. You better get out there and define yourself before other people define you. So you've got to accept yourself. You've got to recognize that—be self-aware.

Okay, you're really not that important. Let me give you the news flash. And the universe doesn't care if you're successful or not. And so you shouldn't either. You should just follow your journey, but if you're an entrepreneur you've got to be bold and you've got to think very, very big. Otherwise, what are you doing it for?

Have you ever been to a Donald Trump rally?

MALE: Only the Trump campaign understands how popular Donald Trump is and what his path to reelection might be.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Have you ever been to a Bernie Sanders rally?

CROWD: Singing.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Let me tell you something. We can sit in a salon like this and we can self-talk to each other and we can insulate ourselves with what we think are the right ideas or the best ideas, but the average person is hurting out there. And so they're looking for something more disruptive or something more change-oriented.

So if you are a media personality or you're a CEO, and people are telling you you have to be more of a media personality, you better be authentic.