Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio.
Everyone makes mistakes, but tenacity in the face of failure is the key to success. But Anthony Scaramucci is asking how do we teach the resiliency that inspires tenacity and gives everyone an equal chance to fail…and fail again?
“Failing sucks,” Anthony Scaramucci chuckles ruefully. “Anybody who tells you differently is completely full of it.”
The son of a crane operator and first in his family to go to college, Scaramucci knows something about meteoric success, rising through the world of finance to become the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, a global investment firm based in New York City.
However, he also knows a thing or two about freefalling failure, such as his singularly brief but notorious stint as President Trump’s press secretary.
Everyone makes mistakes, but tenacity in the face of failure is the key to success.
“I had just been fired from the White House on July 31, 2017,” he says. “I was shot out of a cannon like an Austin Powers villain. Afterward, I’m walking on the Santa Monica pier with my son. He puts his arm around me and asks if I’m going to be okay. I mean, I’m getting lit up by late night comedians, impersonated on Saturday Night Live and torched in the news. I looked at him, and I said, ‘You know what? I’m totally going to be okay. So, watch what I do with this.’”
“Watch what I do with this” really is the encapsulation of Scaramucci’s philosophy when it comes to how to turn a mistake—no matter how disastrous—into a chance to fail “up” into the next opportunity.
Failing to Fail
It’s not easy to fail correctly, navigating a path through pain, self-pity and expectations to reach an objective place of observation and reflection. But if living through failure is tiring, pretending to be perfect is exhausting—and worse—counterproductive.
“If you care about going to cocktail parties and holding a martini glass and telling people that you have a perfect life, never made any mistakes, you’re going to be a dull [expletive]— I mean, person,” says Scaramucci. “People think that makes them look tough and like they have their act together. In reality, they look weak and insecure. Perfection wears thin pretty quickly. What people really like and want is authenticity and vulnerability.”
Don’t confuse vulnerability with victimhood on Scaramucci’s watch, though. Where vulnerability keeps us honest and open to opportunities, victimhood is the gateway emotion to anger, hatred and the worst impulses of humanity.
“It’s a huge mistake to take everything personally,” he says, but is quick to add, “and that’s not to say that you don’t take things passionately, in the sense that you put your heart and soul into what you’re creating in life. But, if you have a fight or a business relationship doesn’t work out, you have to roll with it. Life isn’t fair, but like I tell my kids when they whine, you’re also living in America and have all these opportunities, so shut up.”
Failing to Oblige
Interestingly, Scaramucci is both keenly aware and surprisingly vocal about the disparity of opportunities between America and the rest of the world, and even more tellingly, within America itself. The ability to leverage the lessons of failure hinges not only on a solid educational basis, but also on the willingness of those who have succeeded to guide and care for those who struggle.
“We’ve lost our cultural sense of noblesse oblige,” observes Scaramucci. “Our grandfathers and grandmothers said let’s help people, let’s make a platform for people to fall back on, but also a platform for opportunity.”
And there’s the crux of helping people succeed at “failing.” Nobody is entitled to fail “up,” but everyone should have access to the tools that teach them how to be resilient.
“I’m not for equal outcomes, but I am for equal opportunity,” Scaramucci says firmly. “Right now, we’re an income-based society where the rich own assets and everyone else earns wages. The rich are getting richer, and the middle class and poor are struggling to tread water. But we are all sitting in our little tribal spaces, yelling at each other on cable. Our political identities and ideologies are not going to be workable for our children and grandchildren. We need practical, non-ideological solutions to things that are going on the planet.”
From Solon of the ancient Greeks to Marie Antoinette, history and Scaramucci are full of stories of what happens when people fail to honor the social contract that balances rights with responsibilities and allows the glue that holds society together to become unstuck.
“People believe the rich and powerful have rigged the system,” notes Scaramucci. “They get angry and become disaffected from the establishment, and they become polarized. I want to we talk about how we’re going to create an aspirational society, regardless of color, creed, sexual orientation, how are we going to do that?”
Failing to Teach
It all comes back to education.
But education comes in many forms and requires more investment from everyone.
For example, education can take the form of a mentor’s friendly advice, such as the kind Scaramucci got in his first interview with Goldman Sachs.
“I’m at the Charles Hotel in a one hundred percent polyester suit that I bought from Syms,” he recalls. “I’m wearing a white polyester shirt and a tacky black tie, and my hair is blown back like Tony Manero from Saturday Night Live. Basically, I was fully flammable at my first interview. Oh, I left out my cockroach-killing shoes from Capezio. The partner takes me aside and says, ‘Listen, you’re a really smart kid, but you are the worst dressed person that we’ve ever met at Harvard Law School. We like smart kids, but I can’t invite you down to Goldman unless you go buy some clothes.’”
A broader definition of education also includes expanding the concept of what corporate internships and training programs need to teach to students, as well as working with educators and institutions to tackle the complex issues of educational access and quality.
“Do we have the money and technology?” asks Scaramucci. “Absolutely. But what the hell are we doing? There’s a group of self-interested cynical people at the top who don’t care about serving the public, who want to keep people dumb so that they don’t vote, and they can preserve their own power.”
“It’s about creating a system where you’re giving back something tangible,” he adds. “Sure, I can write a check, but checks don’t solve problems. But if you’re putting kids in situations where they can’t read or write, now they’re getting low-skilled jobs, and they’re getting angry. But if you bring kids into your corporate culture and hit them over the head, and you talk to them about being an entrepreneur, you talk to them about their own personal development and survival, now you’ve got something exciting going on.”
Failing to Dream
The American dream hasn’t changed, but the skills and abilities it takes to achieve it have gone from challenging to almost impossible in many cases. In a society that values self-reliance, it may seem ironic to talk about investing in a goal of egalitarian opportunity, leveling if not the playing field, then at least the home plate. But, it’s important not to conflate “equal” with “identical.”
“Not everybody is the same,” Scaramucci remarks. “We need to lift people up, to help them learn resiliency so they don’t get knocked out of the game. We want kids saying, ‘Okay, my parents have no money. But you know what, I will get a good education, and if I want to drive myself, I will build on my failures and become successful. So, I fail at the same time as I succeed. I’m failing upwards.’”
He pauses and laughs. “Yeah, that’s America.”
