Goodbye Gordon Gekko

How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul

By: Anthony Scaramucci

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

We never really know how it’s going to turn out. One day a community organizer, the next day President. One day CEO of Lehman Brothers, the next day the piñata for greed and ambition run amok. Life is full of decisions, choices, and unexpected twists and turns; how you pick yourself up and react to thee unanticipated circumstances will make all the difference.

According to author Anthony Scaramucci, it is time to say goodbye to Gordon Gekko, the rogue character famously portrayed by Michael Douglas in the classic movie Wall Street. In Goodbye Gordon Gekko, Scaramucci explores opportunities for leading a rich life in a difficult, radically changed economy. Believing that the financial crisis was caused by a nation of Gekko-wannabes tripped up by status anxiety and egocentric tendencies, he argues that you can be happy and financially profitable as long as you stay true to yourself and stick to your values and principles. Scaramucci offers hope, urging you to pass through the happily-ever-after portal so that you can find your fortune and all that is fortunate.

With years of experience at Goldman Sachs, and having co-founded two successful alternative investment management companies, the author provides a behind-the-scenes view of life on Wall Street—the wins and the losses, the rights and the wrongs, the successes and the failures, the good mentors and the difficult colleagues. Through these entertaining and insightful stories, featuring advice from a diverse cast of characters ranging from Li Ka-shing to John Weinberg to his Italian nana, Scaramucci identifies the temptations and roadblocks that accompany our professional ambitions and personal choices, revealing the rules for leading a profitable and fortunate life. What does this mean in practical terms? As Scaramucci shows, it means ridding yourself of egotistical tendencies and developing the self-awareness to bounce back from failure. It means building a circle of competence made of those you trust, mentoring and celebrating others, and giving back to your company and country, all the while targeting success. It means seeing capitalism as an art and businesses as creations and vocations, not simply as levers to feeding your ego. Goodbye Gordon Gekko provides a road map to help people achieve true wealth defined beyond a checking account.

©2010 Anthony Scaramucci (P)2010 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

“A fun, easy listen, with sage advice. Scaramucci is a player, looking under the rocks of corruption in our financial capital, and he survives as an honest soul.”-(Oliver Stone, Three time Academy Award Winner, Director, Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps)

Solid book

I have a strong value for academic, heavily cited, well founded work. It bolsters credibility and is basically a more formal version of the idea of credit where credit is due, especially if those people would appreciate it. I have also personally experienced a pretty good amount of certain folks intentionally let's say copying off my homework. I largely don't care about that too much when I'm allowing it, though it's probably more valuable to learn with a tutor directly. When somebody goes out of their way to an extent to do the right thing and provide good credit where credit is due; however, it's significantly conducive to value and I have a thorough appreciation of that. Throughout this book (and also Anthony Scaramuccis other books actually) he does make note of a pretty good number of people in reasonable detail who have helped him out or made him who he is. That makes the book for me. I would recommend you purchase all of his books he's released to date. They likely have an overwhelmingly positive expected value for you if you pick up just a point or two from each book. This would be especially true for people still in university as the impact this can have on you and the people you interact with over the course of your career would obviously be increased exponentially if you only factor basic compound interest.

An Exercise in Self-Promotion

This book is very disappointing. There is very little of value. It's basic purpose is for the author to tell the world what a great life he has had. He gives advice like mentor people as much of possible and give lots of money to charity, which is easy for him to say since he was making a million dollars a year since his twenties. He spends lots of time telling you to follow rules we learn as children, like treat people with respect, be nice, and don't discriminate. He loves to name drop about successful people that he knows personally. He gives stories of some adversity he faced, where of course he always came out ahead. Although he claims to be fallabe, all his examples are self-aggrandizing. If you follow his advice, you do great; if you don't follow it, you fail miserably. It's really a shame that the author didn't have anything insightful to say after all his years of experience in finance.