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    The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur's Memoir
    The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur's Memoir
    The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur's Memoir
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur's Memoir

    Written by Joe Ricketts

    Narrated by Danny Campbell

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire.

    Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to take control of their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Street is playing right there on Wall Street, but Ricketts made that happen. His company, begun with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off like a rocket thanks to an early embrace of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also faced a series of near-disasters: the SEC almost shut him down; his partners tried to force him out because of his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the company; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down again when a customer committed massive fraud. By the time of the dot-com bust, he had proven that his strategy based on frontier values could survive just about anything.

    The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us—how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of splitting with his mentor and of his brother’s death from AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion.

    A must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting their own business, The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get is the ultimate only-in-America story.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateNov 5, 2019
    ISBN9781797102009
    Author

    Joe Ricketts

    Joe Ricketts is the founder, former CEO, and retired chairman of online brokerage TD Ameritrade, and the author of The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get.

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    Reviews for The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get

    4.5/5

    63 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Great story about Ameritrade- Learned a lot about having conviction and pushing through. Also, great business lesson about providing value and controlling cost. But some management stuff is not good practice. Still learned a lot about thought process and determination. Good book to learn about running a successful business and how to handle challenges.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Wow what an amazing book just loved it, pure inspiration
    • 5/5
      I am still listening to this book. I am savouring every last minute. The story itself and the wonderful narration keep me involved the whole time. It's non fiction but doesn't get boring at all and I am not from the finance world but I LOVE reading about entrepreneurs.