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

Joe Ricketts always had the present of viewing what others missed. The kid of a residence builder, he began life like a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he noticed the opportunity to challenge the best brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to manage about The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur’s Memoir their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Road is playing right there on Wall Road, but Ricketts made that happen. His business, started with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off just like a rocket thanks to an early accept of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also encountered a series of near-disasters: the SEC nearly shut him down; his partners tried to drive him out due to his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the business; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down once again when a consumer committed massive fraud. By enough time of the dot-com bust, he had verified that his technique based on frontier ideals could survive just about anything.

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a look at inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us—how they start to see the horizon where we simply visit a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also discussions honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the profession sacrifices his wife made for his business, the intricacy of being a father, and the pain of splitting along with his coach and of his sibling’s death from AIDS. Conquering these and other challenges, he constructed a company today worth $30 billion.

A must-read for anybody who’s ever imagined starting their personal business, The Harder You Function, The Luckier You Get may be the ultimate only-in-America story.