The Third Door: The Mindset of Success - Hardcover

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The day before his freshman year final exams, Alex Banayan hacked The Price Is Right, won a sailboat, sold it, and used the prize money to fund his quest to learn from the world’s most successful people. Since then, Banayan has been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list and Business Insider’s “Most Powerful People Under 30.” He has contributed to FastCompany, The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, and TechCrunch, and has been featured in major media including Fortune, Forbes, Businessweek, Bloomberg TV, Fox News, and CBS News. An acclaimed keynote speaker, Banayan has presented the Third Door framework to business conferences and corporate leadership teams around the world, garnering standing ovations from Apple, Nike, IBM, Dell, MTV, Harvard, and countless others.

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Chapter One

Staring at the Ceiling

Right this way . . .”

I stepped across the marble floor and turned a corner, entering a room with glistening floor-to-ceiling windows. Sailboats drifted down below, gentle waves lapped onto the shore, and the afternoon sun bounced off a marina and filled the lobby with a bright, heavenly glow. I followed an assistant down a hallway. The office had couches with the most plush cushions I’d ever seen. The coffee spoons sparkled in a way I’d never seen spoons sparkle before. The conference room table looked like it had been carved by Michelangelo himself. We entered a long corridor lined with hundreds of books.

“He’s read every one,” she said.

Macroeconomics. Computer science. Artificial intelligence. Polio eradication. The assistant pulled out a book on feces recycling and placed it in my hands. I flipped through it with sweaty palms. Nearly every page was underlined and highlighted with scribbles in the margins. I couldn’t help but smile--the scribbles had the penmanship of a fifth grader.

We continued down the hallway until the assistant asked me to stay where I was. I stood there, motionless, looking at a towering frosted glass door. I had to stop myself from touching it to feel how thick it was. As I waited, I thought of all the things that led me here--the red scarf, the toilet in San Francisco, the shoe in Omaha, the cockroach in the Motel 6, the--

And then, the door opened.

“Alex, Bill is ready for you.”

He was standing right in front of me, hair uncombed, shirt loosely tucked in, sipping a can of Diet Coke. I waited for something to come out of my mouth, but nothing did.

“Hey, there,” Bill Gates said, his smile lifting his eyebrows. “Come on in . . .”

Three Years Earlier, My Freshman Dorm Room

I flipped over in bed. A stack of biology books sat on my desk, staring back at me. I knew I should study, but the more I looked at the books, the more I wanted to pull the covers over my head.

I tossed to my right. A University of Southern California football poster hung above me. When I’d first taped it on my wall, the colors were so vibrant. Now the poster seemed to blend in with the wall.

I turned onto my back and stared at the silent white ceiling.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Ever since I could remember, the plan was for me to be a doctor. That’s what happens when you’re the son of Persian Jewish immigrants. I practically came out of the womb with “MD” stamped on my behind. In third grade, I wore scrubs to school for Halloween. I was “that kid.”

I was never the smartest kid in school, but I was consistent. Like, I consistently got B minuses and consistently read CliffsNotes. To make up for my lack of straight As, I always had a sense of direction. In high school I “checked the boxes”--volunteer at a hospital, take extra science classes, obsess over the SATs. But I was too busy trying to survive to stop and wonder whose boxes I was checking. When I’d started college, I couldn’t have imagined that a month later I would be hitting the snooze button four or five times each morning, not because I was tired, but because I was bored. Yet I continued dragging myself to class anyway, checking the premed boxes, feeling like a sheep following the herd.

That’s how I found myself here: lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. I’d come to college looking for answers, but all I got were more questions. What am I actually interested in? What do I want to major in? What do I want to do with my life?

I flipped over again. The biology books were like dementors, sucking the life out of me. The more I dreaded opening them, the more I thought about my parents--running through the Tehran airport, fleeing to America as refugees, sacrificing everything to give me an education.

When I received my admissions letter from USC, my mom told me I couldn’t attend because we couldn’t afford it. Although my family wasn’t poor and I grew up in Beverly Hills, like many families, we lived a double life. While we lived in a nice neighborhood, my parents had to take out a second mortgage to cover the bills. We went on vacations, yet there were times when I’d see notices on our front door saying our gas was going to be cut off. The only reason my mom allowed me to attend USC was because the day before the enrollment deadline, my dad stayed up all night, talking to my mom with tears in his eyes, saying he’d do whatever it took to make ends meet.

And this is how I paid him back? By lying in bed, pulling the covers over my head?

I glanced at the other side of the room. My roommate, Ricky, was at a small wooden desk doing his homework, spitting out numbers like an accounting machine. The squeak of his pencil mocked me. He had a path. I wish I had that. All I had was a ceiling that wouldn’t talk back to me.

Then I thought about the guy I’d met the prior weekend. He’d graduated from USC a year earlier with a math degree. He used to sit at a desk just like Ricky’s, spitting out numbers just like him, and now he was scooping ice cream a few miles from campus. I was beginning to realize that a college degree no longer came with guarantees.

I turned over to the textbooks. Studying is the last thing I want to do.

I rolled onto my back. But my parents sacrificed everything so that studying would be the only thing I have to do.

The ceiling remained silent.

I flipped over and planted my face in my pillow.

I trudged to the library the following morning, my biology books under my arm. But as much as I tried to study, my internal battery remained depleted. I needed a jump start, something to inspire me. So I pushed my chair back from the study tables, wandered to the aisles of the biography section, and pulled out a book on Bill Gates. I figured reading about someone as successful as Gates might spark something within me. And it did--just not what I’d expected.

Here was a guy who started his company when he was my age, grew it into the most valuable corporation in the world, revolutionized an industry, became the richest man alive, and then stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft to become the most generous philanthropist on earth. Thinking about what Bill Gates accomplished felt like standing at the base of Mount Everest and staring up at the peak. All I could wonder was: How did he take his first steps up the mountain?

Before I knew it I was flipping through the biographies of one successful person after another. Steven Spielberg climbed the Mount Everest of directing, so how did he do it? How did a kid who’d been rejected from film school become the youngest major studio director in Hollywood history? How did Lady Gaga, when she was nineteen years old and waiting tables in New York City, get her first record deal?

I kept returning to the library, searching for a book that held the answers. But after a few weeks, I was left empty-handed. There wasn’t a single book that focused on the stage of life I was in. When no one knew their names, when no one would take their meetings, how did these people find a way to launch their careers? That’s when my naive eighteen-year-old thinking kicked in: Well, if no one has written the book I’m dreaming of reading, why not just write it myself?

It was a dumb idea. I couldn’t even write a term paper without half the page coming back covered in red ink. I decided not to do it.

But as the days pressed on, the idea wouldn’t let me go. What interested me wasn’t writing a book so much as embarking on “a mission”--a journey to uncover...