The One Mindset Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Dozens More of the World’s Most Successful People Share
Editor’s Note: Alex Banayan is the author of the new book The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World’s Most Successful People Launched Their Careers, which is available everywhere June 5th. Alex’s journey began when he was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. The day before his final exams, he 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.
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“Success leaves clues.”
I’ll always remember the first time I heard Tony say those words at a UPW event, because in many ways, I’ve devoted my life to proving that idea.
For the past 7 years, I’ve been obsessively studying success. I’ve spent thousands of hours researching, pouring over hundreds of biographies, and more importantly, sitting down one-on-one with the people I was dying to learn from.
For business, I interviewed Bill Gates; for music, Lady Gaga; computer science, Steve Wozniak; poetry, Maya Angelou. I interviewed Larry King, Jane Goodall, Pitbull, Jessica Alba, Quincy Jones, and many more.
I chased Larry King through a grocery store, hacked Warren Buffett’s shareholders meeting, crouched in a bathroom to get to Tim Ferriss — getting each interview was an equally wild adventure. And they were all packed with surprising lessons.
Bill Gates taught me his keys to negotiating. Steve Wozniak showed me how to engineer sustainable happiness. Jessica Alba: how to use your biggest fears to launch a billion-dollar business. Even Pitbull gave unbelievable lessons about achieving and maintaining success—and how he learned them while he was struggling to survive on the streets.
My goal was never to find the “one key” to success. We’ve all seen those business books and TED Talks. I usually just roll my eyes.
What I did discover, though, was that while every person I interviewed was completely different on the outside — at their core they approached life with the exact same mindset.
DISCOVERING THE MINDSET
Every single one of these entrepreneurs treats life, business, and success . . . like a nightclub.
There are always three ways in.
There’s the “First Door”: the main entrance, where the line curves around the block. That’s where 99% of people wait around, hoping to get in.
There’s the “Second Door”: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through.
But what no one tells you is that there is always, always . . . the “Third Door.” It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen — there’s always a way.
Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took . . . the Third Door.
UNCOVERING THE FOUNDATION
When I started writing this book, my focus was on gathering the wisdom of the greats so their hindsight could be my generation’s foresight. But I soon realized that the mission goes deeper. The mindset of the Third Door, is really about possibility.
I’ve learned that while you can give someone all the best knowledge and tools in the world, sometimes they can still feel stuck. But if you can change what someone believes is possible, their life will never be the same.
It’s that mindset of possibility that transformed my life.
Because when you change what you believe is possible, you change what becomes possible.
Over the past 7 years, I’ve learned that everyone has the power to make little choices that can alter their lives forever. When Bill Gates sat in his dorm room and pushed through his fear to make his first sale, that was a choice. When Steven Spielberg jumped off the Universal Studios tour bus at age nineteen so he could roam the lot and meet film executives, that was a choice.
You can either choose to continue waiting in line for the “First Door” — or you can choose to jump out of line, run down the alley, and take the “Third Door.”