The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure–from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholder’s meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga–as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.
Favorite Takeaways – The Third Door
STEP 1: DITCH THE LINE
Life, business, success…it’s just like a nightclub.
There are always three ways in.
There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where the line curves around the block; where 99 percent of people wait around, hoping to get in.
There’s the Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires, celebrities, and the people born into it slip through.
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 away.
The Spielberg Game – Steven Spielberg
Many times the hardest part about achieving a dream isn’t actually achieving it—it’s stepping through your fear of the unknown when you don’t have a plan. Having a teacher or boss tell you what to do makes life a lot easier. But nobody achieves a dream from the comfort of certainty.
1. Jump off the tour bus.
2. Find an Inside Man.
3. Ask for his or her help to bring you in.
Tim Ferriss
What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness…The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
Qi Lu – Qi Time
Whether you’re a rice farmer or the president of the United States, you only get twenty-four hours in a day.
It’s like driving a car, If you always drive at sixty-five miles per hour, it doesn’t wear and tear the car that much. But if you speed up and slam the brakes often, that wears the engine down.
Qi wakes up every morning at four o’clock, goes on a five-mile run, and is in the office by six. He eats small meals throughout the day of mostly fruits and vegetables, which he packs in containers. He works eighteen hours a day, six days a week. If you cut 8 hours of sleep down to 4, then multiply the saved time by 365 days, that equals 1,460 extra hours—or 2 additional months of productivity per year.
Hidden Reservoir – Sugar Ray Leonard
You may have a desire, a wish, a dream—but it’s got to be more than that—you’ve got to want it to the point that it hurts. Most people never reach that point. They never tap into what I call the Hidden Reservoir, your hidden reserve of strength. We all have it. When they say a mother lifted up a car off a trapped child, that’s that power.
How many times have people told you, ‘You can’t interview these types of people’? How many times have they said, ‘No way’? Don’t let anyone tell you your dream isn’t possible. When you have a vision, you’ve got to hang in there. You’ve got to stay in the fight. It’s going to get tough. You’re going to hear no. But you’ve got to keep pushing. You’ve got to keep fighting. You’ve got to use your Hidden Reservoir. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible.
You’ve got to keep fighting. You’ve got to use your Hidden Reservoir. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible.
Elliott Bisnow
Fans ask for pictures. Peers shake hands.
Linear vs Exponential Life
You see, most people live a linear life, They go to college, get an internship, graduate, land a job, get a promotion, save up for a vacation each year, work toward their next promotion, and they just do that their whole lives. Their lives move step by step, slowly and predictably.
But successful people don’t buy into that model. They opt into an exponential life. Rather than going step by step, they skip steps. People say that you first need to ‘pay your dues’ and get years of experience before you can go out on your own and get what you truly want. Society feeds us this lie that you need to do x, y, and z before you can achieve your dream. It’s bullshit. The only person whose permission you need to live an exponential life is your own.
Sometimes an exponential life lands in your lap, like with a child prodigy. But most of the time, for people like you and me, we have to seize it for ourselves. If you actually want to make a difference in the world, if you want to live a life of inspiration, adventure, and wild success—you need to grab on to that exponential life—and hold on to it with all you’ve got.
Big decisions are rarely clear when you’re making them—they’re only clear looking back. The best you can do is take one careful step at a time.
Dean Kamen – Frog Kissing
It’s a term Kamen coined to motivate his engineers, spun from the fairy tale of the princess and the frog. Think of a pond full of frogs. Each frog represents a different way to solve your problem. Kamen tells his engineers that if they keep kissing frogs, eventually one will turn into a prince. So even when you’ve kissed dozens of frogs—and all you have as a result is a nasty taste in your mouth—Kamen says to keep kissing them, and eventually, you’ll find the prince. But what if you’ve kissed all the frogs and there’s still no prince?
Larry King – The secret is: there is no secret.
“Sometimes when people are starting out and feel they don’t know how to interview, they look to the people they admire—maybe it’s Barbara Walters or Oprah or myself—and they see how we interview and they try to copy that. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. You’re focused on what we’re doing, not why we’re doing it.”
He explained that Barbara Walters asks thoughtful questions that are strategically placed, Oprah uses loads of enthusiasm and emotion, and he asks the simple questions that everyone wants to ask.
“When young interviewers try to copy our styles, they’re not thinking about why we have these styles. The reason why is because these are the styles that make us the most comfortable in our seats. And when we are the most comfortable in our seats, our guests are the most comfortable in their seats—and that’s what makes for the best interviews.
The secret is: there is no secret
Bill Gates
figure out your opponent’s fears, then use them to your advantage.
The best-negotiating tactic is to build a genuine, trusting relationship. If you’re an unknown entrepreneur and the person you’re dealing with isn’t invested in you, why would he or she even do business with you? But on the other hand, if the person is your mentor or friend, you might not even need to negotiate.
Always stay an intern -Pitbull
It’s about humbling yourself enough to learn, even when you’re at the top of your game. It’s about knowing that the moment you get comfortable being an executive is the moment you begin to fail. It’s about realizing that, if you want to continue being Mufasa, at the same time you have to keep being Simba.
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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