The Third Door
Alex Banayan · 2018
At eighteen, Alex Banayan set out to learn how the world's most successful people launched their careers. His years-long quest to reach icons like Bill Gates and Maya Angelou, and even his failed pursuit of Warren Buffett, reveals the Third Door: the unconventional way in that the rest of us never see.
Success is never a single line at the front door, there's always an unmarked third way in, and this book is a 19-year-old's obsessive, funny, and hard-won field guide to finding it.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Third Door pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Banayan's central image is a nightclub with three entrances. The **First Door** is the main line where 99% of people wait, hoping to get noticed. The **Second Door** is the VIP entrance for the born-rich and famous. But there's always a **Third Door**, you jump out of line, sneak down the alley, bang on a window, slip through the kitchen. Successful people almost always took the Third Door.
- Don't just set a goal, turn it into a **quest**. Inspired by Tim Ferriss and structured on Joseph Campbell's **Hero's Journey**, Banayan reframed 'interview successful people' into an epic mission, which gave the tedious rejections and dead ends a narrative meaning that kept him going.
The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Nightclub With Three Doors
- Spinning the Wheel: The Price Is Right
- Turning a Goal Into a Quest
- Finding Your Elliott: Mentors and the Hustle
- Getting an Inside Man
- The Buffett Failure and the Abyss
- Bill Gates's Own Third Door
- Maya Angelou and the Real Lesson
- There's Always a Third Door
Finish The Third Door tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
More on career & skills
-
To Sell Is Human Daniel H. Pink Whatever your job title, you spend most of your day trying to move other people, this book teaches you how to do it well without… -
What Got You Here Won't Get You There Marshall Goldsmith The higher you climb, the more your success depends not on adding skills but on subtracting the interpersonal habits that quietly… -
Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson A ten-minute parable that hands you a vocabulary for change so you can spot your own fear before it costs you the career you were… -
Women Don't Ask Linda Babcock & Sara Laschever It turned the throwaway line "she just didn't ask" into a measurable force behind the pay gap, and handed women the data, the… -
Work Rules! Laszlo Bock Google's former head of People Operations opens the company's playbook to prove that treating employees with radical trust and… -
A Whole New Mind Daniel H. Pink A field guide to the career skills that survive automation and outsourcing, the ones no algorithm and no cheaper competitor can…