This week, Cory speaks to author and keynote speaker Alex Banayan. Banayan is the author of the highly anticipated book release of “The Third Door,” which covers a decade-long journey tracking down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, Steven Spielberg and dozens of the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.
The Third Door is available in bookstores everywhere, including Amazon, iBooks, Audible and thirddoorbook.com. In this week’s episode, Banayan talks about coming up with the idea for his book as a college student, funding his book by hacking The Price is Right, common traits of successful people, a 2-year journey of landing an interview with Bill Gates, and more.
As a pre-med student destined to become a doctor, Alex Banayan was miserable. “I was laying on this dorm room bed staring at these biology books, feeling like they were dementors sucking the life out of me.” Instead of his textbooks, Alex really wanted to read a book on how successful people got to where they are now. Since that book didn’t exist, the then 18-year-old set out to write it himself.
But before he could write the book of his dreams, he had to earn enough money to support himself while writing it. Instead of studying for his finals, Alex decided to test his luck on The Price is Right. The odds were against him even getting called down to compete on Price is Right, but Alex spent all night learning how to “hack” the show and beat the odds. “Sometimes statistics can be really misleading because they’re assuming that there are no ways to impact the variables,” said Alex. Alex impacted those variables and won prizes worth over $30,000. But this was just the first step of what became The Third Door.