The third door 

An orange-colored book was sticking out: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It was the book Brandon had given me. I grabbed it and stretched out on the floor. As I turned to the first page, it felt like Tim Ferriss was talking just to me. His words sucked me in so deeply that I didn’t lift my head for the next hour except to reach for a pen to mark my favorite parts.The opening scene was of Tim Ferriss competing in the Tango World Championships.The next page had Ferriss racing motorcycles in Europe, kickboxing in Thailand, and scuba diving off a private island in Panama.

Two pages later I discovered a line that almost made me scream “yes!” out loud: “If you picked up this book, chances are that you don’t want to sit behind a desk until you are 62.”

Chapter two was called “The Rules That Change the Rules.”Chapter three was about conquering fear.Chapter four had a passage so powerful it felt like Tim Ferriss whacked my “what do I want to do with my life?” crisis with a wooden bat:“What do you want?” is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about it.“What are your goals?” is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork. To rephrase the question, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture…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.

Three pages after that was an entire section titled “How to Get George Bush Sr. or the CEO of Google on the Phone.”

Thank you, God!I went to Tim Ferriss’ website and saw he’d written a second book. I bought it immediately. If The 4-Hour Workweek was about hacking your career then The 4-Hour Body was about hacking your health. I flipped to a chapter called “The Slow-Carb Diet: How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.” It sounded as if it were written by a snake-oil salesman, but Ferriss had used his body like a human guinea pig to prove it worked, so what did I have to lose? The answer: a lot—a lot of weight. Following his instructions, I shed forty pounds over the course of the summer. Bye-bye,Fatty Banayan. My family was shocked and jumped headfirst on the Tim Ferriss bandwagon too. My dad lost twenty pounds; my mom, fifty pounds; my cousin, sixty.

We were just a few of the millions of people following Tim Ferriss online, reading his every blog post and liking his every tweet. The Internet had changed the world, and a new world needs new teachers. Tim Ferriss was that guy.

His name was now at the top of my list, and The 4-Hour Workweek gave me just the clue on how to reach him.He began thinking about time. Particularly, the amount of time he felt he wasted in bed. He was sleeping eight hours a night, but then he realized that one thing in life doesn’t change: whether you’re a rice farmer or the president of the United States, you only get twenty-four hours in a day.

“In some ways,” Qi said, “you can say God is fair to everybody. The question is: Will you use God’s gift the best you possibly can?”Qi Time seemed like a fanatical, even unhealthy lifestyle. But when I thought about it through the lens of Qi’s circumstances, I saw it less as a quirky experiment and more as a means of survival. Think about it. With so many brilliant college students in China, how else could Qi have found an edge to break through? 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. “Luck is like a bus,” he told me. “If you miss one, there’s always the next one. But if you’re not prepared, you won’t be able to jump on.” I realized Qi Time wasn’t just about sleeping less. It was about sacrifice—sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term gain. In just eight years at Yahoo, Qi became an executive vice president, overseeing more than three thousand engineers.“You may have the heart—you keep fighting, you keep fighting, you keep fighting—but your mind is saying, ‘Man, forget this. I don’t need this.’ The head and the heart aren’t going together; but they have to go together. It all has to connect. Everything has to connect to reach that level, that pinnacle.“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.“When I saw in the letter that you’re nineteen, I remembered how I felt when I was your age. I was eager. I was excited. I was hungry. I wanted that gold medal more than anything. And when I look at you”—he paused and stepped toward me, pointing his finger at my face—“don’t let anybody take that away from you.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Dream Mentor

My story is that I’m a nineteen-year-old who is writing a book with the hope of changing the dynamic of my generation. The book will feature some of the world’s most successful people and will focus on what they were doing early on in their careers to get to where they are today. I’m truly humbled by the people who have already jumped on board for this mission—from Microsoft president Qi Lu to author Tim Ferriss. I’m determined to combine the greats from the older generation along with the new generation, and integrate their wisdom and practical advice into one book that changes people’s lives. Like you say, “make no small plans” “Rule number one: Never use your phone in a meeting. I don’t care if you’re just taking notes. Using your phone makes you look like a chump. Always carry a pen in your pocket. The more digital the world gets, the more impressive it is to use a pen. And anyway, if you’re in a meeting, it’s just rude to be on your phone.“Rule number two: Act like you belong. Walk into a room like you’ve been there before. Don’t gawk over celebrities. Be cool. Be calm. And never, ever ask someone for a picture. If you want to be treated like a peer, you need to act like one. Fans ask for pictures. Peers shake hands.

“Speaking of pictures, rule number three: Mystery makes history. When you’re doing cool shit, don’t post pictures of it on Facebook. No one actually changing the world posts everything they do online. Keep people guessing what you’re up to. Plus, the people you’re going to impress by posting things online aren’t the people you should care about impressing.

“Now, rule number four,” he said, slowly stressing each word, “this rule is the most important. If you break it”—he moved his hand across his neck in a slicing motion—“you’re done.

“If you break my trust, you’re finished. Never, ever go back on your word. If I tell you something in confidence, you need to be a vault. What goes in does not come out. This goes for your relationships relationships with everyone from this day forward. If you act like a vault, people will treat you like a vault. It will take years to build your reputation, but seconds to ruin it. Understood?“Understood.”“Good.” He stood up and looked down at me. “Get up.” “But I thought you said there were five rules?”

“Uh, oh yeah. Here’s a last one: Adventures only happen to the adventurous.”Elliott’s meeting began and I found myself sitting with my forearms on my knees, listening more intently than I ever had to a professor in class.Elliott continued walking. “You see that guy over there,” he whispered to me. “That’s Larry Page, the CEO of Google. That guy to your left is Reid Hoffman. He’s the founder of LinkedIn. Now look over there. The table in the far back—the guy with the glasses, he created Gmail. On your right, in the blue running shorts, that’s Chad. He’s the cofounder of YouTube.” “Elliott said he’d text me when I land.“He’ll text you when you land? You are insane! I don’t have the energy for this. You’re not going.”“Mom, I’ve thought it through. Worst-case scenario is he ditches me. I’ll just book a return ticket and I’ll have wasted my Price Is Right money. But the best-case scenario is maybe he’ll become my mentor.”

“No. The worst-case is he doesn’t ditch you, and once you’re with him, you don’t know what he pressures you to do, you don’t know where he takes you, you don’t know what kind of people he hangs out with—” “The point of this story is less about throwing money around and more about personal investing,” Elliott told me. “You have to make a calculated judgment that the amount of money you’re going to put in is going to either pay off way bigger in the long term or enough in the short term to offset your costs. Aside from the money you live on, the rest is your money to play the game.” “You see, most people live a linear life,” he continued. “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.” Dan reached for his notebook, ripped out two sheets of paper, and handed them to me.

“I worked for Warren Buffett for seven years,” he said, “and out of everything he’s taught me, this was his greatest piece of advice.”

I pulled a pen out of my pocket.

“On the first sheet of paper,” Dan said, “write a list of twenty-five things you want to accomplish in the next twelve months.”

I wrote things related to my family, health, working with Elliott, working on the mission, places I wanted to travel, and books I wanted to read.“If you could only do five of those things in the next three months,” Dan said, “which would you choose?”I circled them. Dan told me to copy those five things onto the second sheet of paper, and then cross them off the first.

“You now have two lists,” he said. “On top of the list of five, write: ‘The Priority List.’ ”

I scribbled it across.

“All right,” he said. “Now over the list of twenty, write: ‘The Avoidance List.’ ”

“Huh?”

“That’s Mr. Buffett’s secret,” Dan said. “The key to accomplishing your top five priorities is to avoid the other twenty.”

I looked at my list of five. Then at my list of twenty.

“I see your point,” I said. “But there are things on that Avoidance List that I really want to do.”

“You have a choice,” Dan said. “You can be good at those twenty-five things or you can be world-class at the five. Most people have so many things they want to do that they never do a single thing well. If I’ve learned one thing from Mr. Buffett, it’s that the Avoidance List is the secret to being world-class.“Success,” he added, “is a result of prioritizing your desires.” Ever since I’d been on my dorm room bed, I’d been obsessed with studying the paths of successfulsuccessful people, and while that’s a good approach to learning, I couldn’t solve every problem that way. I couldn’t copy and paste other people’s playbooks and expect it to work exactly the same for me. Their playbook worked for them because it was their playbook. It played to their strengths and their circumstances. Not once had I ever looked within myself and wondered about my strengths or my circumstances. What did it mean to out-Alex someone? While there’s a time for studying what’s worked for other people, there are moments when you have to go all in on what makes you unique. And in order to do that, you have to know what makes you, you.

Late that night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept tossing under the covers, thinking about the story Brandon had told me.You can’t out-Amazon Amazon…Screw it. I have nothing to lose.

I grabbed my laptop and began writing her an email. But instead of saying the same thing I did to all the other agents, I just wrote about why I believed in the mission. I told her I was sick of the publishing industry and tired of playing games. I told her my story and then, for paragraph after paragraph, told her how I thought the two of us could change the world together. In the subject line, I wrote “my 3 a.m. stream of consciousness,”

and as I reread the email, it felt like a teenage love letter, but I sent it anyway.

I didn’t expect a response. A day later, she replied.“Call me.”

I did, and she offered to be my agent on the spot.

Elliott had taught me you can either be someone’s friend or a fan, but never both. So I tried to play it cool,“Well, there are a lot of tactics you can use,” Tony told him. “But I can’t tell you which ones would be most effective until I know what your motivations are for writing the book. What are your end goals?”

Aasif’s forehead furrowed.

“Most people never take the time to ask themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing,” Tony said. “And even when they do, most people lie to themselves.“Like for Delivering Happiness, I’m aware that deep down, there was definitely some vanity and ego at play. It’s nice to go to your mom and dad and tell them your book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So that was one motivation. Another was…”

ego at play. It’s nice to go to your mom and dad and tell them your book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So that was one motivation. Another was…” “Ego isn’t particularly healthy,” Tony continued, “but what’s worse is having it and lying to yourself that you don’t. Before you start thinking about marketing tactics, become self-aware of what’s motivating you below the surface. Don’t judge the motivations as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Just ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. Choosing the right tactics becomes easy once you know your end goal.”

Tony explained that just because there was some vanity in wanting to write a bestseller, it didn’t diminish his other motivations of wanting to inspire young entrepreneurs or teaching people how to create a strong company culture. Those desires coexisted. And there it was, on page fifty-two.

The summer before Mark Zuckerberg’s junior year of college, he was in Palo Alto working on a couple side projects, one of which was a website called TheFacebook. It had launched seven months earlier. Later that summer, Zuckerberg pulled his mentor Sean Parker aside and asked for advice.

“Do you think this thing is really going to last?” Zuckerberg asked. “Is it a fad? Is it going to go away?”

Even when Facebook had nearly 200,000 users, Zuckerberg had doubts about its future. I sensed I was onto something, but I wasn’t sure what.

I took out my laptop to dig deeper. After spending hours on YouTube watching interviews of Zuckerberg, I finally found one that shed more light. Weeks before his junior year, Zuckerberg met with venture capitalist Peter Thiel to raise money for Facebook. When Thiel asked if he was going to drop out of school, Zuckerberg said no. He planned to head back for his junior year.

Right before classes began, Zuckerberg’s cofounder and classmate Dustin Moskovitz figured out a more practical approach. “You know,” Moskovitz said to him, “we’re getting to have a lot of users, we have an increasing number of servers,we have no operations guy—this is really hard. I don’t think we can do this and take a full course load. Why don’t we take one term off and just try to get it under control, so that way we can go back for spring semester?”

So that’s what Elliott was talking about. Ever since I’d watched The Social Network, I’d thought of Zuckerberg as a rebel who dropped out of school, threw his middle finger to the sky, and never looked back. The film never showed Zuckerberg doubting Facebook’s future. It never showed him cautiously debating taking one semester off.For years I’d seen headlines that read “Dropout Mark Zuckerberg” and naturally assumed his decision to leave college was clear-cut. Headlines and movies make things seem black and white. But now I was realizing: the truth is never black and white. It’s gray. It’s all gray.

If you want the whole story, you have to dig deeper. You can’t rely on headlines or tweets. Gray doesn’t fit in 140 characters.

I grabbed a book on Bill Gates, and on page ninety-three, there it was again.

Gates didn’t impulsively drop out of college either. He took just one semester off during junior year to work full-time on Microsoft. And when momentum for the company didn’t fully pick up, Gates went back to college. Again, no one talks about that. It wasn’t until the following year that Gates took another semester off, and then another, as Microsoft grew.

Maybe the hardest part about taking a risk isn’t whether to take it, it’s when to take it. It’s never clear how much momentum is enough to justify

leaving school. It’s never clear when it’s the right time to quit your job. 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.

Although the idea of dropping out of USC altogether didn’t sit well with me, staying enrolled and taking one semester off sounded perfect. I drove to campus, spoke to my academic adviser, and she handed me a bright green form that said “USC Leave of Absence,” which gave me a seven-year window to return to classes at any point.I ran off to tell my parents the good news.

“No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon

uncommon in American business…So I do more reading and thinking, and make fewer impulse decisions than most people in business.”

I’d never known much about finance and hadn’t thought I had a passion for it, but there was something about the way Buffett explained it that completely drew me in.

“I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.”“The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything—you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you’re a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, ‘Swing, you bum!’ ”“I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”

As soon as I got off the phone, I printed out ten quotes and plastered them across the storage closet walls.

The third door 

As soon as I got off the phone, I printed out ten quotes and plastered them across the storage closet walls.

“Persistence—it’s a cliché, but it happens to work. The person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down!” JERRY WEINTRAUB

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

—THOMAS EDISON

“You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.”

—BABE RUTH

“My success is based on persistence, not luck.”

—ESTÉE LAUDER

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

“We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.”

HELEN KELLER

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.”

—CALVIN COOLIDGE

“If you don’t think you can deal with this amount of uncertainty and failure,” he continued, “then wait for Lewis and Clark to deliver the map and you can be one of those people who does a good job following their lead. But if you want to be one of those people who do what these innovators did, be prepared, like they did, to fail and get frostbite and have people not make it. If you’re not prepared for that stuff, that’s okay: don’t do it. There is plenty of room in the world for other people. But if you do want to do it—if you want to go off and do really big things—be prepared for them to take way longer than you thought, cost way more than you expected, and be full of failures that are painful, embarrassing, and frustrating. If it’s not going to kill you, keep trudging through the mud.”“Let’s say I’m going through that mud,” I said. “Could you at least give me a few tips or a checklist on how to find the right frogs to kiss?”“Okay,” Kamen said. “Here’s a big one: it’s better to prove it can’t be done than to exhaust the infinite number of ways to fail.”

He explained that when he’s kissed a lot of frogs but hasn’t made progress, he steps back and asks whether what he’s doing is actually impossible. Does it contradict the laws of thermodynamics, Newtonian physics, or some other fundamental principle?

“It’s good to know when you’re wasting your time,” Kamen said. “If you can convince yourself that a problem can’t be solved, you can quit without feeling like a coward.”Reporters interview Buffett all the time. Of course it’s possible.

“If you keep kissing frogs,” he continued, “and you keep getting nothing but similar results, there needs to be a point where you say, ‘I’m not going to count on luck. I’m not going to keep buying lottery tickets.’ Although I always say ‘tenacity is great’ and ‘don’t be a coward’—brute force is just plain dumb.“Sure, there may be billions of frogs, but sometimes I’ll notice there are only ten different kinds of frogs. So that’s a good second tip: you should kiss one of these, one of those—but don’t try to kiss every possible frog. First figure out how many kinds of frogs there are and then see if you can kiss one of each kind.”He told me a story about the lack of science and technology education in American public schools. Most people claimed it was an education crisis, so they tried to solve it in the same old ways—updating curriculum, hiring more teachers—but nothing seemed to work. Kamen wondered what would happen if they asked the question differently. What if this wasn’t an education crisis, but a culture crisis? As soon as he reframed the problem, new frogs appeared. Kamen decided to create a competition called FIRST, which treats scientists like celebrities and turns high school engineering He said that the best way to raise money before you have a track record is to do it from people who already believe in you and trust you, because they’ve seen you do other things in the past. Those people can be family, friends, college professors, former bosses, or even the parents of your friends.

“It’s hard to do when you’re young,” Munger added, “and that’s why people start so small.”“All right,” he said. “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,” Larry added. “There’s no trick to being yourself.” I shared with him what I thought, and before I knew it he was telling me the entire story of how he started TED. He enthralled me with story after story and I felt like I’d broken the wisdom piñata and was trying to stuff as many nuggets into my pocket as possible.

“You want to know the secret to changing the world? Stop trying to change it. Do great work and let your work change the world.”

“You won’t get anywhere significant in life until you come to the epiphany that you know nothing. You’re still too cocky. You think you can learn anything. You think you can speed up the process.”“How does one become successful? You’ll get the same answer if you ask that to any other older, wiser, wwiserwiand more successful person: you have to want to do it very, very badly.”

“I don’t understand why people give speeches with slides. When you speak with slides, you become a caption. Never be a caption.”

“I live my life by two mantras. One: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And two: most things don’t work out.”“It’s not about the names,” I repeated. “It’s not about the interviews. It’s about, well, I just believe that if all these leaders come together for one purpose—not to promote anything, not for press, but really, just to come together to share their wisdom with the next generation, I believe young people could do so much more—”

“All right,” he said, slicing his hand up. “I’ve heard enough…”My whole body tensed.

He looked at me, swung his hand down, and said, “…We’re in!” For me, a single lesson stood out among the rest. Although his talent for coding was remarkable, none of this would have happened if Gates hadn’t pushed through his fears in his dorm room, picked up the phone, and called MITS. It was his ability to do the hard, uncomfortable thing that made this opportunity possible. The potential to unlock your future is in your hands—but first you have to pick up the damn phone.During the IBM negotiation, Gates knew he had to keep Microsoft’s source code secret, yet he also knew he couldn’t tell IBM not to take the source code because that was the very thing it was buying. Gates figured out what IBM was scared of—a major lawsuit—and used that to form a strategy. In the contract, he insisted on unlimited liability if IBM accidentally disclosed the source code. That meant if any employee even unknowingly leaked the code, Microsoft could sue IBM for perhaps billions. That scared IBM’s attorneys so much that the company chose not to even take the source code, which is exactly what Gates wanted. The lesson: figure out your opponent’s fears, then use them to your advantage. Gates told me to ask for their advice, spend as much informal time with them as possible, and get them to take me under their wing. I can see now that Gates was essentially telling me to stop worrying about the BuzzFeed tricks. 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.It was the last thing I expected to hear from the business world’s chess grandmaster. I thought he’d share battle-tested secrets, but instead he was telling me to befriend my opponent so I wouldn’t have to battle.“Dude, that’s the story of my life. They’re called bullshit no’s. I get them a thousand times a week. You just have to build a pipeline so when you get a bullshit no from one person, there’s still thirty others to work on.All the people I’d interviewed treated life, business, and success the same way. In my eyes, it was like getting into a nightclub. There are always three ways in.

“There’s the First Door,” I told Matt, “the main entrance, where the line curves around the block. That’s where ninety-nine percent of people wait around, hoping to get in.

“Then there’s the Second Door, the VIP entrance. That’s where the billionaires, celebrities, and the people born into it slip through.”

Matt nodded.

“School and society make you feel like those are the only two ways in. But over the past few years, I’ve realized 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—”He told me that he met Steve Jobs in 1971, just a few miles from where we were sitting. Jobs was in high school and Wozniak was in college. A mutual friend of theirs named Bill Fernandez introduced them. The moment they met, Wozniak and Jobs hit it off and spent hours sitting on a sidewalk, laughing and sharing stories about pranks they’d pulled.“When I was a kid,” Wozniak said, “I had two goals for my life. The first was to create something with engineering that changes the world. The second was to live life on my own terms.

“Most people do things because that’s what society tells them they should do. But if you stop and do the math—if you actually think for yourself—you’ll realize there’s a better way to do things.”

“Is that why you’re so happy?” I asked.

“Bingo,” Wozniak said. “I’m happy because I do what I want every day.”

“Oh,” his wife said, laughing, “he does exactly what he wants.”

I was curious about the difference between Wozniak and Steve Jobs, so I asked what it was like founding Apple when it was just the two of them. Wozniak shared a handful of stories, but what stood out most were the ones that made it clear how different their values were.

One story took place before Apple was formed. Jobs was working at Atari and was assigned to create a video game. He knew Wozniak was a better engineer, so he made a deal: if Wozniak would create the game, they would split the seven-hundred-dollar pay. Wozniak was grateful for the opportunity and built the game. As soon as Jobs got paid, he gave his friend the three hundred and fifty dollars he had promised. Ten years later, Wozniak learned that Jobs hadn’t been paid seven hundred dollars for the game, but rather thousands of dollars. When the story broke in the news, Steve Jobs denied it, but even the CEO of Atari claimed it was true. “Society tells you that success is getting the most powerful position possible,” Wozniak said. “But I asked myself: Is that what would make me happiest?”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.My sisters boiled down their questions into four obstacles. The first was how to deal with darkness. There’s an expression Maya Angelou coined called “rainbow in the clouds.” The idea is that when everything in your life is dark and cloudy, and there’s no hope in sight, the greatest feeling is when you find a rainbow in your cloud. So I asked Angelou, “When someone is young and just starting out on their journey, and she or he needs help finding that rainbow, in mustering the courage to keep going, what advice do you have?” “Take as much as you can from those who went before you,” she added. “Those are the rainbows in your clouds. Whether they knew your name, or would never see your face, whatever they’ve done, it’s been for you.”Angelou once wrote, “Nothing so frightens me as writing, but nothing so satisfies me.” When I had shared that quote with my sisters, they’d said it resonated with them. The third obstacle was dealing with criticism. In Angelou’s autobiography, she wrote about joining a writer’s guild. She read aloud a piece she’d written and the group ripped it apart. “You wrote that it pushed you to acknowledge that if you wanted to write,” I said, “you had to develop a level of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.” “It was hard,” Angelou said, “but I knew I could do it. That’s what you have to do. You have to know that you have certain natural skills, and that you can learn others, so you can try some things. You can try for better jobs. You can try for a higher position. And if you seem assured, somehow your assurance makes those around you feel assured. ‘Oh, here she comes, she knows what she’s doing!’ Well, the thing is that you’re going to the library late at night and cramming and planning while everybody does their thing. “Try to get out of the box,” she said. “Try to see that Taoism, the Chinese religion, works very well for the Chinese, so it may also work for you. Find all the wisdom that you can find. Find Confucius; find Aristotle; look at Martin Luther King; read Cesar Chávez; read. Read and say, ‘Oh, these are human beings just like me. Okay, this may not work for me, but I think I can use one portion of this.’ You see?

“Don’t narrow your life down. I’m eighty-five and I’m just getting started! Life is going to be short, no matter how long it is. You don’t have much time. Go to work.”As time passed, I became even more grateful for this conversation, because if I’d waited much longer it wouldn’t have happened. Almost exactly a year after this phone call, Maya Angelou passed away.“If you try to go it as a lone wolf, if you’re just angry and fighting the system the whole time, no one is going to want to be around you because you’re always going to be mad, fighting the good fight. But if you can run the race with grace, dignity, and integrity, it makes it a lot easier to get to the finish line.

“Nobody is in control of who they are when they’re born,” she continued. “You’re born into the family you’re born into and you’re born into the circumstances you’re born into. So you just have to take what you can from where you’re at and not compare yourself to other people. You have to look at your path and know that whatever got you there, and where you’re going, is unique to you. You weren’t supposed to be any other way.

“And it’s so easy to get distracted,” she added. “The man in the left lane is still going to get to his finish line. He doesn’t care. He may look over at you in the beginning, but then he’s off. If you’re constantly looking over your shoulder at him, you’ll never finish your race. And you know what? The obstacles women face just make for better businesses. Because in the end, we know how to deal with some shit. This man in the cartoon won’t be equipped, because you really only learn if you’ve gone through it.”“I like that,” she said. “It’s so true. My cofounders and I always say here that it’s tough to find job candidates who are intelligent and focused, but who are also dreamers. The dreamer part is that entrepreneurial spirit—where if this door is closed and that door is closed and that door is closed—how the hell are you going to get in? You just need to figure it out. You need to use common sense, build relationships; I don’t care how you get in, but you’ve got to get in somehow.”

“So you literally hire based on the Third Door?” I asked, laughing.“Yes! I don’t care where you got your degree. I don’t care about your past work experience. I care about how you solve problems. I care about how you take on challenges. How do you create new ways of doing things? It’s about having that hustle, that drive. That’s everything when it comes to the best people here. It’s all about the Third Door.”

As I stared out of the airplane’s window, watching clouds floating below, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this Gaga experience came to be. In a way, it just seemed like a series of little decisions. Years ago, I chose to cold-email Elliott Bisnow. Then I chose to go to Europe with him. I chose to go to that concert in New York City where Elliott introduced me to Matt. Then I chose to spend time visiting Matt’s home and building a relationship with him.As my thoughts continued to unfold, a quote came to mind, from a seemingly unexpected source. It was from one of the Harry Potter books.At a critical moment in the story, Dumbledore says, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

It’s our choices…far more than our abilities…

I thought back to my conversations with Qi Lu and Sugar Ray Leonard. The message of that quote was the underlying lesson I learned during those interviews. While Qi Lu and Sugar Ray were both born with remarkable abilities, what made them stand out in my eyes were their choices. Qi Time was a choice. Chasing the school bus was a choice.Different images began coming to mind, rolling in front of my eyes like a slide show. When Bill Gates sat in his dorm room, pushing through his fear and picking up that phone to make his first sale, that was a choice. When Steven Spielberg jumped off the Universal Studios tour bus, that was a choice. When Jane Goodall worked multiple jobs to save money to travel to Africa, that was a choice.

Everyone has the power to make little choices that can alter their lives forever. You can either choose to give in to inertia and 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. We all have that choice.

If there was one lesson I learned from my journey, it’s that making these choices was possible. It’s that mindset of possibility that transformed my life. Because when you change what you believe is possible, you change what becomes possible.

The plane’s wheels hit the ground in Los Angeles. I carried my duffel bag and made my way through the terminal, feeling a gentle calm I’d never known before.