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.
On the lot, he would approach Hollywood stars and studio executives and ask them to lunch. Spielberg snuck onto soundstages and sat in editing rooms, soaking up as much information as he could. Here was a kid who had been rejected from film school, so in my eyes, this was his way of taking his education into his own hands.
“I’d also not end with something like, ‘Thanks in advance!’ It’s annoying and entitled. Do the opposite and say, ‘I know you’re super busy, so if you can’t respond, I totally understand.’
Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
“In China,” he said, “if you wanted to go to the United States, you had to take two tests. The fees to take them were sixty dollars. My salary each month, I think, was equivalent to seven dollars.”
“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.”
The best cure for nervousness is immediate action.”
Bite off more than you can chew. You can figure out how to chew later.”
I’ve learned that you have to go for it, even if there’s a chance you’ll fail. The planets are never going to perfectly align. When you see an opportunity, it’s up to you to jump.”
“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.
“Success,” he added, “is a result of prioritizing your desires.”
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.
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.
He applied to Columbia University because he knew Benjamin Graham, the Wall Street legend known as the father of value investing, taught there. Buffett got into Columbia, took Graham’s class, and eventually Graham became his mentor.
Buffett is famous for being a long-term value investor and this story shows he treated his career the same way. He could’ve gotten a high-paying job right out of school and made far more money in the short term. But by offering to work for free under Graham, he set himself up to make much more in the long term. Instead of trying to get paid as much as possible in dollars, Buffett chose to get paid in mentorship, expertise, and connections.
“One path leads to a linear life, the other an exponential.”
“The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” —THOMAS EDISON
Cal explained that it’s still a human being making the hiring decision. Only after looking you in the eye can someone get a sense if you’re genuine. You may be using the same words in an email, but it’s a different experience in person. “People like human beings,” Cal said. “People don’t like random names in their inbox.”
“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.”
Behind the nerdy glasses and magazine covers, there’s the boy who read the entire World Book Encyclopedia at age nine. At thirteen, his hero wasn’t a rock star or basketball player, but the French emperor Napoléon. One night at dinnertime he hadn’t left his room, so his mom yelled, “Bill, what are you doing?” “I’m thinking!” he shouted. “You’re thinking?” “Yes, Mom, I’m thinking. Have you ever tried thinking?”
On the other hand, he used his computer skills to help his high school automate the class schedules—and rigged the system to put himself in the classes with the best-looking girls. Now, that’s relatable.
The man the media portrays as an awkward, uncool geek was famous in college for staying up hours past midnight playing high-stakes poker. In his twenties, he blew off steam by sneaking onto construction sites in the middle of the night and racing bulldozers across the dirt. While he was starting Microsoft, he would take breaks from coding by climbing into his Porsche, flooring the gas pedal, and racing on the highway.
Gates wanted to be paid in something more valuable than cash: strategic positioning. It’s better to make a fair deal today that sets you up for more deals down the road than a great deal that doesn’t set you up for anything. The takeaway was clear: choose long-term positioning over short-term profits.
“A tipping point only appears in hindsight,”
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.
“Bingo,” Wozniak said. “I’m happy because I do what I want every day.”
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.
At the time, it seemed obvious Jobs would be the company’s CEO, but it wasn’t clear where Wozniak would fit in on the executive team. Jobs asked him what position he wanted. Wozniak knew that managing people and dealing with corporate politics were the last things he wanted to do. So he told Jobs he wanted his position capped at engineer. “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?”
Leading up to the public offering, Wozniak found out that Jobs had refused stock options to some of Apple’s earliest employees. To Wozniak, these people were family. They helped build the company. But Jobs refused to budge. So Wozniak took it upon himself and gifted some of his own shares to the early employees, so they all could share in the financial rewards. On the day the company went public, those early employees became millionaires.
Though in all that time, Pitbull stressed, he never did any cocaine himself. He saw how it affected his parents and didn’t want that for his own life. Now that he’d “graduated” and survived the world of drug dealing, it was time for level two of his video game: becoming the biggest rapper in Miami.
The look in Pitbull’s eyes made me feel like he wasn’t kidding. A part of me couldn’t believe it—here’s one of the most famous musicians in the world, who can headline Madison Square Garden, yet he seems dead serious about fetching coffee for Carlos Slim Jr. Our conversation continued and Pitbull kept tapping on the idea of being an intern in life. He said that while he can now walk around record labels like a king, the following day he’ll be walking through the halls of Apple or Google taking notes. It’s that duality that makes him, him. And that’s when I realized Pitbull’s key to continued success: it’s about always staying an intern.
What defines Maya Angelou is how she turned darkness into light. She channeled her experiences into works of art that made waves in American culture. She became a singer, dancer, writer, poet, professor, film director, and civil rights activist, working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She wrote more than twenty books, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings spoke so directly to the soul of readers that Oprah Winfrey has said: “Meeting Maya on those pages was like meeting myself in full. For the first time, as a young black girl, my experience was validated.” Angelou won two Grammy Awards and was the second poet in American history, preceded only by Robert Frost, to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration.
‘Every storm runs out of rain.’ I’d make a sign of that if I were you. Put that on your writing pad. No matter how dull and seemingly unpromising life is right now, it’s going to change. It’s going to be better. But you have to keep working.”
Many celebrities create businesses that are a reflection of their lives on the mountaintop. They create fragrances or clothing lines, but Alba created a business that’s a reflection of her lowest point. She tapped into her humanity. She created something that resonates with all people. That was her key to ascending her second mountaintop: to first go back down to her deepest valley.
“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.”
I already knew he’d been nominated for more Grammy Awards than any other music producer in history. I knew he’d produced Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the highest-grossing album of all time, as well as “We Are the World,” the highest-grossing single of all time. He’d worked with some of the greatest performers of the twentieth century, from Frank Sinatra to Paul McCartney to Ray Charles. In the world of film, he produced The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg, which was nominated for ten Oscars. In television, he created The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which was nominated for an Emmy. As a mentor, he helped launch the careers of Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey. Quincy Jones is undeniably one of the most important figures in the history of entertainment,
All great art is emotional architecture.”)
I’d always seen success and failure as opposites, but now I could see they were just different results of the same thing—trying. I swore to myself that from now on I would be unattached to succeeding, and unattached to failing. Instead, I would be attached to trying, to growing.
At a critical moment in the story, Dumbledore says, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Sugar Ray
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.
It’s that mindset of possibility that transformed my life. Because when you change what you believe is possible, you change what becomes possible.
my focus was on gathering the wisdom of the greats so their hindsight could be my generation’s foresight.
I’ve learned that while you can give someone all the best knowledge and tools in the world, sometimes their life can still feel stuck. But if you can change what someone believes is possible, their life will never be the same. I dream of a future where more and more people are given that gift of possibility, no matter who they are or where they were born.