The Science of Success Podcast

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Achieving What You Think Is Impossible - Walking The Walk with Alex Banayan

Lace Gilger
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Do you want to figure out why you’re not walking the talk? In this episode we uncover the truth about what really holds people back - and share the the secret strategy that all successful people use to achieve incredible things. We examine the world’s most successful people and figure out exactly what commonalities they share, and how you can use them in your own life. All of this and much more in our interview with returning guest Alex Banayan. 

Alex Banayan is the best-selling author of The Third Door, which chronicles his five-year quest to track down the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers. He has been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list and Business Insider’s “Most Powerful People Under 30.” He has been featured in major media including Fortune, Forbes, Businessweek, Billboard, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and much more!

  • The lessons from a crazy seven year story of attempting to interview the world’s top performers

  • All super successful people treat life the SAME way. 

  • What’s the “third door” and how can you open it to achieve anything you want in life?

  • There’s ALWAYS a third door. ALWAYS. 

  • Shared quest to understand why people succeed- and even more specifically than that - understand the Inflection Point in their career - not what they do when they are super successful - but what they did to GET super successful 

  • Why do most people NOT achieve their dreams?

  • People are focused on fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of abandonment

  • There are so many psychological factors that imprison people from achieving their dreams. 

  • Everyone focuses on the EXTERNAL factors to success, but the biggest thing everyone misses are the INTERNAL factors.

  • Studying success through three different prisms:

  • The world’s top achievers

  • People who are interested in success (readers, self help enthusiasts, etc)

  • Alex’s personal journey

  • One of the biggest things that unite all the different perspectives on success. 

  • The BIGGEST REASON most people never achieve their dreams has NOTHING to do with how hard it is to execute on that dream. The reason most people don’t achieve their dreams is because they’re afraid to get out of line. They’re afraid to get uncomfortable. 

  • There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors compelling you to stay where you are. 

  • People grossly over-estimate the difficulty of executing their dreams, and grossly underestimate the importance of the psychological side.

  • What is your conscious object of desire?

  • Every good story involves a subconscious object of desire, which only reveals itself through the actions of the protagonist.

  • What does the food say to you when you’re eating it?

  • If you say you want something and you’re doing something else - ask yourself - when you do that thing - ask yourself what is it SAYING to you? That helps you key into your subconscious desire.

  • Invite the parts of yourself that have been hiding in the shadows to step forward. 

  • When you sit your fears down you can befriend them. 

  • When the conscious and subconscious conflict - the subconscious wins

  • The “bible” of storytelling

  • “What a character says is their personality, what they do (especially in moments of pressure) is who they are.”

  • Writing and storytelling with a “Grip.” Grab the chapter by the lapel, sit it down, point a finger in it’s face and say “listen up.”

  • If there is no conflict in the story, then you did not write a story. Many times conflict is not external its internal. 

  • The way you connect with a human being is through storytelling - it’s one of the most important communication skills 

  • Never use an adverb when telling a story. Don’t use that many adjectives either. Use more specific verbs or a more vivid description. Focus on nouns and actions. 

  • Keep your punctuation super simple. Clear writing uses commas and periods, that’s it. Everything beyond that is extraneous ornamentation. 

  • Every sentence is like a restaurant. The same is true of every paragraph, chapter, and book. 

  • The first word is the maitre d'

  • Every part of that sentence is a different course in the meal

  • The final word is the dessert. 

  • The difference between “Do you love me?” and “Is it me you love?”

  • What is the best way to get over what’s holding you back and take action on your dreams?

  • Anyone with a big enough WHY will find the HOW. 

  • Homework: If you don’t know what your passion or your path is, but you want to get started, take the “30 Day Challenge.” Buy a notebook, write “30 day challenge” on the front. Every day for the next 30 days you have to journal about the same 3 questions. It has to be 30 consecutive days, it can’t be spread out over several months. Pick the same time of day and consistently do it:

  • What filled me with enthusiasm today?

  • What drained me of energy today? 

  • What did I learn about myself today?

  • The magic happens on the last few days

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

Do you want to figure out why you're not walking the talk? In this episode, we uncover the truth about what really holds people back and share the secret strategy that nearly all successful people use to achieve incredible things. We examine the world's most successful people and figure out exactly what commonalities they share and how you can apply them to your own life; all of this and much more in our interview with returning guest, Alex Banayan.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life.

If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we shared how a college dropout went from waiting tables to becoming the owner of a major league soccer team and the most powerful venture capitalist in the healthcare industry. We uncovered the incredible strategy that can be used to break into any industry and become a dominant player, sharing the stage with top CEOs, even without any connections or relationships. We shared why you don't have to be an expert to leverage the credibility of others, talked about the power of public speaking and what it means to orchestrate a deal and much more with our previous guest, Marcus Whitney. If you want an inside scoop at what it really takes to achieve success, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Alex.

[0:02:18.1] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest returning back to the show, Alex Banayan. Alex is the best-selling author of The Third Door, which chronicled his five-year quest to track down the world's most successful people and uncover how they broke through and launched their careers. He's been named to Forbes 30 under 30, Business Insider's most powerful people under 30 and he's been featured in major media outlets across the globe from Fortune, to Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, MSNBC and much more. Alex, welcome back to the Science of Success.

[0:02:48.6] AB: Thank you so much. Feels good to be back.

[0:02:51.8] MB: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show. Your journey and your story from Third Door was so hilarious, made you laugh, it made you cry. We got into a lot of the details around that in the first interview and some of these ridiculous stories. For anybody who's excited about this conversation and wants to go back and you haven't listened to the first interview with Alex, I recommend doing that. Alex, for people who are just tuning in and haven't caught the first one, give us a short summary of this epic journey, which I know is quite challenging to do.

[0:03:25.3] AB: I appreciate that. It's very kind of you to say. You never had to really bring it down to a short version. On the surface, this is a wild seven-year journey to track down the world's most successful people and figure out how they broke through and launched their careers. This is my journey of researching and interviewing people to find what is that definitive mindset for success. Then the subtext of this narrative, you read the book, is that it's also this coming-of-age story and the search for belonging and the search for understanding, what the meaning of life is.

The book covers all industries for business. I spoke to Bill Gates, music; Lady Gaga, science; Jane Goodall, poetry; Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Jessica Alba, Larry King, Steve Wozniak, Tim Ferriss. That's been this unbelievable journey filled with surprising lessons at every turn. When I had started this journey, there was no part of me looking for that “one key to success.” We've all seen those business books, or those TED Talks. Normally, I just roll my eyes.

What ended up happening over this seven-year journey, I realized that every single one of these people treats life and business as success the exact same way. The analogy that came to me, because I was 21 at the time is that it's like getting into a nightclub. There's always three ways in. There is the first door, the main entrance where the line curves around the block and that's where 99% of people wait around hoping to get in. That's where you're standing out in the cold, holding your resume, hoping the bouncer lets you in. That's the first door

Then there's the second door, the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities go through. School and society have this way of making you feel like those are the only two ways in. What I've learned is that there's always, always the third door. It's the entrance where you jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, go through the kitchen, there's always a way in.

It doesn't matter if that's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software, or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest director of Hollywood history, they all took the third door. That's not only the title and the thesis of the book, that's really the energy I'm trying to inject into the next generation.

[0:05:56.9] MB: It's such a powerful message. Again, we won't get into the details, but the stories from this journey were absolutely mind-blowing, of a college kid trying to track down Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Lady Gaga and all of these world-changing icons.

[0:06:12.6] AB: Yes. Yes. If you're looking for a book with the bullet points on success, it's not this. This is much more wild adventure stories, with lessons throughout. Yeah. There's the story of chasing there coming through the grocery store, hacking Warren Buffett's shareholders meeting with a 30,000 people, spending four days with Lady Gaga in Austin, Texas, hacking the price is right. There's definitely a lot of preposterous adventures in there.

[0:06:40.7] MB: They’re laugh-out-loud, funny and heartwarming and sad and make you laugh and cry. The thing that really piqued my interest beyond the great narrative was this shared quest that I think we both have, which is trying to understand what makes people succeed, but even more specifically than that, because there's a lot of things about that, one of the things that – maybe one of the biggest things that I've been interested in my entire life is understanding that inflection point, or trying to figure out not what Bill Gates did when he was 50 and he was already a type of industry, because so many biographies focus on all of that stuff, I want to know what did they do to become successful, not what did they do once they were already successful.

[0:07:29.4] AB: That is the exact reason why I wrote this book. It's because I was searching for a book that focused on just that. Eventually, I was left empty-handed. Exactly what you just said is the heart of the beginning of this journey.

[0:07:47.6] MB: That's why I love what you're working on, because it's something that to me, there's no books about it and nobody talks about it. You're lucky in a biography of an eminent achiever, if you get 20 pages on –

[0:08:00.4] AB: Oh, my God.

[0:08:01.5] MB: - the critical time in their life.

[0:08:03.6] AB: That is 20-page. It's normally 2 to 10 pages.

[0:08:07.9] MB: Yeah. It might be a paragraph sometimes.

[0:08:10.8] AB: Because this is the thing, when you're Bill Gates, or Spielberg, or Buffett, people want to hear about all the sexy stuff. When Bill Gates did the first Windows launch. No one wants to hear about – well, a biographer probably doesn't think that people want to hear about him making cold calls and getting hung up on, but that to me is the most interesting part.

[0:08:36.2] MB: I totally agree, because I'm obsessed with the question of how can I, or anybody apply these lessons and take some morsel that's actually applicable to my life. If I'm not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a lot of these later game strategies don't necessarily work. There have to be nuggets. You said something earlier that really resonated with me that I think so many people miss is that there's a commonality to the perspective that a lot of these achievers have, but even more important than that is that there's always and you repeated yourself and said, always twice, always a way in.

[0:09:18.3] AB: If I had to summarize the entire energy of The Third Door in one sentence it would be, there's always a way.

[0:09:28.4] MB: So many people miss that and get stuck thinking that there's some barrier, there's something holding them back. In the pre-show, you made a great comment talking about how you've been touring all around the globe, doing book tours and launching the book and yet, the question, the number one question that you get from people in the audience is often nothing to do with the breakthroughs in these achievers’ careers, but it was something else entirely. Tell me a little bit about that.

[0:10:01.5] AB: It's been a really exciting year, because last year the real focus was on the US book tour. This year, I was very lucky to be able to go on this international tour. We did book launches in China and Japan and Korea and Bulgaria and Italy and Spain and Canada. It's been this really remarkable journey and what I've been surprised by. This actually is true again, even on the US book tour last year too, which is you would think, or I would think and I wrote this book that really talks about the world's most successful people and the people coming to these book signings would want to ask questions, how did Bill Gates do this? How did Spielberg do that?

What I've been shocked by is that 90% of the questions I've been getting in countries all around the world have a much different focus. The focus of 90% of the questions I hear have much more to do with people's fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of being abandoned by the people they love. If they go out and achieve their dream, if they go out to pursue their dream, there are so many psychological factors that imprison people, whether they're aware of it or not, that are the biggest reasons people don't go after to achieve their dream.

It's almost this hidden underbelly of success. When we normally talk about success, we're achieving a dream, you talk about the external factors. Well, how did you start the company? How do you raise capital? How do you manage? How do you operationalize all these external factors? What I've learned not only through my research writing this book, but also just seeing the readers’ responses, is that it's the internal factors, the internal reasons people don't achieve a dream, that not only are the most critical to the journey, but also are the most pressing on people's minds right now.

[0:12:09.3] MB: I've noticed the same thing. In many ways, that's again, our journeys and visions are so similar, because I've – the whole project of the Science of Success is all about trying to help people overcome and even recognize those internal barriers. Tell me a little bit more about that phenomenon and how you've learned to deal with it and what you've seen from studying the Warren Buffetts and the Lady Gagas of the world and how they think about it.

[0:12:40.4] AB: Yeah. I've been lucky when it comes to and I'm sure you've – I would imagine you've had a similar vantage point. When it comes to studying success, I've been doing it for about nine years now, very intentionally focusing on cracking this puzzle. I have had three different groups that I am able to study success through a prism. One is and the most obvious one is the world's most successful people.

Interviewing Bill Gates and studying Buffett, that's being one group. The second group, that's been more recent the past year or so is seeing the responses of readers who have read the book, meeting people at speaking engagements and they think they're asking me questions, but I'm actually studying their questions as data for my larger curiosity. That's another group.

A third vantage point that I have is my own personal journey. I started this process when I was an 18-year-old unknown college freshman from my dorm room. It wasn't intentional, but it was almost this meta experience of I'm studying success of how people launched their careers, at the same time trying to launch my own career and going through the process myself. If I've learned one thing that unites all three of these vantage points, it's that the reason most people do not achieve their dream, the biggest reason most people don't even attempt their dream has nothing to do with how hard it is to execute on that dream.

If we go back to the third or analogy, the reason most people don't achieve their dream is not because how hard it is to run down the alley, bang on the door, crack open a window. That's not the reason most people don't achieve a dream. The reason most people don't is because of their fear of leaving the line for the first door. If you think about it, that line for the first door is probably where you were born, where all your family is, where your family expects you to be, where your friends are, where that line for the first door is on the sidewalk, where it's clean and well-lit, there's a bouncer there that keeps things safe. Probably, that's where you've been sustained your whole life too.

Doesn't matter if you're happy, or not happy. If you're lucky enough to have food on your table, it's probably because of where your current situation is. There are dozens, if not hundreds of factors compelling you to stay in that line. I think people grossly overestimate how hard it is to run down that alley and find the third door. Look, it's hard. I am the last person to tell you that it's easy, but it is possible. The reason most people don't do it is because of their fear of leaving the line for the first door.

[0:15:35.5] MB: Such a great point. Even this idea that people grossly overestimate the difficulty of the actual execution piece, not to say that it's easy.

[0:15:45.9] AB: Look, it's hard. Yeah, it is really – You will be feeling at times you're bleeding from your eyeballs level hard, but it's still easier than most people think. I wouldn’t say it’s easier. I would say more doable.

[0:16:00.3] MB: I think that's a great refrain.

[0:16:02.1] AB: Yeah, it's not easier it. It's more possible.

[0:16:05.5] MB: Yet, everyone's focus is on the execution, the action and they don't focus on the –

[0:16:12.8] AB: It’s a safer excuse.

[0:16:14.1] MB: Yup, exactly.

[0:16:14.9] AB: It’s a safer excuse. I'm not going to knock anyone for doing this, because look, even – forget about achieving your giant dream, let's even talk about, let's say you want to be healthier. Let's pull something out of my closet of shame. Being healthier, working out more. I'm a great case study in thinking how hard and how much lifestyle changes I'd have to make to really dial in my health and work out every day and eat perfectly.

No, no. I know what to do. I've read the books. I know exactly what to do. I've done it before in the past. I know what to do. I know how to do it. The truth is yeah, I have that fear of discomfort, that fear of changing my habits. It's just easier to talk about how monumental of a task it is than it is to admit all the reasons you subconsciously don't want to do it.

[0:17:09.4] MB: Fitness is such a great example, only for the fact that it's so simple.

[0:17:14.7] AB: Right. It's not rocket science on how to lose weight literally. The science is there. Again, there are exceptions. Some people have thyroid, or stuff. For the most part, for the average person, it's the food you eat and your level of activity, but most people don't do it.

[0:17:36.3] MB: It's absolutely right.

[0:17:36.9] AB: Yeah. I'll raise my hand there too sometimes.

[0:17:39.2] MB: Oh, for sure. It's just such a great prism to understand that problem, because it's so simple. Business, or success in any more complex endeavor –

[0:17:48.9] AB: Right. There's more external factors.

[0:17:51.2] MB: There’s so many things, there's so many different factors –

[0:17:53.4] AB: Finding and luck and opportunity and resources. Right, fitness is a much more – oh, and you want to think a level deeper. What I've been learning recently is that when it comes to success, or when it comes to any journey that you take in life, whether it be a relationship journey, a personal development journey, familial journey, there is the conscious and I was learning this in a storytelling workshop I went to. There is the conscious object of desire, right? Let's boil it down to fitness, or we can even use the third door as an example.

In the third door, my conscious object of desire is I want to learn how to succeed. The conscious object of desire is if you pull aside the main character of this story, third door, it's me, but in everyone's life it's themselves. Everyone is the main character of their own personal life, right? If you pull that main character aside and you ask the main character, “What do you want the most?” The conscious object of desire is the answer that comes out of their mouth.

However, every good story and I've learned this very recently, every good story also has a sub-conscious object of desire, which only reveals itself through the actions of the protagonist. If you ask someone what is your object of desire? They say, again hypothetically, “I want to be healthier.” Then the camera cuts to 2:00 in the morning and they're eating hamburger and fries. All of a sudden, the viewer of that movie of your life knows that something isn't aligned. Trying to figure out what your subconscious object of desires in real-time is extremely hard and why most people don't do it.

[0:19:42.8] MB: Only through action can you start to reveal what it is.

[0:19:47.3] AB: Correct. That's why therapy and journaling is so useful, because you're reflecting on your actions and your decisions, not on your – this storytelling workshop I went to, the professor, instructor said something really interesting. He said, the conscious is simply PR for the subconscious mind, which I guess is that's a very Freudian thing to say, which is you have subconscious desires that your conscious mind rationalizes. It makes excuses for.

Yeah, I’ll use myself as an example. There are times where I eat in a disordered manner, that probably isn't the most beneficial for my health at times. Yeah, I even feel shame, even just talking about it right now, but it's my reality. My sister actually said something really interesting. She asked me. She said, “What does the food say to you when you're eating it?” Never thought of it in those terms, but I instantly knew the answer. It says, “I'm here for you.” That told me and realize that in times of stress and again, it's not every day, but there are times in times of stress where my subconscious object of desire is comfort and acceptance. It's not being healthy.

Being healthy is my conscious object of desire, but what I really want is that comfort and acceptance. Then food, since my childhood has been something that's been a reliable source of that. Welcome to the Alex Banayan shame program. You’re here now and we’ll take the first one.

[0:21:19.0] MB: No, that’s so interesting. We don't have to keep going down the food rabbit hole, but the question of what does it say to you when you're eating it, that's really interesting. I have to think about that. So many people and I include myself in this absolutely, that desire for love, acceptance, the feeling of being enough, that's one of the – if you really boil down limiting beliefs and the primary psychological motivators, that has to be one of if not the most prominent, or predominant. People may achieve that end in vastly different ways, but that desire of wanting to be accepted from an evolutionary standpoint is even baked into us in many ways.

[0:21:58.9] AB: Right. It's a thing that any listener right now, if you want to try to figure out why you're not walking the talk, right? Let's say you want to start a company, but for some reason you instead are spending all your time posting on Instagram. I don’t know. This is hypothetical. Okay, great. Instead of judging yourself and being harsh on yourself and beating yourself up, why don't you pull back the layers? A good question to ask yourself is okay, I say I want one thing, but I'm doing something else. Let's say that something else is posting on Instagram.

Ask yourself, “When I post on Instagram and I see those likes, what are the likes saying to me?” That answer is probably a clue to what your subconscious desire is on this quest. The key that I've been learning is it's hard to practice, easy to say, which is instead of judging yourself, just look at yourself with clear eyes and invite those parts of yourself that you've been hiding in the shadows to step forward. Because it's when you sit your insecurities down at the dinner table, when you sit your fears down, that you can befriend them and only then can you as a whole person walk forward in a single direction.

[0:23:17.7] MB: Such a powerful phrase. Very young Jungian of you. This is such an important point and extrapolating that question beyond just the food, for example. Anytime that there's a disconnect between what you want and what you're actually doing, figuring out why is this other activity meeting your needs, or serving you in some way.

[0:23:38.8] AB: Right. Because it is.

[0:23:40.2] MB: It has to be.

[0:23:40.7] AB: You probably aren't doing things that you don't want to do. Now look, people might say, “Well, that makes no sense. I know alcohol is bad for me. Why do I keep drinking every night?” Because it's giving you something that you subconsciously want, whether you know it or not. I don't say that in a judgmental way at all. Sometimes alcohol gives people exactly what they want, just associating from the reality. Actually, the list stops right there. The list stops right there.

Sometimes maybe you can make some stuff. I'll have a couple glasses of wine a night, because it feels good and it's a social lubricant for me. Yeah. If you have any destructive habits in your life that you can't understand why you keep doing it, there is actually a reason that your subconscious likes, which is why you're doing it. The human brain does what feels good to it, even if consciously that thing is causing chaos in your life.

[0:24:39.4] MB: One of the reasons why on the show I talk so much about the subconscious, about limiting beliefs, etc., is because when the conscious and the subconscious conflict, the subconscious always wins.

[0:24:51.7] AB: Oh, yeah. That's every good story.

[0:24:53.4] MB: Interesting. I never thought about it from the narrative standpoint.

[0:24:56.2] AB: Well, a narrative is just storytelling is the way human beings understand our life in our world. It works both ways. If you want to be a good storyteller, you should understand how humanity works and the human psyche works. If you understand how the human psyche works, it's also very helpful to understand a good storytelling, because they're just mirrors of each other. Every great movie is a great movie because it actually speaks deeply to the human experience. If didn't resonate, people would say, “That was a psycho two hours. That meant nothing to me,” right?

Even the world's craziest sci-fi movies, it resonates because we're human beings and something about it felt right. The best characters are the complex characters, where they say, “I have no heart. I am ruthless. If you cross me, I'll cut off your head.” Then in the movie, someone they love crosses them and they reach for the gun, their hands shakes and they walk away.” Their conscious desires that they're this tough person, no mercy. Their subconscious desire is they want family and loyalty and belonging.

Aristotle in his book Poetics, says that what a character says is their – how does he put it? He puts in a perfect way. I highly recommend anyone who's into storytelling to read Aristotle's Poetics. Aaron Sorkin recommends it as his bible, his favorite book. What Aristotle says is that what a character says is their personality, what a character – dang, I'm paraphrasing. Or what a character does is who they are. What a character says is their personality of how they want to be seen by the world, but what they do in moments of pressure is who they are

[0:27:00.3] MB: The most epic and life-changing thing that we've ever done at the Science of Success is about to happen. We're launching a live, in-person intensive just for you. This will be an intimate two-day deep dive in-person with me, where we will go over all the biggest lessons and greatest life-changing insights that I've personally pulled from years of interviewing the world's top experts on the Science of Success, and show you exactly how to specifically apply them towards exponentially achieving the goals that you have for your own life and business.

You'll learn how to influence anyone, 10X your productivity, overcome procrastination and overwhelm and so much more. Bring your own unique challenges, goals and desires and get highly specific tailored feedback and a playbook for exactly what you need to do to achieve your biggest goals.

Here's the thing, we're only going to have 15 spots available for this intensive. That's 15. 15 spots. If we sell out super-fast, we might do a second intensive, but this is priced so that I can spend intimate one-on-one time with every single person who attends. This event is going to be here in Nashville on January 27th and 28th. Get more details and reserve your seat before we sell out at success-podcast.com/live. That's success podcast.com/live. I can’t wait to see you here in Nashville.

[0:28:39.3] MB: You’re obviously a fantastic storyteller. The book, the stories from that are incredible, even in this conversation, I get that sense from you. Where did you and how did you learn how to tell compelling stories?

[0:28:58.0] AB: Well, there are two questions; where did it come from originally and where did I learn how to hone it, are two different sources.

[0:29:04.8] MB: Tell me both.

[0:29:06.0] AB: Well, the first question where did it come from, I was actually meeting with a rabbi who I really admired. She's this wonderful writer. Her name is Naomi Levy. She wrote this book called Einstein and the Rabbi. She was telling me this philosophy that talent, you don't own it when you're born. You don't own your talents, you don't own your skills. This is a spiritual philosophy. The idea is that they are like this flickering flame inside of you. Anyone who's been around a child for long enough, you see like oh, that –

I was actually at a coffee this morning and I just saw this kid who's three-years-old in the coffee shop and he just had this spark in his eyes and was just performing for anyone who would look at him; making funny faces, being silly, climbing on the railings. I'm like, he's either going to be the world's best performer, or sales. He just has it in his eyes. What this rabbi’s theory is that you don't own that. The spirit is inside of you. It's only through practice and dedication and hard work do you transfer that ownership to yourself, because we've all seen people in their 20s, or 30s, or 40s who never let that fire grow. They neglected it for so long, that just left them.

Now answering your question of where it came from, when I was a little kid, when I was I think two-years-old, or three-years-old, I physically couldn't – my mom was very worried about me, because I couldn't put words together into a sentence. I could say a couple words here and there, but I couldn't form sentences as a kid. My mother and grandmother used to cry at night very worried about me.

One time my family went to Disneyland and I'm three years old or something like that. Again, I don't remember this story. This is my mom's story that she tells me. I watched this play by – the goofy was in this play at Disneyland, one of those shows they have. I loved it so much. When I came back home to my grandmother, I wanted to tell her everything about the show, about this play, this goofy play, but I didn't know how to put words together. According to my mother, I spent the next 30 minutes acting out every scene of this play for my grandmother. I'm being all the characters and acting it all out. That's where that rabbi’s philosophy of the fire is in you.

Again, if I just stopped there, I wouldn't be a writer. I actually didn't become a real writer, or storyteller in my opinion, until the journey of The Third Door, where I had to learn how to write narrative. While I did have some storytelling instincts – That's actually a really good way to put it. You might have some instincts, that's a tangible word to use. You might be born with certain instincts. Maya Angelou, when I interviewed her for The Third Door says, some people might be born with a certain ear four notes, or they might be born with a certain eye for lighting, or what-have-you, or a certain brain for numbers, but that's about it.

At the end of the day, it's how much you hone it. I met a mentor by the name of Cal Fussman, which I know you know. Cal really taught me how to write. For three, almost four years, we would sit together for two to three hours every night for about three days a week and I would come show him my most recent draft and he would tear it apart and taught me to do it again. Very much like a Mr. Miyagi relationship, wax on, wax off.

Look, Cal is a good enough writer. He could have told me exactly what to do. Just do this, do this. He's a master storyteller, master writer. but I'm very lucky in hindsight that he had the patience and the heart to show me how to hone that skill. Since then, it's the skill that I – one of them that I cherish the most in my life.

[0:33:37.7] MB: What are some of the biggest lessons that you learned from Cal and some of the –

[0:33:41.3] AB: God bless you for asking that question, because as soon as I stop talking, I really want to pay homage to Cal right there. Okay, now look. At some point in my life, I owe it to the world to do a something of what Cal Fussman taught me. Because it's not fair that I'm the only recipient of his good, gracious gift of his teachings. Because look, he's not a professor, he's a practitioner, he's a best-selling, author, writer, speaker, podcaster. He's out there in the world. He's not sitting down teaching classes. Do you want the big ideas, or do you want the nitty-gritty, little stuff? Because there's years of teachings in there.

[0:34:28.9] MB: Let's start with the big stuff and then maybe share one or two nitty-gritty tactics.

[0:34:32.2] AB: Okay. Big stuff. Big stuff. Okay, I'll tell you two big stuff that made no sense to me when he first tried to teach me them and it took me years to understand. I have no idea if this will land with people who hear it or not, but I'll say it anyways. Two big stuff. The first big thing, again, and it's so – Cal speaks in code. I used to show him a chapter, a draft of a chapter, and you have to understand, the Bill Gates chapter in the book I edited a 134 times before my publisher even sighed. There were a lot of edits.

Sometimes I'll show Cal a draft and he would say, “Ah, this draft is underwater. Bring it to the surface.” Then he would send me home. That was what my mentorship with Cal was like. One thing that he would try to teach me is something called grip, or that's Cal’s word. Having a grip. Good writing has a grip and I'll give you an example. Here, I'll literally, I have the book right in front of me. I'll open to a random chapter.

Okay, here's a chapter called The Impostor, which is about my journey to meet with Mark Zuckerberg. A chapter that a way I used to try to write when I was just starting out would be say something like, it was a beautiful sun shining day when I got an e-mail, something like that trying to make it a nice story and starting it like that. Cal said that that is the most and I'm summarizing years of his teaching. He would say that would be the most immature and timid way to write. The reader knows and can smell your insecurity and will have no respect. Now he doesn't use these kinds of words, but that was my take away of what he was saying.

What Cal is saying is that you want to grip the words, grip the chapter, literally grab it by the lapel, sit it down, point a finger and then say, “Listen up, that's what having a grip is.” Here's the start of the imposter chapter. The founder of TED had told me, “I live my life by two mantras. One, if you don't ask, you don't get. Two, most things don't work out.” Now I had just made my most far-fetched ask yet and I was working up better than I could have imagined.

The way that chapter starts is essentially saying, “Listen up, this is important and you're going to want to know where this goes.” Now that took me years to try to understand, but that's one thing Cal taught me.

Another thing that Cal taught me is if there is no conflict in the story you just wrote, you did not write a story. You just recounted what happened. Again, these are my summaries of Cal’s lessons. He didn’t use these words exactly, but that's my takeaway. Which is I would show Cal a chapter in my book where I said everything that happened. I wrote the best of my memory, what happened in that interview, or in that adventure and Cal said, there's no conflict here.

What Cal would help me do is search through my memory and also peel back the layers and say, “Ah, this was the conflict. This was the conflict.” Many times, the conflict is not external, it’s internal. Matt, if you remember the interview with Bill Gates. It was a perfectly, cordial, beautiful interview.

Me sitting with Bill Gates for an hour and asking him questions. There is no conflict in that chapter. That's why it took 134 edits for me and Cal to come to the realization, there was a lot of conflict, but it was inside of my own head. That's what creates that narrative drive. Without conflict, there is no narrative drive. I would say those are two big overarching lessons I've learned from Cal Fussman. I owe it all to him.

[0:38:30.2] MB: There's so many different things I want to touch on. One, you shared some really good knowledge there, the two pieces of advice from the founder of TED;’ one, ask not, have not. I’m paraphrasing that a little bit. The second is most things don't work out. We touched on that and went deeper on that in our original interview.

For people who want to explore, those are two really important concepts and they work really well together and they can honestly create magic in your life if you pursue them and implement them.

Staying on this thread of storytelling, I think it's really important to understand the skill and the art of storytelling. To me, that's something that if you imbue your communication with a powerful story, it's a hundred or a thousand times more impactful than just reciting the facts. As somebody who's very rational, logical, cold, calculating thinker, it's something I personally struggle with and trying to communicate information to people. It's such a fascinating topic for me and one that I think really improves anyone's communication skills to master, even the fundamentals or some of the basics about storytelling.

[0:39:45.4] AB: Yeah. It's surprising. I do a lot of keynote speaking for different corporations. The obvious reason they bring me in is the main topics I talk about is really how do you find that exponential growth, exponential success through the third door.

What's been interesting just in this past year is I've been getting a lot more requests to do storytelling keynotes. Not just with marketing executives, but with sales teams, because so much of the sales process is how can you connect with that customer, connect to that account? The way you connect with the human being is through a story. Storytelling for business purposes and business growth is grossly overlooked and can be that competitive advantage that most companies are looking for.

[0:40:32.3] MB: I want one more tidbit from the storytelling thread. Tell me a tactic, or a nitty-gritty detail, or a lesson you learned about storytelling that has really been impactful for you and your work.

[0:40:44.7] AB: Well, I'll just make some simple stuff, which is do not ever use an adverb. These are little small things from Cal. Do not use adverbs. Do not use adverbs ever. Adjectives, don't use them that much either. It's much better to use a more specific verb, or a more vivid description. For example, he's had a charming smile. Charming is an adjective. I would write something like that and then Cal would say that is not how it's done. He would teach me different ways to write. He would say, here's an example, his smile lifted his eyebrows, or something along those lines where you can actually see what that smile look like. That's a warm open smile. Smile is lifting the eyebrows, that's warm and open.

Instead of using an adjective, using a verb in a description. He smiled that it lifted his eyebrows, so that's action. You really want to focus on nouns and action. When it comes to punctuation, you want to use as simple punctuation as possible. When I wrote, I really loved dashes, em dashes. Some people use a lot of parentheses, or a lot of semicolons, or whatever. A lot of people love to use ellipses.

There's a thing; clear writing uses commas, periods and question marks. Everything else, an exclamation point, a ellipses, a dash, a parentheses, those are – let's make a sports analogy. Let's say you're playing basketball. The comma, the question mark and the period is your dribble, your bounce pass, your free throw, your jump shot, right?

Everything else, your ellipses, your dash, the exclamation point is you're behind the back pass, it's your alley-oop, it's your half-court shot. If you do it once a game, which is pretty much saying once a chapter, you have style. That is a fun game to watch. If you are doing it at every play, which is pretty much saying in every paragraph, you're the most obnoxious amateur in the NBA.

What's harder when you’re writing is you don't normally just write a book in one sitting, you write a few paragraphs here, a few paragraphs there, so you might put in it an exclamation mark every time you sit down to write, maybe one a day. When you pull back, oh God, now there's three exclamation marks in this chapter, there's five or 10 dashes on this one page. That's where editing comes in. You want to tone it down. That's a trick on punctuation.

A final trick and again, all of these are tipping my hat to Cal Fussman. Cal says that every sentence is like a restaurant and the same is true of every paragraph being like a restaurant, every chapter is like a restaurant and every book is a restaurant, but we'll focus on the sentence. The first word is the maître d, welcoming you in. Every phrase, every part of that sentence separated by commas is a different course in the meal. Then the final word of that sentence is the desert.

I'll give you an example. Let's say, here, I'm literally going to just open the book to – sitting in front of me. I'll open to a random page. Here, this is from the chapter It's All Gray. Here's a random sentence; it doesn't even matter the context. Headlines and movies make things seem black and white. That sentence has no comma, no dash. It's a straight, clear sentence. That sentence is having some carrots and hummus. You dip a – exactly what you're getting, you're going straight through, there's no interruption, the waiter isn't bothering you, you get your food, you eat and you go. It is a clean experience.

Now if there is a sentence sometimes, but you want to have variety, because you don't want to eat a salad every day, or carrots and hummus every day, sometimes you want a six-course meal. Sometimes it's good to have a maître d that is a little rude. Starting a sentence with however, comma, boom, the maître d just told you excuse me, you don't have a reservation. Ending a sentence with the word, that's the main part of the main message. Let's say it's, do you love me? The heart of that sentence is me. Do you love me?

Now if you wrote that sentence, is it me you love? The main part of that sentence, the dessert is love. This is especially important with writing, because writing you're visually reading the words. The final word you read is the final word you read and it affects the experience a lot, even more so than oral storytelling. Because oral storytelling, you can rely on inflection points. Do you love me? Do you love me? With writing, it's visual. The last thing the person sees is the last thing they say.

[0:46:13.8] MB: Fascinating. I was curious how you're going to turn that sentence around and it does make a difference. It's really interesting. These are some fascinating tidbits about how to be a better storyteller, which are such important communication skills. I want to circle back to the earlier part of the conversation. We were talking about this idea of people being paralyzed by fear of using the analogy that you use in the book, not wanting to step out of line at the nightclub and run into the alleyway and try to pry open the third door.

The interesting thing that I've found beyond even the initial journey of stepping into discomfort and opening up opportunities and doing things that you're afraid of is that it's a challenge that never stops. Even once you're inside the nightclub, there's infinite opportunities that manifest themselves, that you can't even conceive of if you're still stuck in line and trying to figure out how to get in.

[0:47:16.7] AB: Right. Yeah, I totally agree.

[0:47:19.2] MB: What have you seen and what have you learned about how people can get past the internal factors that are holding them back, the fears that are holding them back from taking action on their dreams?

[0:47:35.6] AB: There's a lot of things that are very helpful. When I was starting out, I came from an immigrant family, so therapy is in the same category of taboo as cocaine. I wasn't ready to go there. Journaling was very safe. I could be in my dorm room and just journal every night and journaling was my way of trying to get some awareness of what I cared about, what I was passionate about, what I didn't like, what was sucking my soul. Talking to friends who were insightful is very helpful. Therapy has been a game changer for me. I go to therapy once a week now for six years. That's been really helpful.

What I'll say, if you want to specifically focus on why most people don't leave that line, if I had to sum it up, there's this famous anecdote of if I were to tell you, specifically if I looked you in the eyes and I said there is a burning building across the street right now, it's on fire, but there is a $5 on the third floor and first person who finds it gets it. Will you run across the street into that building? No. No one in their right mind would do that.

If I looked you in the eyes, I told you same building, same amount of flames on the third floor is the person you love most in this world, you wouldn't even have time to ask me where on the third floor that person is because you would already be running across the street. What that anecdote demonstrates about the human mind is that we tell ourselves the reason we're not going into that building is because of the size of the flames in the first example. “Oh, why would I want – Look at the flames, they’re so thick.” No, that's what we tell ourselves. The reality is we actually don't care enough about what's on the other side of the flames. This is the truth of the human experience, whether you like it or not, take it or leave it.

I didn't make the rules, but this is just how human beings act. The reality is and again, this isn't a novel concept. If you read Man's Search for Meaning, that's one of the big takeaways there. There's a very famous quote that says, anyone with a big enough why will find a how. When it comes to career success, most people who call it quits is because they didn't care enough about the thing on the other side enough, enough. They probably cared about it.

Look, there's all these stories of a financial company, where the second the market dips, all of the partners of the company jump ship to a different fund or something like that. Yeah, because they were in that fund for a quick buck. Then you hear these other stories of these startups, where they are TOMS shoes, Blake Mycoskie, had moments where he almost couldn't make payroll on the company, almost went under. You read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the company almost goes under so many times. These people had a reason larger than themselves. That was the reason to go through the flames.

[0:51:05.5] MB: Shoe Dog is such a great business biography, exactly for that reason. It's staggering how many times the entire company was on the line and almost didn't make it. When you look at Nike today, you see what a tremendous success it is. You don't –

[0:51:21.3] AB: It seems so obvious, right?

[0:51:22.7] MB: Yup, exactly.

[0:51:23.5] AB: In hindsight. Oh, well how can Nike not be famous? Michael and the shoes. Yeah.

[0:51:28.2] MB: You don’t see all the struggle and the challenges behind it. For someone who's been listening to this conversation, who wants to take action in some way to concretely implement something that we've talked about today, what would be a piece of homework, or an action item that you would give them to start taking action today?

[0:51:49.9] AB: Let's say you're in the place where – let's take it down to the lowest common denominator of let's say you don't even know what your passion, or your path is, but you know you want to get going. This could be any stage in life, you can be 16-years-old, you can be 60-years-old, and you want to find out what your subconscious desires are, you want to find out what your inner whisper is telling you.

For some reason if you can't find it, which is most people, myself included when I was starting out, and even times like this, whenever you're starting a new chapter in life, it's something that I call the 30-day challenge. It's called the 30-day challenge and this is what I tell people. Go out and get a brand new notebook, go to a pharmacy, a CVS, get a $1 notebook. Because first of all, the brain knows the difference between writing on a piece of scrap paper and writing on a brand new notebook.

Go get that new notebook and write on the cover, 30-day challenge. Get a sharpie, write on the cover 30-day challenge. This is what you're going to do, for 30 minutes every day and this is 30 consecutive days and I'm 30 days spread out over nine months. 30 consecutive days at the same time, whether that's in the morning, at night, find a time that you can commit, you're going to journal on three questions.

These are the three questions, ready? Number one, what filled me with enthusiasm today? What filled me with enthusiasm today? Now the question is not what made me happy, what made me excited. Now the question is what filled me with enthusiasm today? That's the first question. The second question is what drained me of energy today? What drained me of energy today? The third question, final question is what did I learn about myself today? What did I learn about myself today?

This is the key, if you start doing this after the first couple days, you're going to feel very good about yourself. You're going to be fired up, you're learning about yourself, you feel accomplished, you'll keep going. Then about day 12 and 13 and 14, yeah, you're going to not really remember why you were doing this in the first place. It's going to feel repetitive, you're not going to feel you're getting much out of it. By day 19, you're going to start thinking, “Alex is an idiot. This doesn't work.” If you keep going and you keep doing it, by day 28, 29 and 30, you start seeing this dim and flickering neon sign pointing you on the direction of your path and that's all you need.

[0:54:33.5] MB: Alex, where can listeners find you and the book and all of your work online?

[0:54:39.4] AB: I appreciate you asking. The book is available wherever people like to buy books, so whether that's Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or if you like audiobooks, I read the audiobook myself, so it's on Audible and iTunes. If you end up getting the book from this episode, definitely let me know on social media. My Instagram is @AlexBanayan. Let me know so I can say thank you.

[0:55:06.1] MB: One of the reasons that we had Alex back on the show to begin with is because he had such a great response from the listeners on the first interview. If you enjoyed this conversation, definitely reach out and say hi to Alex.

[0:55:18.5] AB: It would make me very happy.

[0:55:20.2] MB: Well Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show, for digging into all of this wisdom. Some fascinating insights about overcoming what's holding us back and how to be a better storyteller and how to put ourselves on the path towards our dreams.

[0:55:35.7] AB: Thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure being back. I hope we can do it again.

[0:55:40.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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