AUGUST 3, 2024

3 Crazy Mistakes Made Him Interview Billionaires

READ TIME - 5 MINUTES

Alex Banayan made some huge mistakes.

The falls that followed were hard. Yet, for his book "The Third Door," he has interviewed dozens of the most successful people on the planet. Because he gave himself the grace to understand that failure was a beautiful, natural part of the journey. Every setback is an opportunity to learn. The ultimate goal is that, when you look back, you have learned more often than you have failed.

Now, I cannot make the learning process any less painful for you.

But I can tell you Alex's mistakes so you can steal his lessons without scraping your knees.

For those who can’t place the name, Alex Banayan is the youngest bestselling business author in American history. His book “The Third Door” chronicles the seven-year quest to uncover the definitive mindset of exponential growth and success. Alex’s research led him to interview the most innovative leaders of the past half-century, including Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, Larry King, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Jessica Alba, Quincy Jones, and more.

Tim Ferriss Mistake

At 18 years old Alex didn’t have much empathy for the people he was reaching out to.

In his quest to uncover how the world’s most successful people launched their career he emailed Tim Ferriss. He wanted to know how Tim went from being unemployed and fresh out of college to befriending VIPs and CEOs using a “secret cold-email template”.

But Tim never replied. His dumb 18-year-old brain came up with the idea of sending a second email, and then another one, and then another one. And finally, he said yes at the 32nd email. Alex thought he cracked the code of cold outreach until years later when he discovered the truth. The only reason he succeeded is that Tim called a common friend to tell him how annoyed he was at him. But the person on that phone call vouched for Alex so hard that he was able to turn Tim around.

As Alex likes to say: “You can be an idiot. Everyone starts out as sort of an idiot. The beauty is that you’re allowed to make 99 mistakes if you’re learning from them. And that’s what separates a beginners from an experts.”

All you can do is take rejections and mistakes as a form of data to swing the bat a bit better the next time.

The Mark Zuckerberg Mistakes

Lots of experience (and an M.A. in Empathy) later. Alex emails Mark Zuckerberg.

He was speaking at an event in two weeks and he really wanted to meet him. With no response the day before he emailed the person who introduced him and asked if it was too persistent to send another message to Mark. The answer was, “What are you talking about? Mark replied to you a week ago.”

Sweating, Alex went straight to the spam folder.

• Viagra
• Viagra
• Re: Mark Zuckerberg
• Viagra
• Viagra

Even Gmail thought it was impossible for Mark Zuckerberg to actually reply!

The CEO of Facebook has been flagged as spam. In the email he was very nice, didn’t have much time, but he was happy to meet him backstage, so the meeting was confirmed.

He rolled up to the event proudly waving a printed copy of the email from Mark to show it to security. Neither security nor Mark’s team had any record of this guy on Mark’s schedule, and they claimed the email was clearly photoshopped. Alex started begging them so badly, telling them that that was a real email. Finally they said, “If you don’t leave now, we’re going to call the police.” He blew the entire meeting with Zuckerberg.

When he told his friend what had happened, he replied that he could call him to tell Mark what was going on. But Alex was so afraid of being too persistent.

He completely dropped the ball and blew the game.

It was one of those situations where you just beat yourself up morning after morning after morning replaying what happened. Until you finally give up. From my perspective, though, I can say that he’s done a pretty good job over the years.

That’s because the bridge from failing nine times out of ten to becoming the greatest creator of all time is called making mistakes.

So when you’re doubting or beating yourself up, just remember this.

You’re doing fine. It takes longer than you know, just keep going.

The Warren Buffett Mistake

Life is all about persistence.

If you knock on a door and no one answers, you knock again. And if the door still won't open, you break the whole thing down. Which means that the first step to becoming who you really want to be in life is to accept the fact that you have to knock on a door a hundred times.

But sometimes you can knock on a door so many times that you dig yourself into a hole so deep that even Bill Gates can pull you out.

After six months of straight rejections in trying to interview Warren Buffett, finally the lights of hope.

His assistant, worn out by this persistence, gives Alex tickets to the annual shareholders meeting. Alex knows that during the conference, there's a Q&A session where people in the audience can ask Mr. Buffett questions. It was the chance of a lifetime.

He went there with six friends, but as soon as they got there, he realized they had no plan. Six guys in hoodies among grown-ups in suits and briefcases, pushing and shoving. He started asking questions to people who work there to see if he could find a loophole to this lottery and interview Warren Buffett. Even though their chances were one in a thousand, four of them got the chance to ask a question. And that's what we asked the question to Warren Buffett in front of 30,000 people.

The only problem is that Warren Buffett is a pretty smart guy. And when my friend got to the microphone, he started to figure out what was going on.

Just like that, he shut down the whole shareholder meeting.

As life happens, Alex ended up getting an interview with Bill Gates a month later in a completely different way.

At the end, he pulls out a very long list of names. The chief of staff looks at it and says, "Oh, this is easy. Bill and Warren are best friends. We'll take care of it tomorrow. No big deal." A week later, he received an email from Bill Gates’s office saying, "Dear Alex, please do not contact Warren's office again. At that moment, he realized that not only was the answer no, but he had been blacklisted.

Every business book talks about persistence, but none of them mentions the dangers of over-persistence. The problem is that persistence is not about knocking on one door a hundred times.

It's about knocking on a hundred different doors.

See you next week!
Ricc

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