I can't put the book down.
I don’t get why people don’t like reading, a great book is easy to read hard to write. Take "The Third Door" by Alex Banayan, for example.
"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 the line, down the alley, and take the Third Door. We all have that choice.”
This book is much more than its Third Door metaphor, which simplifies the message to: life, business, and success are like a nightclub, with a main entrance for the majority, a VIP entrance for the elite, and then, the third door. This third door represents the notion that no matter how challenging, there's always another way in.
It’s the first book ever I’ve read every single sentence in the acknowledgement and taken notes. No scene in this book is wasted; each sentence moves like a frame in a movie, capturing a critical 3-year journey from ages 18 to 21. This journey includes winning on The Price Is Right, sending countless cold emails that led to failure, and even an attempt to interview Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, Larry King, you name it. And you know, he made it.
It takes you on a wild ride, making you root for Banayan just as the audience in The Price Is Right did when he start his journey as a freshman at USC, reminding readers that there's always a chance to make things happen, even when the odds seem stacked against you.
Secretly, I hope he succeed too, because unintentionally I felt like he’s describing my life too, I’ve tried the Third Door million times, I reached out to people on LinkedIn, I cold emailed hiring managers with my cold emails with CV and cover letter.
The difference is no one has told me what to do at the age of 18 and there’s no hacking into The Price is Right in China, I’m also a women and a minority in this WEIRD world.
As a result, I’ve collected more failure and rejections than my peers would have. But I’m also lucky enough jump through the line and get to the front of the gate by pure naive optimism and the “nothing to lose” mentality.
All I knew was I had a direction, a vague dream about going to New York where all the dreams are made of (as they sing in the songs), I want to meet interesting and smart people. I want to see through their lens, how the world works and what’s possible, I wanted to go really far away, to see the world and go home and make my family proud.
More than 10 years after I first set foot in JFK airport, feeling lost and being dressed in the most ridiculous typical “students come from another country have no clue what’s going on fashion.”, have I made my family proud?
I have no answer to that, but I know if this life is a RPG game, I’ve tried my best to unlock each level of them, and hopefully the script writer can see it and hand me the key to the next level but also give me the strength and courage for me to fight it through.
“But if you can change what someone believes is possible, their life will never be the same.” Alex concluded.
To me, part of life itself, is to keep pushing our believes in the definition of “what’s possible” by creating the evidence against that by achieving the impossible.
We all hold the key to our lives to do that, rewrite the definition of possible for ourselves.
Unlock it.
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