The Third Door

FORBES #1 CAREER BOOK TO READ IN 2018 The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers. The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure—from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga—as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door. Life, business, success… it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that 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, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way in. 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 the Third Door.

Against all odds, Rye and Sonia have survived the perils behind the gold and silver Doors. But Weld is still under threat, and Rye knows what he has to do. One Door remains a mystery—the ancient wooden Door that he has been drawn to from the beginning. For good or ill, his desperate quest will end beyond that Door. All he has to do is dare to go through it…

A life strategy guide by the creator of the Spartan Race explains how the principles that bring about success in an extreme sports environment can help anyone achieve his or her full potential in life, business, and relationships.

From the founders of the acclaimed Summit event series and community comes the story of their unconventional journey to business success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. “[Make No Small Plans] neatly crystallizes the teachings and takeaways—basic truths—from the past fifteen years of Summiteering.”—Forbes In 2008, with no event production experience and two college degrees between the four of them, Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz became business partners and set out to build a global events company. With passion and tenacity, they began cold calling as many inspiring company founders as they could and tried to convince them to attend their first event. In the beginning, only nineteen people said yes. Since then, they have grown Summit into a global community with events all over the world, hosting luminaries including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Shonda Rhimes, Brené Brown, Kendrick Lamar, and Al Gore. In 2013, the Summit founders—with help from their behind-the-scenes co-founder and partner Ryan Begelman—acquired Powder Mountain, the largest ski resort in the United States, with a dream of building a mountaintop town of the future. In Make No Small Plans, they reveal the triumphs, mistakes, and cornerstone lessons from their journey, which began during the Great Recession and continues today. Alongside teachings from some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs of our time, the authors offer takeaways such as: • No idea should go unspoken. • Reputations are earned by the drop and lost by the bucket. • The road to success is always under construction. • Become a favor economy millionaire. Entertaining and empowering, Make No Small Plans shows that anyone can think big and—with a thirst for knowledge, a talented team, and a little humility—accomplish the impossible.

The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman: Tarry was devoid of pronounced African-American racial markings, and her interactions with white Americans were not characterized by fear or distrust, but when her own brown daughter was subjected to racial discrimination she wrote The Third Door in 1955 to tell America about the plight of her people.

After having rescued his eldest brother Dirk during a perilous voyage beyond the Golden Door, humble-but-heroic Rye returns to Weld with Dirk and his friends Sonia and Faene. Although the tyrant Olt has been overthrown, he was not the source of the marauding, dragon-like skimmers—and thus the threat to Weld remains. Rye has a strong feeling that his middle brother Sholto has chosen the Silver Door, and that this is where the skimmers really come from. As his visions of Dirk turned out to be true, he believes his visions of Sholto and the skimmers’ origins are true also. The Silver Door will lead Rye, Sonia and Dirk to bare, desolate places—the Saltings, the Scour—and strange, often desperate people locked in a struggle for survival. It will provide answers to some mysteries, while also giving them new ones to think about. And it will lead them into terrible danger, as the wider ramifications of Olt’s downfall become clear and an even more dangerous enemy rises to challenge them.

My book has three narrators: my birth mother, my adopted mother, and myself. It is the tale of two mothers and their connection to one child. One mother was shamed because she had a child and the other because she couldn't. I am one of 3,500 Greek orphans adopted to the U.S. in the 1950s. Conceived in an act of violence, I was born to an unwed mother who was exiled from her island home for 44 years. Homeless and seven months pregnant in a large mainland city, she could not care for me and lost me to foreign adoption. Raised in California, I returned to Greece when I was 30 where, through a series of life-changing events, I reconnected with my birth mother. Finally, as the orphaned child, I tell my story. Based on documents and oral histories given by both mothers, and my experiences, it is a tale so miraculous it reads like fiction.

BOBBY KAUFMANN IS A COCAINE DEALER IN TEXAS' BIGGEST PARTY TOWN... 23 years old and an alcoholic, Bobby Kaufmann spends his time drinking and making hand-to-hand sales. With one day bleeding into the next, Bobby begins to understand the futility of his way of life. Not lost on him is that every single woman he knows is less interested in him for who he is than what he can get them. For the first time, this state of affairs begins to bother him. So, he resolves to change. The novel opens depicting Bobby's terrifying youth as his mother submits to an enormous drug habit. The rest of the novel chronicles an unsettling eight weeks in which the young adult Bobby, mired in the conflicts of his dead-end youth, tries to make the transition from professional criminal to a legitimate owner of a bar on Austin's famed Sixth Street. Although more resolved than ever to end his self-destructive ways, the real question finally emerges--is Bobby Kaufmann capable of change? Born and raised in Houston, Jim Williams received a BA in political science from the University of Houston, followed by an MA in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. Williams is a sixth-generation Texan who has lived in Austin for more than twenty-five years. He is currently hard at work on his second novel.