Alex Banayan Podcast: The Third Door & Approach Anxiety

What the Third Door is

Banayan says about 70% of the way through his interviews he started hearing a common melody. Everyone he talked to approached life and business like getting into a nightclub.

• The first door is the main entrance, with the line around the block. That’s where 99% of people wait and hope.
• The second door is the VIP entrance for billionaires and celebrities.
• The third door is the one where you jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window or sneak through the kitchen.

School makes us believe the first two are the only options. Banayan’s point is that the third door always exists. He also says nobody takes it because it’s fun. You take it because you have a dream big enough that waiting in line won’t get you there.

As we said on the show, once you’re inside, nobody cares how you got in. If anything, people respect you more for it.

The flinch: approach anxiety has a name

This is the part of the conversation I’d send to anyone with approach anxiety. Banayan says one of the biggest misconceptions about the third door is that it’s for extroverts. He calls himself one of the most scared kids you’ll ever meet.

He traces his fear, which he named “the flinch,” to a third-grade lunch. He opened a container of his family’s Persian stew, the smell filled the cafeteria, and the kids laughed. From then on he ate alone after school. Over the years the flinch grew into fear of rejection, fear of failing and fear of looking like a fool. Add years of being heavier, being teased, not getting his first kiss until college, and a family that didn’t allow parties or sleepovers, and he says it became part of who he was.

Here’s what I want you to take from that. The guy who walked up to Spielberg wasn’t fearless. He was terrified and did it anyway. What changed wasn’t the fear. It was his relationship with it.

He credits a line from Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart: when she asked a meditation master about his relationship with fear, he said he agreed with it. For Banayan, that ended the internal war. If you agree with your fear, it doesn’t necessarily go away, but it stops being a battle and steps to the side.

Try it on your next approach. Instead of “I shouldn’t be nervous,” say “Yep, I’m nervous. Makes sense. Going anyway.”

That is the skill of naming the fear out loud and moving anyway. It is a skill, so it improves with repetition and feedback. You can practice it with a coach in the X-Factor Accelerator: 90 days of guided practice. If you want low-cost practice speaking up and managing fear, compare Dale Carnegie vs Toastmasters.

The Spielberg approach: what to steal

His first big shot came a month into the project. He showed someone the list of dream interviews he kept on a note card in his wallet, and she told him Spielberg would be at a fundraiser and she could get him in as a caterer. He spent the month watching every Spielberg movie and reading an 800-page biography.

At the event, Spielberg was 20 feet away, and Banayan froze completely. He went to the bathroom and told himself that if he didn’t push through, the whole journey was over before it started. When Spielberg headed for the exit, his fear of failing finally outweighed his fear of rejection. He sprinted across the room, said “Mr. Spielberg,” and asked if he could ask a question. Spielberg said yes, just walk with me.

Three things to take into your own approaches:

1. Write the dream down and carry it. Banayan’s note card meant that every time someone asked what he was working on, he had something concrete to show. That’s how the Spielberg tip came to him.
2. Make failure scarier than rejection. Rejection is a moment. Never trying is something you carry with you.
3. Walk with them. Banayan says asking to walk someone to their car almost always works. Who’s going to say no? On a night out, “I’m heading to the bar, walk with me” does the same job.

He had no pitch. He poured his heart out about the project. Spielberg gave him a “maybe,” then turned back and said he believed Banayan could pull it off. As we said on the show, we often think there’s a magic phrase, and we lose the genuine moment that actually lands.

The inside man, and when persistence backfires

Banayan learned that emailing the Gates Foundation’s press address goes nowhere. The yes comes from an inside man: someone in the organization who believes in you enough to put their reputation on the line. It took him a year to get a five-minute call with Bill Gates’s chief of staff, who told him he was 95% there and to come back with a publisher. He got the book deal, then heard nothing for months.

What broke it open was advice from Larry King, which Banayan paraphrases: technology has changed, but people haven’t. They’ll only say yes once they can look you in the eye. So he asked his contacts for one last favor: five minutes in person at a conference. He waited at the wrong lobby espresso bar, got “stood up,” called the assistant in tears, and ended up with a 45-minute ride to the airport instead.

Then there’s the other side. Banayan spent eight months pounding on Warren Buffett’s door. Even after Bill Gates’s office put in a word, the answer was no more contact. He’d been so persistent he got himself blacklisted. No business book warns you about that.

Here’s how I’d translate that socially. Persistence without warmth isn’t confidence. It’s pressure. If you’ve asked twice and gotten nothing, change your approach or go through a mutual connection. Don’t just send a third, fourth or thirtieth message. Banayan sent Tim Ferriss 32 emails, and what actually got the yes, he later learned, was a mutual acquaintance vouching that his heart was in the right place.

A great conversation, then the follow-up disappears. That usually isn’t bad luck. Phrases like let’s grab coffee or let’s stay in touch are often tests. The Access Test covers 13 of them, at dinners, events, and dates, with a calibrated response for each. It takes 49 minutes. See the 13 tests.

The cold email template that gets replies

Johnny and I know this from our own inboxes. Most people reach out wanting your time with no context and no clear ask. Banayan shared the template Tim Ferriss taught him, which he says has worked better than he can overstate:

1. Opener: “I know you’re incredibly busy and get a lot of emails, so this will only take 60 seconds to read.”
2. Who you are: one or two sentences, only the context that’s relevant to them.
3. Your question: one or two sentences, something specific they can answer right away. His example: “What’s the best book you’d recommend for an up-and-coming podcaster?”
4. Close: “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply. Even a one- or two-line response would completely make my day.”

It works because it’s the opposite of what busy people usually get: short, specific, and easy to answer without a meeting.

Break the pattern, start with the heart

When Banayan finally sat down with Bill Gates, Gates went into “encyclopedia mode,” fast facts he’d told a thousand times. Banayan knew that would make a dead interview, so he asked about a story he knew Gates couldn’t tell without laughing. The energy of the whole conversation changed.

Larry King’s advice to him: don’t copy other interviewers. Be comfortable in your own seat, because when you’re comfortable, your guest is. And from Esquire writer Cal Fussman, he learned to ask questions people don’t already have an answer to, ones they have to reach back into memory for. If you start with the heart and then go to the head, the conversation opens up.

That’s great date advice. “What do you do?” gets the rehearsed answer. “What’s the best trip you’ve ever taken, and what made it great?” gets a real one.

Introverts, mentors and the feedback loop

Banayan’s gut says most of the successful people he interviewed are introverts who learned how to handle social situations well. We say the same in our classes: we’re not trying to turn introverts into extroverts. We’re giving them tools to do well in a world that rewards extroverts.

His best relationship advice came from Bill Gates, about mentors. When Gates was young, he’d ask an executive for the five books they’d recommend on a topic, read them fast, and go back to say thank you and what he learned, without asking for anything. That builds a mental picture of you: reads fast, grateful, respects my time. The next ask gets a paragraph instead of a sentence. Slowly, you climb the ladder.

Rejection, insecurity and courage

Banayan didn’t “toughen up.” He says the rejections were crushing. Two things kept him going. First, coming back to the core belief behind the project. It didn’t give him a burst of energy, but it kept him from letting go. Second, take a break. Ride your bike, turn off your phone, take the weekend. Burning out and quitting is worse than resting.

On insecurity, he says the moment he stopped trying to get rid of his insecurities and gave them a seat at the table, they got quieter, like a toddler having a tantrum on a plane who calms down once the parent stops fighting.

His final lesson ties it all together. Every person he looked up to was scared at the beginning, with no exceptions. It wasn’t fearlessness. It was courage. Courage is acknowledging your fears, weighing the consequences, and caring enough to take one thoughtful step forward anyway.

More from The Art of Charm

• How to use approach anxiety to your advantage
• Four steps to overcome approach anxiety
• Be more confident socially and overcome fear of rejection
• Dr. Stan Beecham on building belief systems
• Gary John Bishop on action, self-talk and wisdom
• How to start a conversation with anyone
• All Art of Charm podcast episodes