by Alex Banayan
“Luck is like a bus,” he told me. “If you miss one, there’s always the next one. But if you’re not prepared, you won’t be able to jump on.”
* * *
Two years after Qi finished at Carnegie Mellon, a friend invited him to lunch. There was a person at the table Qi didn’t know. The new acquaintance asked what he was working on and Qi said he worked at IBM researching e-commerce platforms.
The friend-of-a-friend worked for Yahoo, which at the time was known for its prominent Web directory. He asked Qi to stop by his office on Monday and Qi agreed. When he arrived at Yahoo headquarters, there was a job offer on the table.
Yahoo had secret plans to build an e-commerce platform and sought someone to build it. Qi joined the company, took on the project, and spent nearly every second he had coding. For three months, he cut his sleep down even more to just one or two hours a night—working so hard he got carpal tunnel syndrome and had to wear a brace. Qi felt it was worth it, though, because he ultimately created what we now know as Yahoo Shopping.
Qi was promoted to head the company’s next major initiative: Yahoo Search. That turned out to be another home run, but Qi didn’t slow down. In addition to taking on more engineering projects, Qi spent his weekends holed up in a library, reading stacks of books about leadership and management.
I realized Qi Time wasn’t just about sleeping less. It was about sacrifice—sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term gain. In just eight years at Yahoo, Qi became an executive vice president, overseeing more than three thousand engineers.
After nearly a decade at the company, Qi decided the ten-year mark would be a good time to finally take a break. During Qi’s last week at Yahoo, his staff handed out T-shirts at his going-away party that read: “I worked with Qi. Did you?”
Qi was considering heading back to China with his family when he got a call from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft was looking to build a search engine. Qi met with Ballmer and decided not to go back to China, accepting Ballmer’s offer to become president of online services.
As Qi told me about working through the nights to create the Bing search engine, a weird feeling sank into my stomach. My thoughts began to wander, and then a distant memory flashed in my mind.
I was five years old. In the middle of the night I’d had a bad dream, so I climbed out of bed to go to my parents’ room. As I made my way down the dark hallway, I saw a blue light seeping through the bottom of their door. I poked my head in and saw my mom sitting at her tiny desk, typing on the computer. Night after night, I’d crawl out of bed and spy on my mom working as the rest of the family slept. I would later learn that my dad had just filed for bankruptcy for his used-car lot, which meant my mom had to keep our family afloat. Perhaps, in her own way, my mom’s sacrifice was like Qi Lu’s sacrifice.
Only now, while listening to Qi Lu, did I understand why my mom had been crying when I’d said I was leaving premed. To her, I was turning my back on everything she’d worked for. The guilt of how ungrateful I’d been was so painful I began to squirm. Then, Qi took the conversation to one of the last places I expected.
“By the way,” he said, “thank you for doing what you’re doing. What’s motivating you to go on your mission is, in some ways, similar to what motivates me. Every minute of every day, it’s about empowering people to know more, do more, and be more. I think what you’re doing, in many ways, is a great example of that.”
He offered to help in any way he could. I pulled the index card out of my wallet with the names of the people I hoped to interview and handed it over. Qi nodded his head as his finger slowly went down the list.
“The only person I know personally,” he said, “is Bill Gates.”
“Do you…do you think he’d be interested?”
“Yes, you absolutely should have a chance to talk to him. I’ll mention your book to him.”
“Maybe I could write an email?”
Qi smiled. “I would be happy to forward it to him.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Hidden Reservoir
“BILL FUCKING GATES!” Corwin hollered.
He raised his glass to toast the news. Brandon, Ryan, and I lifted our glasses too. We clinked them together and continued celebrating in the dining hall all night.
Sophomore year couldn’t have started better. I was so happy I had to hold myself back from dancing as I walked to class. Even lectures were more enjoyable now. A few days later, as I was headed to the library, I saw an email from Qi Lu’s assistant on my phone.
Hi Alex,
I have reached out to BillG’s office and they unfortunately cannot accommodate this request…
I read the message again, but my mind refused to accept it. I called Stefan Weitz, my Inside Man at Microsoft. He explained that Bill Gates probably didn’t turn me down himself; his Chief of Staff makes most of these decisions.
“Is there any way you can get me in front of the Chief of Staff?” I asked. “All I need is five minutes. Just let me talk to him myself.”
Stefan told me to sit tight and he’d see what he could do.
But I couldn’t sit tight. That night I decided to channel all my frustration into Qi Time. Qi wasn’t born on Qi Time—he chose to do it. And now I was making that choice too. Every morning that followed, I jumped out of bed at six o’clock, went straight to my desk, and wrote cold emails, requesting interviews from everyone on my list. When I got rejected by all of them, I reached out to people beyond my initial list. I woke up even earlier and worked even harder, but that only led me to getting rejected twice as fast. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Some of the no’s hurt more than others, like the one with Wolfgang Puck. I’d answered a trivia question on Twitter, won tickets to a food and wine red carpet event, and then I approached the acclaimed chef there. When I asked for an interview, he said, “I’d love to! Come by the restaurant and we can do it over lunch!” He hugged me like we were old friends. The following day, I emailed his representative as if she were my old friend too.
Hey *****,
My name is Alex and I’m an undergraduate student at USC. I spoke with Wolfgang last night at the LAFW red carpet event and he told me to contact you about setting up a meeting time for an interview. He said it would be best if I come over for lunch at “the restaurant” (in all honesty, I’m not sure which one he was referring to! haha)…
She didn’t reply. So I followed up once, twice, and even a fourth time. Clearly, I hadn’t learned my lesson from Tim Ferriss. Puck’s representative responded a month later.
hey alex—
yes, we did receive your emails, and hey, I’ve been thinking of the proper response. so hey, I know you will take the advice as constructive when I tell you that when you contact the world’s most successful people, I might suggest you do not say, hey larry king, or hey george lucas. typically, such queries would start as “dear mr. king” or “dear mr. lucas” out of respect.
but hey, I digress…
I spoke to wolfgang about this before he left for new york, and although it sounds like an interesting opportunity, unfortunately, he will not have time to do this because he has a full schedule now until the end of the year with his recent opening of CUT in london and his ongoing opening activities at the hotel bel air. wolfgang asked that I respond to you on his behalf to tell you that he is sorry, but he cannot participate…
As the days of fall dragged on, I felt more and more despondent, each rejection beating away at my self-worth. Getting up before sunrise morning after morning, just to get rejected, felt like I was lying on a road so a truck could run me over, reverse, then run me over some more. But there was one person who didn’t turn me into roadkill, and I thank God for him, because he may have saved the mission.
Most people know Sugar Ray Leonard as the six-time world champion boxer with the bright smile in the 7 Up and Nintendo commercials. If you know
the sport well, you know him as the slick, quick-punching artist who became a global sensation at the 1976 Olympics.
After attending his book signing and getting pushed aside by security, I used the Tim Ferriss cold-email template to reach out to someone who did public relations work for Sugar Ray. We met and she became my Inside Man. I wrote Sugar Ray a letter explaining that I was nineteen, and after reading his autobiography, I sensed his advice was exactly what my generation needed. As soon as my Inside Man passed along the note, Sugar Ray invited me to his house.
He met me at the door wearing a black tracksuit and showed me to his home gym. The second I stepped in, it felt like I’d entered the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin—except the gold covering the walls wasn’t buried treasure, but gold medals and glimmering plaques engraved with the words WORLD CHAMPION. A punching bag hung from the ceiling. Dumbbells and treadmills surrounded the plush leather couch in the middle. All the sparkle coming off the gold fit into my image of Sugar Ray—but when we sat and started talking, I soon realized I had no idea what was underneath that sparkle.
Sugar Ray told me he grew up in a family of nine in Palmer Park, Maryland. Money was so tight that one Christmas the only gifts under the tree were the apples and oranges Ray’s dad stole from the supermarket stockroom where he worked. His dad had boxed in the navy, so when Ray was seven he decided to give the sport a try. He climbed into the ring at the No. 2 Boys Club outside of Palmer Park, and within seconds, he was getting pounded in the face. Blood gushed from his nose. His legs burned as he moved around the mat. He walked away defeated, head pounding, and returned home to his comic books.
Six years later, his older brother urged him to give boxing another try. Ray returned to the gym and got beat up again. This time, though, he decided to stay with it. He was younger, shorter, skinnier, and less experienced than the other boys, so he realized he needed an edge.
He dressed for school one morning and walked with his brothers and sisters to the bus stop. As the yellow bus pulled to the curb, the other kids stepped on, but Ray held back. He threw his backpack on the bus, tightened his shoelaces, and as the bus drove away, he chased after it, running behind it all the way to school. That afternoon, he ran behind the bus again all the way home. He did it the next day as well. And the next. He ran in the heat, the rain, the snow—some days were so cold that ice froze on his face. He chased the school bus day after day after day.
“I didn’t have the experience,” Sugar Ray told me, “but I had the heart, the discipline, and the desire.”
As soon as that last word left his mouth, he looked at me a bit differently and asked what was motivating me to chase my dream. We talked about the mission, and Sugar Ray made me feel so comfortable that I admitted to him how defeated I’d felt trying to arrange interviews. He asked to see my list. While looking it over, Sugar Ray subtly shook his head and smiled, as if he understood something that I didn’t. He then began telling me the story of one of the biggest fights of his life, and the lesson was exactly what I needed to hear.
Five years after he’d turned pro, Sugar Ray stepped into the ring with Thomas “The Hitman” Hearns. Not only was The Hitman undefeated, but he’d also won nearly every fight by knockout. He famously had a far-reaching left jab that would snap his opponent’s head back, which then set up the real terror that seemed to come out of nowhere: The Hitman’s deadly right hand.
Tens of thousands filed into Caesars Palace and millions tuned in on pay-per-view. The bout was billed as “The Showdown.” The winner would be named the undisputed welterweight champion of the world.
After the opening bell rang, The Hitman’s far-reaching jab zoned in on Sugar Ray’s left eye. Jab after jab after jab, to the point where Ray’s eyelids became black and purple and swollen shut. Sugar Ray rallied back in the middle rounds, but by the twelfth, he was still behind on the scorecards. He slumped forward on his stool in the corner of the ring, his left eye throbbing. He tried to force it fully open, but he couldn’t, leaving him with only half his vision in that eye.
The only way he could win was by stepping through the strike zone of The Hitman’s right hand. That was crazy to begin with, but without being able to fully see out of his left eye, it was practically suicide. Sugar Ray’s trainer crouched in front of him and looked him square on.
“You’re blowing it now, son. You’re blowing it.”
Those words triggered a powerful feeling within Ray that spread throughout his body. Thirty years later, as we sat on his couch, he made those words come alive.
“You may have the heart—you keep fighting, you keep fighting, you keep fighting—but your mind is saying, ‘Man, forget this. I don’t need this.’ The head and the heart aren’t going together; but they have to go together. It all has to connect. Everything has to connect to reach that level, that pinnacle.
“You may have a desire, a wish, a dream—but it’s got to be more than that—you’ve got to want it to the point that it hurts. Most people never reach that point. They never tap into what I call the Hidden Reservoir, your hidden reserve of strength. We all have it. When they say a mother lifted up a car off a trapped child, that’s that power.”
The bell for the thirteenth round rang and Sugar Ray exploded out of his corner as if the blood in his veins had turned into pure, concentrated adrenaline. He shot off twenty-five consecutive punches and The Hitman flew into the ropes, dropped to the floor, and then stumbled up. Ray sprinted after him. The Hitman stumbled back again but the bell saved him. When the next round began, Ray ran out in overdrive again and pummeled Hearns with a blizzard of punches to the head. Then, with just a minute to go in the fourteenth round, The Hitman went limp into the ropes. The referee stopped the fight. Ray was the undisputed champion of the world.
The story hung in the air, and then Sugar Ray stood up from the couch, stepped toward the door, and motioned for me to follow.
“I want to show you something.”
We headed down a dimly lit hallway. He told me to stay put and disappeared around a corner. A minute later, he returned holding his gold world-championship belt. Soft light shimmered off its ridges. Sugar Ray stepped over and put it around my waist.
He stepped back, giving me a moment to let the feeling sink in.
“How many times have people told you, ‘You can’t interview these types of people’? How many times have they said, ‘No way’? Don’t let anyone tell you your dream isn’t possible. When you have a vision, you’ve got to hang in there. You’ve got to stay in the fight. It’s going to get tough. You’re going to hear no. But you’ve got to keep pushing. You’ve got to keep fighting. You’ve got to use your Hidden Reservoir. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible.
“When I saw in the letter that you’re nineteen, I remembered how I felt when I was your age. I was eager. I was excited. I was hungry. I wanted that gold medal more than anything. And when I look at you”—he paused and stepped toward me, pointing his finger at my face—“don’t let anybody take that away from you.”
STEP 3
FIND YOUR INSIDE MAN
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Dream Mentor
It was a good thing Sugar Ray gave me that talk, because rejections pounded me for the rest of fall. The holidays flew by faster than I liked and it was now January, the first week of spring semester, and the prospects of reaching the people I dreamed of were grim.
I was standing in a CVS parking lot one afternoon, a heavy sheet of gray clouds overhead, and a chocolate-brownie ice cream cone in my hand. When life beats you down, at least there’s always ice cream.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My eyes widened when I saw the Seattle area code. Instantly, it felt like the gray clouds were parting and white light was shining down on me.
“So, you want to interview Bill, huh?”
On the line was Bill Gates’ Chief of Staff.
Stefan Weitz, my Insi
de Man at Microsoft, had managed to arrange the call. To preserve the Chief of Staff’s privacy, I’ll leave his name out.
I started telling him about the mission, but he said there was no need because Stefan and Qi Lu had already told him all about it.
“I love what you’re doing,” the Chief of Staff said. “I love your initiative. I love that you’re doing this to help others and I’d love to support this”—just hearing that made me feel like I was 99 percent there—“but, the thing is, you’re only about five percent there. I just can’t take this to Bill. You don’t have enough momentum.”
Momentum?
“Look,” he added. “I can’t present an interview request to Bill for a book that doesn’t even have a publisher. Even when Malcolm Gladwell came to us for Outliers, it wasn’t a sure thing. Now—if you can get more interviews done, if you can get a publishing deal from Penguin or Random House—then we can sit down and discuss presenting this to Bill. But before any of that can happen, you need to engineer more momentum.”
He said goodbye and hung up, leaving me in a haze, two words echoing in my head. Five percent? The next thing I knew I was in the storage closet, my head in my hands, those words still reverberating in my mind.
At this rate, my friends would be in rocking chairs by the time the mission was completed. If Qi Lu’s introduction only got me 5 percent of the way there with Bill Gates, then I must be at negative 20 percent with people like Warren Buffett or Bill Clinton. And with all the tests and homework I have for school, I’ll be—