by Alex Banayan
Tony explained that just because there was some vanity in wanting to write a bestseller, it didn’t diminish his other motivations of wanting to inspire young entrepreneurs or teaching people how to create a strong company culture. Those desires coexisted.
As the conversation went on and more people gathered in the kitchen to listen, I took a second to mentally step back to appreciate what was going on—here I was, dressed as Rango the chameleon-cowboy, with a tail sticking out of me and a cowboy hat on my head, listening to a teddy bear tell a hillbilly how to launch a book.
“The first three months after your launch are the most important,” Tony said. “Because one of my end goals was for my book to become a bestseller, I spoke everywhere I could during those months: business conferences, college classes, wherever. I bought an RV, wrapped it with an image of the book cover, and spent three months living on the road.
“Those three months were some of the most exhausting of my life,” he said, his voice deflating. “I was speaking all day and traveling all night. I was doing everything I could to spread the seeds. But even then, I couldn’t be everywhere at once. So I sent boxes of books to events and conferences, hoping the message would reach people.
“Honestly,” he added, “I have no idea if those books were ever read. I don’t even know if that made a difference.”
I have to tell him…
But the spirit of Elliott was hanging over my shoulder: Don’t be an idiot. If you tell him, he’ll always see you as a fan.
In that moment, though, I knew I had to be myself.
“Tony,” I said, “during my freshman year of college, I was a volunteer at one of those business conferences you’d sent boxes of books to. I’d never heard your name before, and I didn’t even know what Zappos was, but the event coordinators were handing out your book, so I took one home. A few months later, when I was going through one of the toughest times in my life, I picked up your book and couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing that weekend. Reading about how you chased your dream, well, it made me feel like mine was possible.
“If you didn’t send those books to that business conference,” I continued, my voice shaking, “I wouldn’t be doing what I do today. Tony, your book changed my life.”
Everyone in the kitchen froze.
Tony was just looking at me, silently. But the softening of his face, and the welling of his eyes, told me more than any words could’ve said.
TWO WEEKS LATER, DOWNTOWN LAS VEGAS
I ripped open a UPS box and pulled out a navy-blue Zappos shirt. To anyone else, it was just a piece of fabric. But to me, it was Superman’s cape.
I’d just woken up in a unit in Tony’s apartment building, where he’d arranged for me to stay. I slid the shirt over my head, grabbed my backpack, and headed downstairs, where a Zappos company car was waiting. The car curved along the road, and ten minutes later, we pulled up to Zappos headquarters.
As I stepped through the doors, I saw a popcorn machine on the reception desk, a Dance Dance Revolution arcade game by the couch, and hundreds of cut-off neckties stapled to the walls. An assistant escorted me down a hallway to the work area where the desks were decorated even more wildly than the lobby. One aisle was covered in an avalanche of birthday streamers; another with flashing Christmas lights; a third had a ten-foot inflatable pirate. Sitting at a cluttered desk, in a rain forest–themed section, was Tony. He was hunched in front of his laptop. When he saw me, he motioned for me to grab a chair.
I said good morning. Tony’s assistant leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re about five hours late. He’s been up since four.”
Tony shut his laptop, stood up, and motioned for me to follow. We moved down the carpeted hallway to our first meeting. I trailed a few feet behind the methodical steps of his black leather shoes. I could feel how timid my steps were. Despite how nice Tony had been, I still felt I didn’t deserve to be there. A part of me was scared that if I did even the smallest thing wrong, he’d send me home.
We got to the conference room. I spotted a chair in the back and moved toward it. Tony saw me, shooed away the seat, and pointed to the spot next to him. When we went to another conference room for our next meeting, Tony motioned for me to sit next to him again. He did it again in the meeting after that. By our fourth meeting in the afternoon, I sat next to him, without him having to point.
After our lunch meeting with a corporate distributor, Tony exited into the hallway with me behind him. He turned his head back over his shoulder and asked, “What’d you think?” I stumbled out an answer. He didn’t respond. He just listened, nodding. After our next meeting, again he cranked his neck back and asked, “What’d you think?” Tony asked for my opinion again, then again.
The light outside the windows began to darken. The office emptied. As we walked out of the final meeting, Tony again asked what I thought. But he didn’t have to crank his head back this time. I was no longer behind him—I was walking beside him.
The next morning, I threw on another Zappos T-shirt and went downstairs where Tony’s driver was waiting for me. We headed across town to a two-thousand-person auditorium where Tony was preparing for a company-wide meeting. He’d already been there for two hours.
I arrived at the auditorium and stayed backstage all morning watching Tony rehearse. The presentation was a cross between a corporate keynote speech and a high school pep rally. Hours later, the lights dimmed and the curtains opened. Tony’s dad and I sat together in the front row, watching it all unfold.
As the day came to an end, I was heading out of the auditorium when a Zappos employee stopped me by the door. He said he saw me shadowing Tony the prior afternoon. The guy told me that he’d worked at Zappos for a few years and one of his biggest dreams was to shadow Tony. He asked how I got so lucky.
The look in his eyes wasn’t new. I’d noticed a few other Zappos employees looking at me the same way the day before, as though they wanted to be in the position I was in.
Later that evening, I went over to Tony and said goodbye, thanking him again for the past two days.
“And, I know this might sound weird,” I said, “but why don’t you let your employees shadow you?”
Tony looked at me blankly and said, “I’d be happy to—but no one ever asks.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s All Gray
TWO WEEKS LATER, THE STORAGE CLOSET
I kept pacing, glancing at my phone on the desk. I knew I should call. But I couldn’t. A memory kept flashing in my mind.
“You going to drop out?” Elliott had asked.
“What?”
“You heard what I said.”
He was the last person I wanted to talk to about this. But I also felt he was the only person I could talk to. I reached for my phone.
“Hey, guy. What’s going on?”
“Elliott, I need your help.”
I told him my literary agent said the ideal time to pitch publishers was next month, which meant I needed to finish rewriting my book proposal by then. But my junior year of college began in a week.
“So what’s the problem?” Elliott asked.
“I know if I go back to USC this semester, homework and tests will pile up and I won’t finish rewriting the proposal in time. So, I guess I know what I need to do, but the last thing I want is to look my parents in the eye and tell them I’m dropping out of school.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You are not dropping out of school.”
Wait—what?
“No one smart actually drops out of school,” he went on. “It’s a myth. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t drop out the way you think they did. Do some research. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
When we got off the phone, I ran my finger across my shelf and plucked out a book I hadn’t opened yet: The Facebook Effect, the authorized account of the company�
��s early days. And there it was, on page fifty-two.
The summer before Mark Zuckerberg’s junior year of college, he was in Palo Alto working on a couple side projects, one of which was a website called TheFacebook. It had launched seven months earlier. Later that summer, Zuckerberg pulled his mentor Sean Parker aside and asked for advice.
“Do you think this thing is really going to last?” Zuckerberg asked. “Is it a fad? Is it going to go away?”
Even when Facebook had nearly 200,000 users, Zuckerberg had doubts about its future. I sensed I was onto something, but I wasn’t sure what.
I took out my laptop to dig deeper. After spending hours on YouTube watching interviews of Zuckerberg, I finally found one that shed more light. Weeks before his junior year, Zuckerberg met with venture capitalist Peter Thiel to raise money for Facebook. When Thiel asked if he was going to drop out of school, Zuckerberg said no. He planned to head back for his junior year.
Right before classes began, Zuckerberg’s cofounder and classmate Dustin Moskovitz figured out a more practical approach. “You know,” Moskovitz said to him, “we’re getting to have a lot of users, we have an increasing number of servers, we have no operations guy—this is really hard. I don’t think we can do this and take a full course load. Why don’t we take one term off and just try to get it under control, so that way we can go back for spring semester?”
So that’s what Elliott was talking about.
Ever since I’d watched The Social Network, I’d thought of Zuckerberg as a rebel who dropped out of school, threw his middle finger to the sky, and never looked back. The film never showed Zuckerberg doubting Facebook’s future. It never showed him cautiously debating taking one semester off.
For years I’d seen headlines that read “Dropout Mark Zuckerberg” and naturally assumed his decision to leave college was clear-cut. Headlines and movies make things seem black and white. But now I was realizing: the truth is never black and white. It’s gray. It’s all gray.
If you want the whole story, you have to dig deeper. You can’t rely on headlines or tweets. Gray doesn’t fit in 140 characters.
I grabbed a book on Bill Gates, and on page ninety-three, there it was again.
Gates didn’t impulsively drop out of college either. He took just one semester off during junior year to work full-time on Microsoft. And when momentum for the company didn’t fully pick up, Gates went back to college. Again, no one talks about that. It wasn’t until the following year that Gates took another semester off, and then another, as Microsoft grew.
Maybe the hardest part about taking a risk isn’t whether to take it, it’s when to take it. It’s never clear how much momentum is enough to justify leaving school. It’s never clear when it’s the right time to quit your job. Big decisions are rarely clear when you’re making them—they’re only clear looking back. The best you can do is take one careful step at a time.
Although the idea of dropping out of USC altogether didn’t sit well with me, staying enrolled and taking one semester off sounded perfect. I drove to campus, spoke to my academic adviser, and she handed me a bright green form that said “USC Leave of Absence,” which gave me a seven-year window to return to classes at any point.
I ran off to tell my parents the good news.
* * *
“A semester off?” my mom yelled. “Are you out of your mind?”
She was slicing tomatoes in the kitchen.
“Mom, it’s not as big of a deal as you think.”
“No, it’s a bigger deal than you think. I know you. I’ve known you longer than you’ve known you. I know that once you walk away from school, you’ll never go back.”
“Mom, it’s just a—”
“No! My son is not going to be a college dropout!”
“It doesn’t say dropout,” I said, waving the green form in the air. “It says leave of absence.”
She sliced harder into the tomato.
“Mom, you just have to trust me. Elliott told me—”
“I knew it! I knew Elliott was behind this!”
“This has nothing to do with Elliott. I love college, but—”
“Then why can’t you stay?”
“Because I need to get this publishing deal. The moment I get one, I’ll get to Bill Gates, and once he’s in, the mission will hit its tipping point and everyone else I want to interview will be in. I have to make this happen.”
“But what if you can’t make it happen? Or worse: what if you don’t realize you can’t make it happen? What if you try to get the book deal and you don’t get it, so you try again, and again—and it’s not until years later that you finally call it quits and decide to go back to school—and then they won’t let you back in?”
I explained to her the seven-year window.
My mom stared at me with gritted teeth, then stormed off.
I went to my room and slammed the door. But as soon as I collapsed on the bed, a voice within me wondered…what if Mom is right?
Normally when my mom and I argued like this, I would call my grandma. But now that was the last thing I could do. My insides knotted as I thought about it. Jooneh man.
I’d sworn on my grandma’s life I wouldn’t drop out. How could I break that promise?
But staying true to that promise wouldn’t be staying true to myself. When I’d said those words, I didn’t know where my life would lead.
The advice I got at Summit from Dan Babcock came to mind: Success is a result of prioritizing your desires.
But how could I prioritize this?
Family of course comes first, but at what point do I stop living for others and start living for myself?
The tension pulled at me. I called Elliott that night filled with fear and confusion, but his voice couldn’t have been more matter-of-fact.
“I went through that same stuff with my parents,” he said. “But then I realized: Why the hell is school supposed to be one-size-fits-all? There’s a line from a Kanye song I heard years ago:
Told ’em I finished school and I started my own business
They say “Oh you graduated?”
No, I decided I was finished.
“You did school,” Elliott said. “Now it’s time for you to do you. It’s time for you to finish.”
* * *
Every day for the next week, I sat in the living room with my mom and dad, trying to make them comfortable with my decision. I was now down to the final day to submit the leave-of-absence form. There were three hours until the deadline. I’d signed the form and was in my room, getting ready to drive to campus to hand it in.
The more I looked at the green form on my bed, the more I felt fear pulsing through my veins. As much as Elliott’s guidance had helped, twenty minutes on the phone with him was nothing compared to twenty years of living with my mom. A part of me felt she might be right—maybe ten years from now I would end up delusional, without a publishing deal, and without a college degree. Although I knew I had a seven-year window, and Elliott had told me not to worry, I still felt I might be making the biggest mistake of my life.
As I tied my shoes, the doorbell rang. I slipped the green form in my pocket, grabbed my car keys, and headed for the door. I twisted the knob and pulled it open.
It was my grandma.
She was standing on the steps, trembling, tears streaming down her face.
STEP 4
TRUDGE THROUGH THE MUD
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hallelujah!
I locked myself in the storage closet and rewrote the book proposal as fast as I could. I didn’t talk to my friends. I didn’t see my family. I slept just three or four hours a night. When I would close my eyes, one image kept coming back to me as if it had been chiseled into the insides of my eyelids—my grandma, tears streaming down her face.
Qi Lu had told me he’
d slept only a couple hours a night while creating Yahoo Shopping and I’d wondered how it was possible. Now I knew.
My agent had told me rewriting the proposal would take thirty days. I finished in eight. When your back is against the wall, you learn what you’re capable of. I emailed her the 140-page document, prayed she could work her magic, and then, just eleven days after I’d turned in the leave-of-absence form—I got the publishing deal.
* * *
I immediately shared the news with my parents. Even my dad, who celebrated every possible occasion, couldn’t crack more than a smile. I could tell he was still shaken by my leaving school. I needed to talk to someone who I knew would be as excited as I was. I called Elliott.
“You didn’t,” he said. “No way. You’re lying.”
“It really happened.”
“Holy…shit. You did it! It worked! BRO, YOU ARE A SUPERSTAR!”
I’d never heard Elliott talk to me like this before.
“This is nuts!” he went on. “So what are you going to do next?”
“Now it’s time to get my interview with Bill Gates.”
“That’s insane! How much time do you think you’ll get with him? Are you going to do it at his office? Or can you do it at his home? Is it just going to be you two, one-on-one? Or will you be in a room with a dozen PR guys?”
“Dude, I still haven’t told his Chief of Staff the news.”
“Stop,” Elliott said. “That email has to be…perfect.”
We spent the next hour on the phone drafting it. I didn’t write a direct ask because I assumed it was abundantly clear why I was reaching out. Before hitting send, I thought about how just two years earlier I was on my dorm room bed, fantasizing what it would be like to learn from Bill Gates. It was finally coming together.
