Malcolm Gladwell's Full Proof Interview Question

You know, it's interesting. I had an interview the other day with a candidate, and one of my favorite questions to ask now is, "Tell me about the hardest thing you've ever done." Like, what was it? You know, I want to hear. And the answer for one of them was that they took a hot yoga training class for a week. And I don't want to be relatively rude, but I remember thinking, you know, you're this was like a 30-ish year old individual and either maybe bad recall if we are really giving if we are really giving, but on the other hand, what a fucking tragedy. I was like, that's the hardest thing, you know, even with life throwing something at you that's not desirable, it's hard to build a lot of resiliency if you think that that is difficult. The only thing I think you can do is using sort of trial and error, and give them something hard to do and see whether they can adapt to it. And also you're asking the right question is, can they identify? The problem with the question, "Tell me the hardest thing you've done?" is that the person we're most interested in answer that question because they wouldn't as hard. What would be a better question to ask? The question is, "Give me an example of something that makes you happy." And if my guess is that people who seek out challenge will give you an example of, you know, something my dad loved to take really really long walks, really long walks. And it didn't matter how cold it was. We knew and I would go with him in the Canadian winters, it would be 20 below, we would go for like a two-hour walk. I would be 11 years old. That didn't strike me as hard or him as hard. It made us happy. So if you ask me at 11, "What makes you happy?" "Going for a walk with my dad." And then if you dug into it, you would realize, "Actually, it was a pretty demanding thing you guys did." "It didn't even occur to you to call that hard."