Malcolm Gladwell

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, this was like a 30-ish year old individual, and either maybe bad recalls if we are really giving, but on the other hand, what a fucking tragedy.

I was like, that's the hardest thing?

Even with life throwing something at you that's not desirable, it's hard to build a lot of resiliency if you think that is difficult.

And so it's interesting because the winners in our company tend to be people who have done crazy things.

And so, you know, we just hired a guy who's like, I do ultra marathons and it's what I like to do and I'm doing one with my mom, you know, and his mom's quite old.

So I was like, that's incredible.

Tell me about that.

Now, I know when something silly gets hard in work, it's probably nowhere near as hard as an ultramarathon.

He's going to be fine.

It just seems almost rude.

I don't even know how to communicate to young people that they're coddling themselves.

Are there data or studies that's used to back it up?

How do we tell people, you need to do harder things without them just shutting us out and going, okay, whatever, older people, you guys don't understand anything that I'm going through today.

What would be a better question to ask?

That's a great counterpoint.