The best interviews end with the person surprising themselves

Most interview advice is build rapport, ask open questions. In practice that gets you polite nothing.

What works for me is staying concrete. I ask about one specific thing that actually happened, not what they think in general. Then I let it breathe. I allow the silence and wait for their pace instead of jumping in.

The reason I do it is the payoff. People end up landing on something they hadn't noticed about themselves, and that's the part I'm actually after.

Ten years in and it's still the hardest thing to hand to someone else. Half of why I built Koecle, launching Monday.

When has an interview made someone realize something they didn't know they thought?