Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro

His stories were about people, and how they were affected by something bigger. He found the stakeholders.

The stories that don’t have some kind of guiding principle are like a roulette wheel spinning, and you hope as you read that eventually the marble will drop into a slot so the stories will make a point. I’ve read some stories where there wasn’t a marble at all. Good interviews, like stories, must have at least a marble.

Like a story, a good interview has a beginning, a middle with a climactic point, and an end. And hopefully a few surprises.

Ultimately, a good story is a controlled release of the narrative. This leads to that, which leads to something else. It doesn’t tell everything—it

in addition to what was said. You’ll be able to make the interaction more human, more believable, more artful, more inspiring, more beautiful.

Good interviewers are simply themselves. They’re not acting. They’re curious. They know how to be quiet and listen. The authentic ones who ask good questions are the ones who extract profound answers instead of clichés, and who get past the surface and into something that rarely gets explored.

Some of the best interviewers I have seen are tentative, noncombative, soft-spoken people.

a purposeful series of questions that leads to understanding, insight, and perspective on a given topic.

That’s an interview question. I answer, and she follows up with another question.