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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.