6 ideas
Standardized, formulaic interviews are designed to filter out the worst candidates, not to find the exceptional ones, because they reward conformity and rehearsed answers. To identify outliers you need conversational, unpredictable interviews that disrupt scripts and reveal how a person actually thinks under uncertainty.
Pose questions candidates cannot have prepared for — like 'what are the open browser tabs on your computer right now?' or 'what's something you believe that most people disagree with?' — to bypass rehearsed self-presentation. The goal is to observe spontaneous reasoning, genuine obsessions, and self-awareness rather than polished narratives.
A person's energy — their capacity to mobilize effort, sustain drive, and energize others around them — is one of the most underrated predictors of long-term achievement. Distinguish between personal energy (own output) and the rarer ability to raise the energy of an entire group or organization.
Evaluate talent by the trajectory and durability of someone's drive rather than a single impressive moment, asking whether they will keep improving for decades. The key question is whether ambition compounds over time or burns out after early success.
Moderately low agreeableness — a willingness to defy consensus, resist social pressure, and pursue unpopular ideas — often correlates with breakthrough creative and entrepreneurial achievement. Conventional hiring screens out these people because they interview poorly and seem difficult, leaving high-variance talent on the table.
Talented people are systematically underdiscovered in groups outside elite credentialing pipelines — women, minorities, people in unfashionable locations, and the disabled — creating arbitrage for those who look there first. Actively searching neglected pools yields high returns precisely because competitors ignore them.