The Interview

Timur had practised his answers for weeks. He knew exactly what he would say about his strengths, his weaknesses, and where he saw himself in five years. He had even recorded himself on video and watched it until he could no longer stand the sound of his own voice.

On the morning of the interview, he arrived twenty minutes early. The office was on the fourteenth floor of a glass building, and the receptionist asked him to wait in a room with a large window overlooking the mountains.

The interviewer was a woman in her forties named Mrs Harris. She shook his hand, sat down, and said something Timur had not expected.

"I'm not going to ask you any of the usual questions. Instead, tell me about something you failed at."

For a moment, his mind went completely blank. All his prepared answers disappeared.

Then he remembered the online shop he had built at seventeen. It had taken him four months. He had spent all his savings on advertising. In the end, it sold exactly nine products, and three of them were bought by his mother.

He told Mrs Harris the whole story, including the part about his mother. She laughed, and he found himself laughing too.

"And what did you learn?" she asked.

"That building something is the easy part," Timur said. "Finding out whether anyone actually needs it is the hard part. Now I ask that question first."

Mrs Harris wrote something in her notebook. A week later, he received an email offering him the job. In the feedback section, there was only one line: "Honest about failure. Learned from it."