Tough Interview Questions: How Lucky Are You and Why?

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

 

I explain what the trick is in this question and how to answer it.

The Right Answers to Tough Interview Questions

Here’s one of those fun trick questions. And I have to say trick, cause let me explain the trick to you. Cause it suggests the answer and most people miss it entirely. The question is, how lucky are you and why?

The key to the suggesting the answer is the “and why” part. Cause most people are gonna go off on the tirade about incredible luck, or they have no luck. Very predictable answers. Now,

what the employer is suggesting with the question, is that there are reasons why people are lucky and they wanna know what your reasons are. So, that lets you know right off the bat, they’re thinking it isn’t about luck after all. Now, you might just simply start off by saying, you know, luck is one of those funny things. You know, for example, there are musicians who are incredibly lucky, but no one talks about the 25 years they’ve spent in the studio working up to the point where someone would notice them and thus they become the luckiest musicians in the planet because they’ve got a hit record. Or, you know, a variety of things. You can use movies as an example of that.

But, fundamentally, what the employer generally wants to hear is, look, you know, some people will talk about karma and I’ve done a lot of great things in my life that helped to create, you know, circumstances where I receive good fortune. And thus you’re translating luck into good fortune. But I don’t wanna make it seem as though these things happen to me by accident. I work incredibly hard to make my luck, as you will. To put myself in the position where I have the opportunity to have good things happen to me. You know, I do the work. You know, I drive the sales. You know, you talk about the nature of your work, you know, in answering the question. And you lay out a couple of things that you do that helps make you, air quotes, “lucky”.

So that, you know, it isn’t really about the luck. Most people don’t know how much I’ve done up until this point to to arrive at this stage. So where they think it’s luck, I think it’s the effort that’s gone into it. And then they’ll ask you, “Can you give me an example of that?” And you talk about some someone uh something from your history where people were amazed that you did something, but you’ve spent 20 years of your life working up to that point. Maybe it was uh how you came up to a solution with a solution to a problem where you’ve seen something similar in junior high school. On and on and on. You can use examples like that, but, you know, the trick is not that it’s luck, but that you’ve put effort into getting, air quotes, “luck” to put yourself in the position to be able to suffer this to to be lucky.

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