Jeff Bezos’s Favorite Job Interview Question Is Weird. Psychology Says It’s Also Brilliant

Jeff Bezos’s Favorite Job Interview Question Is Weird. Psychology Says It’s Also Brilliant

Back in his days at Amazon, Jeff Bezos always asked this odd job interview question. Psychology says it’s surprisingly revealing.

EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL

These days, Jeff Bezos might spend more time planning his lavish Venetian wedding than hiring frontline engineers and executives. But back in the day when he was actively leading Amazon, Bezos always asked job candidates the same unusual question.

“When I worked at Amazon 1999-2006, Jeff Bezos’ favorite interview question was ‘are you a lucky person?’” former Amazon executive-turned-investor Dan Rose reported on X.

Was Bezos a believer in rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clovers? Did he want to borrow the magic dust of good luck from new hires to sprinkle over his young company? Not likely.

Instead, a variety of Bezos watchers and psychologists insist the question is an unusual but effective way to screen for some of the most important qualities for business success, including humility, initiative, and optimism.

Luck as a sign of humility

Bezos is famously a huge fan of humility in his hires. He also reportedly asks job candidates about their previous mistakes, believing that the ability to admit and learn from errors is one of the best signs of true intelligence.

Asking if a potential hire is lucky seems to have nothing to do with the search for the intellectually humble. But according to venture investor Patrick Mayr, asking about luck is actually a great way to gauge humility.

“For someone to acknowledge that they have benefitted from luck is a sign of modesty,” he wrote in a blog post endorsing Bezos’s luck question.

To admit to luck shows you understand your good fortune is not just about your limitless smarts and astounding work ethic. It’s also about being in the right place and the right time. This is what self-described lucky guy Warren Buffett memorably calls “winning the ovarian lottery.” You aren’t a lone hero. There is space for gratitude and self-improvement.

This is a truth that Bezos’s fellow billionaire Mark Cuban also understands. “The reality is in order to become a billionaire, the one thing you have to have is luck,” he has declared.

Luck as a sign of initiative

People who refuse to admit the role of luck in their lives are likely to be spotlight-hungry ego maniacs. But there are other reasons you might want to hire self-described lucky people. For one, science shows luck isn’t actually totally random (though plenty is). Lucky people manufacture much of their good fortune through their outlook and behavior.

One classic psychology experiment illustrates this point nicely. Researchers gave study subjects a newspaper and asked them to count the numbers of pictures within it as fast as possible. Some took many minutes to answer. Others had an answer in seconds. Was the difference luck?

Nope, the researchers had sneakily inserted a box on page two that read, “This paper has 43 images. You can stop reading now.” People who considered themselves lucky were much more likely to notice this box and spare themselves a lot of page flipping.

What people label luck is often only keen observation and alertness to opportunity. Those are definitely attributes Bezos might want to a new hire to have.

Luck as a sign of optimism

Finally, saying you’re a lucky person doesn’t just reflect past good fortune. It also likely indicates you expect good fortune in the future too. In other words, those who describe themselves as lucky tend to be optimists. As a rule, psychology suggests optimism helps you do better in business.

There is of course such a thing as too much optimism. Anxiety helps you foresee and avoid negative outcomes. Those whose lenses are too rose tinted sometimes walk smack into walls. But science shows a focus on abundance and opportunity tends to make people more creative and cognitively sharper (probably because stress takes up a lot of brain real estate).

Optimists also tend to end up richer. Recent research out of the University of Pennsylvania found that, “after controlling for wealth, income, skills, and other demographics to level the playing field, the data clearly showed that optimists were significantly more likely to experience better financial health than pessimists, and engage in healthier habits with their money.”

Bezos’s favorite job interview question is weirdly brilliant
All of which suggests that while Bezos’s favorite interview question might strike some as odd, there is method to the madness. People might not be lucky in the old-fashioned sense of having the random blessing of fate. But the self-perception of being a lucky person is a good indicator that someone is humble, observant, action oriented, and willing to bet on themselves, their ideas, and a better future.

Who wouldn’t want to hire someone like that?

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.