Blowing the Interview

What would you say is a failure that you cherish most in your life because it really taught you something really important and made you a better person?

That is really interesting. I think one of the biggest failures I had when I left the government in 2011, I had applied for a job that everyone thought that I was an absolute shoo-in to get. I went for the interview, was very well prepared, got in there and then the interview questions were not at all what I thought they were going to be. The interview went badly and I didn't get the job.

What was the job?

It was to be a deputy national intelligence officer at the then DNI. And I was a manager in the intelligence community at that time. And I thought at the time that not getting that job was absolutely devastating. And it contributed to my ultimate decision to leave the government for the first time in 2011. So when I look back at that now, I think to myself, if I had gotten that job, I never would have been Assistant Secretary of state.

Why?

Because there's no path from being a career person in the intelligence community to being a policymaker at the at the State Department. It's a very unusual thing. It's just it doesn't work that way. So I never would have ended up as assistant secretary if I had gotten that job. And at the time, that was one of the biggest failures that I had encountered. And it really shook me. And it turned out it was the catalyst that I needed to change and to move on.