Job interviews are flawed because people forget that interviewers are nervous too. They want to be seen as human. So when I sat down across from the executive panel today, I poured them each a cup of warm chamomile tea, smiled gently, and said: 'Take a breath. You're doing fine. What made you want to hire someone like me today?' They haven't spoken in four hours. I am pretty sure I am the CEO now.

On September 11, one company lost 658 employees in a single morning. Not one person who was at their desk survived. The ones who were not at their desks spent the next five years working to feed the families of the ones who were. The company was Cantor Fitzgerald. A bond brokerage. Floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower. The plane hit between 93 and 99. Everyone above the impact was cut off. Nobody above the impact came down. Cantor had 960 employees in New York. 658 were in the office that morning. All 658 died. The chairman, Howard Lutnick, was not there. He was late. It was his five-year-old son's first day of kindergarten, and he had walked the boy to the classroom door. His driver came into the classroom. A plane has hit the Trade Center. Lutnick's younger brother Gary, 36, worked on the 104th floor. His best friend Doug Gardner, 39, was on the 105th. His sister Edie's morning meeting had been canceled. She was the only one of the three siblings not on her way in. Gary called Edie from the 104th floor, after the plane hit. He told her he loved her. He told her to tell Howard. The smoke was coming in. Then the line went dead. Lutnick spent that day and night at the hospitals, going from bed to bed, looking at faces, looking for his people. He did not find any of them. There were none to find. In the first days, the company did something that got it attacked from every direction. It stopped the paychecks. There was no company. Two thirds of it was dead. The trading floor was gone. The office was a hole in the sky. There was no revenue to pay anyone with. Lutnick said so, publicly, and the reaction was brutal. A CEO who had lost his own brother was being called heartless on national television. Four days after the attack, on September 15, he went on Larry King Live, still in pieces, and made a promise in front of the country. Twenty-five percent of the company's profits, for the next five years, to the families of the 658. And ten years of health insurance. He was ridiculed for it. How does a company that no longer exists pay anybody anything, let alone make promises? Here is what the survivors did. Forty-seven hours after the towers fell, Cantor was back trading U.S. Treasury bonds. Through its London office and an electronic platform, run by technical staff who had walked in from the street. The bond market reopened on September 13 and Cantor was on it, because if there were no profits, there would be nothing to give. Roughly 300 people had survived. They went back to work in borrowed offices, at borrowed desks, next to empty chairs. Some of them had lost a brother, a wife, a fiance, a father, on the same floor they had worked on. They worked anyway. For five years. Edie Lutnick took over the Relief Fund, seeded with a million dollars of her brother's money three days after the attack. She sat at a desk twenty hours a day writing checks by hand. Thousands of them. To widows. To parents. To new mothers whose husbands would never see the baby. Five years later, the promise was kept. Roughly 180 million dollars went to the families. The health insurance ran for the full ten. And they did not stop. Every September 11 since, Cantor Fitzgerald has given away its entire revenue for the day. Every dollar the firm makes on the anniversary. Employees give their day's pay on top. They call it Charity Day. Some years it raises twelve million dollars in one day. The people who were not at their desks that morning have spent twenty-five years working for the ones who were. Gary Lutnick was 36 years old. His brother posted a photograph of him yesterday, on the 25th anniversary, and wrote that Gary was killed for being an American and going to work. He is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States now. He still runs the fund. 658 people. Nobody above the fire came down. The ones below it have been carrying them ever since. 🇺🇸

On September 11, a town of fewer than 10,000 people looked up and saw 38 airliners coming down out of the sky toward them. Nobody had ordered them to take those people in. They took them in anyway. Every one. Into their homes. For five days. The town is called Gander, in Newfoundland, on the far eastern edge of Canada. At 9:45 that morning, the United States closed its airspace. Every plane over the Atlantic bound for America had to land somewhere, now. Gander sits on the point of land closest to Europe. In the Cold War it had been a refueling stop. By 2001 its runways were mostly quiet. Then the planes started coming. Thirty-eight of them. Wide-body jets from Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rome, Dublin. 6,122 passengers and 473 crew. Nearly 6,600 human beings. The town had a population of about 9,600. The mayor, Claude Elliott, said it plainly afterward. Every municipality has an emergency plan. There is no page in that plan that tells you what to do when 7,000 people decide to drop in for four or five days. So they wrote the page themselves. The passengers sat on the tarmac for hours. Some sat on their planes for more than a full day while security screened every aircraft. They had no idea what had happened. They were watching cell phones die. They were watching the fuel gauges and the faces of the flight attendants. Then they came down the stairs onto the ground of a town they had never heard of. Here is what was waiting. Every school in Gander was closed. Every nonessential business was closed. Not to hide. To free everybody up. The community television station put out a single message. Lend a hand. Do what you can. The town's ice rink, the only refrigerated building large enough, was turned into a food warehouse. The mayor called it the largest walk-in freezer in the country. Sandwiches. Casseroles. Soup. Everything the town could cook was coming in faster than it could go out. The pharmacies filled prescriptions for strangers and did not charge them. Heart medication, insulin, whatever a person had left in a suitcase they could not get to. The phone company installed banks of free telephones so people could call home and say the words. I'm alive. I'm in Canada. I don't know where. Schools, churches, the Lions Club, the Legion hall, the Salvation Army, all of them became dormitories. Cots, mats, sleeping bags on gymnasium floors. And when those ran out, the people of Gander opened their front doors. Strangers from Germany and Nigeria and Texas and Israel slept in the spare bedrooms of fishermen and schoolteachers. They took showers in the houses of people whose names they could not pronounce. They ate at kitchen tables next to children who kept asking them questions. Passengers who had money tried to pay. Nobody would take it. A woman on one flight later described the feeling she could not shake. She had landed in a place where nobody was going to let her be alone. On the fourth day, the American airspace reopened. The planes could leave. And the passengers did not want to go. One of them told the 9/11 Museum, years later, that they had been having a wonderful time with those Newfoundlanders. He said it without embarrassment. He had watched the worst thing he had ever seen on a television in a stranger's living room, and the stranger had brought him tea. On the flight out of Gander, on a Delta jet, the passengers passed a hat. They started with $15,000, on the plane, that day. A scholarship fund for the students of the Gander area. Something for the children of the people who had taken them in. That fund has grown to more than a million dollars. Every year since 2001, a kid from Gander goes to college on money from strangers who slept on their floors for four nights. The town has been awarded the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador. A Broadway musical about those five days ran for years. And this week, twenty-five years later, thousands of the plane people flew back to Gander to see the families who took them in. The airport unveiled a mural. Grown men who had been terrified passengers in 2001 hugged grown men who had been teenage volunteers pouring coffee. Here is the part worth remembering. The people of Gander did not know if the planes on their runway were safe. They did not know if there were more hijackers. They did not know who was on board. They did not know how long this would last. They opened the doors anyway. The town's emergency plan had no page for this. They wrote it with their kitchens. 🇨🇦🇺🇸