Allison MaslanCEO & Business Scaling Expert | WSJ Bestselling Author

Wing Lam has run Wahoo's Fish Tacos for 38 years and his hiring rule is simple.

9 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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Wing Lam built Wahoo's Fish Tacos by hiring only kind, generous people with positive attitudes. He says you can teach cooking skills but not kindness. Negativity spreads like a disease, so he won't hire talented people who bring it.

If you're a Debbie Downer, I can guarantee you're not gonna lift anybody up. We can teach them the cooking skills. Or a Donald Downer. Yeah. We can teach them all the other skills. We can't teach them to be nice. So that's the most important skill to us. Like, you gotta be a nice person.
Yeah, definitely be generous. The negativity can become like a disease in your business.
Absolutely.
And grow so quickly. How many of you have held on to somebody in your company that was really negative, but you felt like you couldn't let them go because they held on to such an important position? Can I just tell you, that's a story you're telling yourself, and it's not true. If you make that move for that change, that right person will come in really quickly, and you'll be saying to yourself, I can't believe I didn't do this a long time ago. Because like you said, Wayne, life's too short not to be around happy people. Yep.