A more beautiful question
We think we know how to ask questions. We don’t — not in a world drowning in answers and technology.
Questions direct thinking. “What new possibilities” beats any answer you already had ready.
Montessori had it right: let kids find things out themselves, and question everything at school before the answers get handed to them. Good questioning comes from childhood — before it’s trained out of you. Socrates’ method deserves the same second look. Then the kid ends up asking you something you never thought of, and that’s a new path you didn’t have before.
Edwin Land, inventor of instant photography: “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it… if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”
Doing and stepping back have to alternate. You can’t see a real question mid-motion — you have to stop, see the world through fresh eyes, let yourself be a kid again. You don’t need a better answer in hand to ask a better question.
Question the question. Ask why five times. Throw a closed question at an open one, just to check the open one still makes sense.
The right question comes out of immersing yourself in the life of whoever you’re asking about — make their problem your own, don’t theorize it from outside.
Own the idea, take your time, stay relaxed with it — but at some point stop circling and get on with it. Ask friends. Faster to just try things than to keep refining the question alone.
Learn from failure. Best time there’s ever been for this — connections are easy, knowledge is vast, share the question in public and let strangers work on it with you.
Questioning never ends.
Companies ask too-small questions — no clear purpose, no real values, so they stop being creative and get sunk by whoever asks the bigger one instead. Brainstorm the questions themselves, not just the answers, and give that its own time.
“The best you can hope to have is a good compass to guide you. The ones who understand that — and can embrace that — are going to have the greatest adventures.”
Question daily life the same way. What would you do if you could not fail? Experiment, let life surprise you, fail differently each time.
What if I fail — then what?
What if I do nothing?
What if I succeed?
Questioning solves conflict better than answering does — it pulls both sides in instead of putting either one on the defensive.
Question is a quest — that’s questing questions, made into an actual practice. To better the world. To better myself. Answers are boring.
My question was “who am I?”