Came across this thought: ‘questions are the new answers’, which sounded immediately interesting.
Here’s the Youtube clip.
The art of asking the right questions | Tim Ferriss, Warren Berger, Hope Jahren & more | Big Think
Thought I’d writeup the key points here:
Questions are becoming more valuable than answers
A lot of the time breakthroughs at the root of an innovation and research findings there is a great question.
Questions enable us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.
In a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we really need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information, and find our way to the next answer.
You can see those things you’ve been seeing a little differently.
Curiosity question. A question that a child might come up with.
The initial curiosity driven question can be turned to other experts who know how that might play out into something that is important to the marketplace.
There is no substitute to the first step, the little kid question.
The issue is that schools value the answers and there is almost no value placed on asking a good question.
Start by asking a naive question to yourself, and let them play out. That process can take us to something that is more concrete, actionable.
Questions are often at the root of innovation.
A survival skill for all of us.
A tool.
Asking dumb questions can become a superpower.
‘I don’t understand, please explain that’
Absurd questions. Example, ‘if you had to accomplish all of your work or grow your company 2X while working two hours a week. If you had a gun against your head, how would you attempt to do that?’ These absurd questions don’t allow your to user your default frameworks for solutions. Forces you to think laterally, to break boundaries on the sphere of comfort that you’ve created for yourself.
Journaling asking yourself these questions is powerful.
You might come up with interesting ideas, leads you to an interesting direction. Take he seed and do something with it.
Alex Bloomberg asking the dumb question during the subprime mortgage crisis, ‘why would banks lend money to people who stand next to no chance of paying it back?’ The thought that everyone had in their mind, sitting in front of us that no one was asking.
Often the dumb question that no one seems to be asking is the smartest question you can ask.
If you can override that embarrassment and be the one who ask dumb questions..it is a superpower. The questions here are the most powerful.