Questions over Answers

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Reminder to myself: you don’t aspire to be the person with the best answers.

You aspire to be the person with the most interesting questions.

10 Questions to remind yourself why you value ideation over expertise:

1️⃣
Imagine working on a team project.

Would you rather be the person in the group with the best answers or with the best questions?

2️⃣
Great question askers add some value to a lot of rooms.

Great question answerers add a lot of value to some rooms.

Maybe being great at asking questions within a field of expertise is the best in-between.

Would you prefer to be adept at breadth, depth, or breadth in depth?

3️⃣
In most of the tests we take, we get graded on the quality of our answers.

What if, instead, we were graded on our ability to ask quality questions? Do you think being great at asking questions an undervalued skill?

4️⃣
There’s probably a topic you’re interested in exploring right now.

What if you forced yourself to ask 50 questions about it before deep diving into pre-made tutorials?

Could clarifying your true interest in it first lead you on a potentially more interesting path?

5️⃣
I wonder if the more you ask questions, the better you get at understanding the types of answers you’re looking for?

Perhaps you’re interested in emotional depth, or imaginative exploration, or storytelling, etc. and you haven’t yet honed your skill at guiding conversations.

6️⃣
Adults favour being correct over being creative.

That’s based off the data from the Imaginative Thinking NASA test in 1968, which found that only 2% of adults retain the highly creative capacities they once held as children.

6️⃣
A lot of discourse around confidence suggests we remove “I wonder” & “I think” from our speech as it signals a lack of confidence.

Yet we covet creativity & inquisitiveness.

What traits do you associate with question posing? Childishness, maturity, inquisitiveness…?

7️⃣
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire.

What can you gauge about a person based on the types of questions they ask?

8️⃣
Giving someone the right answer vs giving someone a new perspective.

Can asking the right questions be the same as “teaching a man to fish”?

9️⃣
What are your favourite question asking strategies?

For example, one of mine is to add the word “how” in front of any question that starts with the word “can” — “{how} can I ask better questions?”

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What questions do you enjoy being asked most?

Maybe by understanding which questions fuel our fire we can better gauge what kind of questions and discussions we value most?

Bonus Questions

  1. How can great questions come from having a type of answer in mind?
  2. Would you rather be the best or be the only?
  3. Isn’t it weird that “most smart” can be summed up in the word “smartest”. But the same can’t be done for “most creative”. Is this suggestive of which we value most in english society?
  4. Who do you know who is great at asking questions?
  5. What types of questions are there? Closed vs Open. Reflection vs Answer oriented…
  6. How would you get better at asking questions?
  7. How many questions do you ask a day? What would happen if you asked more?
  8. Asking questions shows a lack of confidence. VS. I wonder if asking questions actually shows a lack of confidence? Would you prefer to be seen as assertive or inquisitive?
  9. If you could be an expert at one thing, what would it be?
  10. What 50 questions could you ask about your ideal expertise?
  11. What do the quality and ease of those questions tell you about your connection to that expertise?
  12. What would you generally advise to avoid asking dumb questions?
  13. What types of answers do you look for from the questions you ask?